Page 154 of Glitched Fates & Stolen Mates

I moved behind him, close enough to feel the tension radiating from his compact frame.

“Rory, hand me the gun,” I murmured into his ear, keeping my voice low. “I’ll do it. Let me—”

“No,” Rory snapped. “I want to be the one. For… for everything he did to me. Everything he did to us.”

I reached for the rifle, but his grip only tightened. “Rory, you don’t need to carry this.”

He shook his head, pulling away from me. “I’m not a kid anymore, Kit. You don’t need to protect me from everything. You don’t want to carry this either.”

Malcolm’s hand closed around his weapon. He lifted it, the movement too smooth, too controlled. No human left. Only violence.

Something shifted in his expression. The emptiness flickered, and for one impossible moment, I saw him. Really saw him. Not the monster who’d terrorised our childhood, not the hollow shell Greywatch had made him, but the man underneath. Broken. Exhausted.

His gaze met Rory’s. A barely perceptible nod.

Rory’s finger pressed on the trigger—

The gunshot echoed through the corridor.

Rory jerked, spinning towards the sound. Not him. Not his shot.

Isla lowered her smoking pistol. “He was a fucking bastard of an uncle,” she said, voice steady until the end, when it wavered.

Malcolm crumpled sideways, a neat hole through his temple. Blood pooled beneath his grey hair, spreading across the concrete in an abstract pattern that was almost hypnotic.

Isla swayed on her feet. Rory was there instantly, wrapping his arms around her slight frame.

Rory’s eyes found mine over Isla’s trembling shoulder. For a heartbeat, we just stared at each other across our father’s corpse.

Da. The man who’d belted Rory for breathing too loud. Who’d called us disappointments, failures, mistakes he should have drowned at birth.

Finally dead. Properly dead this time.

Something passed between us—not grief. Relief? Understanding? The shared weight of surviving something that should have killed us both, long before Greywatch got their hands on him.

Felix, staring down at his tablet, gasped. “Shit! I can see at least twenty more coming. Armed. Moving fast.”

The distant sound of boots echoed through the facility’s corridors, growing louder. How the hell had Felix and Rory even got in here? The thought tried to surface, but survival instincts pushed it aside.

“Which direction?” I asked.

Felix’s fingers flew across the tablet screen. “All of them.” He turned to Isla, face set with grim determination. “Let’s do it. Now.”

“Do what?!” I demanded, but Felix was already moving, thumbs dancing across the screen.

Isla’s voice cut through the approaching footsteps. “All three of us need to squeeze our eyes tightly shut and cover our ears. Right now.”

“What?!” The boots were getting closer, echoing from multiple directions. We were out of time.

“We’re going to force everyone to shift,” Felix said, not looking up from the tablet. “Using the HVAC controls.”

“How—”

“No time to explain,” Isla interrupted, her hands already clamped over her ears, eyes screwed shut. “Do it. Just in case it triggers you too.”

Felix’s thumb hovered over the screen. “Five seconds!”

Rory, completely bewildered, copied Isla’s stance, palms pressed tight against his ears, face scrunched in concentration.