5. Layla
5
LAYLA
The lighter's flame dances closer to my skin. Cassie holds it with the same delicate precision she uses on her keyboards, studying how the heat makes my muscles twitch. My wrists are raw meat against the zip ties, but the pain helps. It keeps me anchored when the rest of me wants to drift away.
“You understand why I have to do this?”
Her voice is almost gentle. Blood from her last session still dries tacky between my shoulder blades, where she carved something in delicate strokes.
The wounds are precise, surgical almost, mapped across my skin like a constellation of Cassie's rage. She's been methodical, each cut and burn placed where Kaden will see them first when he finds me. If he finds me.
My arms bear the brunt of her handiwork. Long, thin slices crisscross from wrist to elbow, a macabre latticework that weeps crimson tears. Cassie has carved her initials into the tender flesh of my inner forearm, signing her masterpiece.
The burns are concentrated on my shoulders and collarbones, angry red welts in the shape of a clockface, scorching a trail of them across my skin, a mocking perversion of Kaden’s tattoos.
She's left my face untouched, save for a single cut bisecting my left eyebrow. A precision strike, mirroring the scar that mars Kaden's own brow.
“He needs to hear what he left behind.”
Cassie rises, the cool wind of her departure nearly causing me to weep in gratitude, and adjusts a dial on her remote. My recorded voice fills the suite through hidden speakers. The sound makes my stomach turn—not because of the agony captured in those moments, but because of how carefully she's edited them. Layered them. Built them into something worse than the truth.
I try to swallow, but it’s like my throat is lined with broken seashells.
She perches on the leather armrest beside my prone form on the floor, close enough that I can smell her perfume, sweetly at odds with the dried blood under her manicured talons. My blood.
I force my head up despite the way it makes the room spin.
“You're admirable, you know.” She studies me with eyes like arctic water. “You lasted pretty long. Trying to stay quiet for him, it's sweet. Misguided, but sweet.”
The monitors lining one wall after she revealed them by opening a hidden panel paint us in electronic twilight. Security feeds, thermal imaging, enough screens to build a digital maze of the Siren's Call's secrets. I focus on them instead of the way my nerves keep misfiring, phantom echoes of what she's done.
I knew there was a reason I never wanted to go to this nightclub. And I’m relieved she hasn’t moved me out of Greycliff. Maybe I still have a chance.
Easier than thinking about what comes next. About whether I can stay silent this time.
An alert chimes. Soft, almost musical.
Cassie goes still.
“Well.” She sets the lighter aside with ceremonial care. “Right on schedule.”
The main screen comes alive, and my heart stops. Not because of the security feed's grainy footage of Siren's Call's rain-slick courtyard. Not because of the armed figures moving into position, their weapons catching moonlight.
Because of the way Kaden moves through them. Like every step is a promise written in blood.
My heart stutters back to life, an aching, desperate rhythm that matches Kaden's relentless stride. He's here. He's alive. The relief is so sharp it steals my breath, a searing, bittersweet ache that lodges behind my breastbone and all the fresh cuts.
I drink in every detail of him like a woman dying of thirst. The way his broad shoulders fill out his black tactical gear, the coiled grace of his movements, lethal and precise. His raven hair is slick with rain, plastered to his forehead in jagged points that only emphasize the stark planes of his mask.
But it's his eyes that undo me. Those piercing neon eyes of his mask that seem to stare straight through the camera and into my battered soul.
“Look how handsome he is.” Cassie's fingers hover over the image, not quite touching. “The way he flows between the shadows. I used to dream about it. How he'd move when he finally came for me.” Her laughter holds glass edges. “Watched every security feed I could hack, studying him. Learning him. The way his shoulders set before violence. How that mask of his would hide every micro-expression most people miss when he’s not wearing it.”
On the screen, Kaden passes the first group of guards placed strategically around the courtyard and hidden by concrete and greenery. Their guns come up.
Cassie’s voice drops to a whisper. “I could give the kill order. Right here. Right now. Unless you have something to give me.”
The lighter's flame returns, close enough that my skin prickles with remembered pain. “What? What is it that you want from me?”
“Tell me how it felt,” Cassie says in an almost childlike lilt. “The first time you saw what he really is. When the mask cracked and the monster showed through.”
The memory floods back. Not of the killing spree inside my home, but of after. Of watching him wash brain matter from his sleeve and how his voice stayed perfectly level, even when describing exactly how he'd unmade the men who threatened me as I washed their blood from my living room floor. What he did to Dawson down in Pulse’s server rooms…
“He didn't break character.” The truth tastes like copper as I voice it. “That's what unnerved me. There was no mask. No monster. Just ... him.”
