Page 73 of Wicked Nightmare

I grabbed a red marker, circling names that popped up repeatedly. Sarah Johnson. Emily Parker. Maria Rodriguez. All different, yet all eerily basic. The kind of names you pick when you don't want to be remembered. All from different small towns, with different addresses. Beside each one was a similar description, only changing the hair color. Each woman was the exact same height, weight and age.

I sat back and stared at the pattern. Five women. Same body. Same face. Different wigs, different towns, different agencies. It was a rotation. She'd work one identity until it got too hot or too recognizable, then she'd shed it and become someone else in a new jurisdiction. A snake shedding skin.

And each identity had a different function. That was the genius of it. No single agency would ever flag her because no single agency saw more than one version. The adoptions worker in one county had no idea she was the foster care supervisor three counties over, and neither of them knew she was the birthing advocate in the next state. She'd built a pipeline. Intake at one end, placement at another, and at every stage, she was the one deciding which children went where.

Which children went to Chimera.

"Hey, Lakey!" I called out. "Got a hit on Janine."

She appeared a couple minutes later in the doorway, wrapped in a towel, hair dripping. "This better be good, Axley. I was just getting to the good part of my bath."

I gestured to the mess of papers. "Oh, it's good alright. Looks like our friend Janine's been playing dress-up. Multiple aliases, all tied to different child agencies. Look, Sarah was an adoptions worker. Maria was a foster care supervisor. Looks like Emily is a birthing advocate and doula, whatever the fuck that is. And Janine is a foster mom. Sadie is blank. No description yet. She must be in transition to her new alias."

Lakey leaned over my shoulder. "Holy shit," she said. "How many?"

"At least five that I can see," I replied. "And each one's connected to a different branch of Chimera. It's a fucking spider web of corruption."

Lakey went still behind me. "So, what you're saying is..."

"Yeah," I nodded. "This goes way deeper than we thought. These bastards have been trafficking kids through the system for years. And Janine? She's been their funnel. She finds them, she places them, she moves them. And when the heat gets close, she becomes someone else and starts again."

Which meant every child who'd passed through her hands was potentially a Chimera asset. Including us. Including Lillianna.

"We're gonna burn it all down," Lakey said, her voice flat and certain.

I reached up, lacing my fingers through hers before pulling her down on my lap. "Damn straight we are, babe. And we're gonna enjoy every fucking second of it."

As I stared at the papers, the apartment walls seemed to fade. Suddenly, I was back in juvie, the stench of piss and blood filling my nostrils. The memory hit me without warning.

"Yo, Axley!" Some punk-ass kid was yelling at me from across the yard. "Heard your little girlfriend's gettin' passed around like a party favor in foster care. How's that make you feel, big man?"

I remembered the rage that flooded through me. Next thing, I was on top of him, my fists connecting with his face over and over until the skin on my knuckles split open and the guards were dragging me off by my ankles. It took three of them. I'd broken the kid's jaw in two places and fractured his orbital socket. They threw me in isolation for a week.

Spider was disappointed that I’d blown my cool, but he didn’t understand.

He kept me protected, but he didn’t have anybody back home that he talked about. He didn’t know love like I did. Spider was huge, quiet, moved through the facility like he owned it and nobody questioned why. He taught me to fight properly. Not the wild, rage-fueled swinging I'd been doing, but real technique. How to use my height, my reach, how to end someone in two moves instead of twenty. "Pain is information, not identity," he'd told me once. "Someone hits the bruise, you smile. You smile and they don't know where the bruise is anymore."

And then there was Cloak. Spider's shadow. Always lurking, always watching, always one step ahead of the guards and three steps ahead of the other inmates. He'd started the fighting ring inside the facility, betting on inmates, running money through channels I never understood. I swear to God that neither of them were under 18, but somehow, they were in the clink with me. Feeding me. Having my back in the showers. Knocking down anyone who tried to step up.

Now I knew why. Spider and Cloak hadn't been there to protect me. They'd been there to watch me. To train me. To shape me into whatever Chimera needed me to become. The fighting ring wasn't recreation. It was a testing ground. And Spider's lessons weren't generosity. They were programming.

"Pain is information, not identity." The same philosophy that let me smile through anything. The same wall I'd built around month fourteen. The same mask I wore every day. Spider had given me that. Chimera had given me that. And I'd been grateful for it.

Fuck.

The only time Spider and Cloak failed me was...

"Fuck," I said, shaking my head. No. I can't go there. The one place that was locked and buried. The door stays shut. Lakey didn't even know, but the guy paid the price seven-fold for what he did. Spider had made sure of that. Or had Chimera made sure of that? Had the guard been part of the experiment too? Had they wanted to see what would happen to me when someone broke through the wall they'd built?

Jesus Christ. I was going to drive myself insane.

Meanwhile, all this torture shit was happening to my girl. While I'd been locked up, being trained and tested and shaped by people I'd thought were protecting me, Lakey had been in a basement under a church with electrodes on her skull and drugs in her veins. I'd failed her. I was the one who broke her because I wasn't there to protect her.

It was worse than I'd imagined. They hadn't just hurt her. They'd experimented on her. Cut her open. Drugged her. Taken things from her body that she'd never get back.

And I'd been in a cell, fourteen months deep, with a guard's hand on my neck, being told I was doing so well.

We'd both been abused, just differently.