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CHAPTER1
Onyx
The human bodycould only take so much pain before it crumbled.
That threshold was different for everyone—lower or higher, depending on a wide variety of factors.
Age, fitness level, mental acuity.
For whatever reasons, some people were capable of surviving much more stress than others, buteverybodyhad a certain limit.
Everybody.
Even me.
My pain threshold happened to be exceptionally high—not only because of training, or physical fitness, or some sort of psychological resilience.
Nah.
I had the rare distinction of being raised on a steady regimen of hatred.
Born into it.
Bred into it.
When resentment and animosity and suffering were all you were ever offered, all you were allowed to give, it gave you sort of… immunity.A fucked-up inoculation against outside attempts at harm.
Eventually, I would hit that point of no return that everyone had; I wasn’t superhuman.
But until I hit it? Until I was pushed off that cliff?
Everything thrown at me had no choice but to flake right off.
My mother’s hatred, Renard’s hatred, Etienne’s, Rojas’s, all of it, in this moment, I was considering a gift.
I didn’t give a damn about the questions I was being asked or the demands of my captors. No amount of blows to my ribs, jabs to the face, no amount of sneakily torturous hits across my shins were going to get me to answer a single question they had.
Because answering their questions might get in the way of me seeing my own hatred-fueled mission through to the end.
I’d rather die.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” one of my captors said, not the one who was hitting me though, I could tell.“What are you doing in Vegas?”
That voice was coming from somewhere else, muffled and distorted, which was more of a clue than my captor probably expected.
There was no reason to disguise their voice if they had no plans to keep me alive.
It was a fortifying thought; one that made it just a tiny bit easier to not give in to the demand for information. I’d already given up too much ground by being captured in the first place, but there wasn’t much I could do about an unexpected sedative.
Since I’d already messed up by not expecting it.
Tati’s place was supposed to be “safe” though.
That was the lie we told ourselves.
I wasn’t “supposed” to have to keep my eyes peeled—another fuckup.
I knew better than to let my guard down.