Cassie picks up her phone from the side table, taps it a few times, then murmurs into it. The guards' weapons waver. Lower.
“Him,” Cassie repeats after she finishes with the person on the other end of the phone. Something vulnerable flashes across her face. “Yes. That's ... yes.”
Kaden stands in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by her men. Their weapons gleam in the rain-scattered light from the club's high-end fixtures. I track his movement across the screen without her having to force me because I can’t look away. I’m both relieved that he’s here and terrified that he’s come.
“Here's how this is going to work.”
I don’t realize Cassie’s slithered closer until she traces one of the fresher burns on my shoulder, and I bite down on a cry. “You tell me which guard gets to go home. Or they all empty their magazines into the Father of the Year in the center there.”
“Playing God doesn't suit you.”
My voice comes out drawn but steady. The AI prototype I discovered weeks ago could play God with thousands of lives. This is just one more impossible choice.
She ignores me.
“Do you see the one on the left?” Cassie asks. She leans close. “That’s Carlos. He has a daughter. She's bright. Creative. Wants to study engineering, but Daddy's salary is the only thing keeping her in school. Imagine her learning how her father died. Imagine that weight.”
The guards raise their weapons while they stay hidden behind the manicured bushes and trees lining the walkway to the nightclub. Kaden's maybe twenty feet away.
“Choose,” Cassie whispers. “His daughter's pain or yours?”
My throat closes. These men aren't innocent. They chose this life, chose to work for someone like Morelli, like Cassie. But their children didn't choose this.
My pulse roars in my ears. Carlos's daughter will grow up without a father, or Kaden bleeds out on rain-slick pavement. It’s the same kind of choice I’m realizing Cassie forces on everyone—whose pain matters more?
The weight of lives I'll never meet presses down. Carlos checks his weapon, professional, practiced. A man who knows his job. A father who took blood money to give his daughter a better life.
I close my eyes. Open them. “The right guard. Take the right guard.”
“You mean David?” She taps the screen where the guard to the right of Carlos crouches. “He has terminal cancer. About a year to live without treatment. His insurance lapsed, so he took this job because Morelli had a soft spot for cancer patients. Anyway, David has a daughter, too. Tammy's only eight.” Her smile curves sharp. “You sure you want to pick David?”
I focus on the screens, filtering out her damning words and memorizing positions, calculating angles. The same analytical mind that spotted the patterns in that AI system now works to keep Kaden alive. Because that's what this is really about—the code I discovered, the one that could turn Cassie's Mafia operation into an automated nightmare. One that could predict and manipulate human behavior on a scale that would make her untouchable.
Cassie could be lying about these backstories, but she’s taking too much joy reciting their backgrounds. From what I’ve gleaned, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets her off.
My heart hammers against my ribs. On screen, David shifts his weight and checks his sector. A man with nothing left to lose but time.
“Yes.” The concession scrapes my throat raw. “I pick David.”
Her laughter spills out of her mouth like liquid mercury.
“I was hoping you'd say that.” She lifts her phone. “David, advance and engage our enemy target.”
David rises, weapon trained. Kaden remains statue-still, but I spot the micro-adjustments in his stance. The way his weight shifts as he registers the threat in his periphery.
“Tammy made him a get-well card yesterday,” Cassie says while I force my attention to stay on the screen. “Covered in glitter. Used her allowance to buy the fancy paper.”
I can't breathe. Can't think. The world narrows to the security feed, to the death warrant I've signed.
Kaden remains motionless, a dark sentinel in the heart of the courtyard. Rain sluices down his mask, his gear, but he doesn't twitch. Doesn't react. Not until David steps within range.
It happens in a blink, a blur of motion too fast for the camera to capture cleanly. Kaden moves, and then David is on the ground, his weapon skittering away across the slick cobblestones.
Kaden wrenches David’s arms behind his back, a brutal hold that must be agony because David’s mouth is wrenched open in a silent scream. The crack of bone follows, then the wet sound of a crushed throat. He drops without a sound, and I taste copper where I've bitten through my lip.
“Beautiful.” Cassie's voice holds something like reverence. “The efficiency. The control.” She lifts the phone again. “All units engage. Let's see how many more children we can orphan tonight.”
I tear my gaze away from the carnage on the screen to the mutant posed beside me, a smile on her lips and a toxic glint in her eye. An innocent little girl turned into Morelli’s impeccably cruel doll. I can barely make Cassie out through the welling tears, but I don’t have to. I’ve learned enough.
Some monsters are just made.
Others are carefully, lovingly crafted.