The Monster You Made (Tainted #2)

Chapter 1 - Lucian

The bunker hums like a dying animal. The machines stutter, lights flicker, and vents wheeze against years of dust and smoke.

Every surface smells of old steel and burned wires.

I sit in the glow of my monitors, watching the scaffolding of my world collapse line by line.

Protocol Seven is running. A purge I swore I’d never use, now chewing through the backbone of the empire I built.

Red commands bleed across the main screen.

Operative rosters, surveillance archives, financial arteries, one after another erased.

I lean back in the chair and listen to the hollow groan of systems dying.

It should feel like control. Instead, it feels like tearing my own ribs out with my bare hands.

On the far wall, the projector flickers to life on its own timer.

Her face fills the concrete. Vera, caught mid-stride outside the courthouse.

She wasn’t looking at the camera. She never knew I was there.

I should have destroyed the photograph months ago, but I let it loop. A ghost I can’t put down.

The air tastes of copper and ash. I drag a hand down my face, unshaven stubble rasping against my palm. I haven’t kept track of the days since she left. Since the night she vanished barefoot into the fog and left me with nothing but smoke in my lungs. Sleep comes in fragments. Rage fills the gaps.

The Crown will see this purge as treason. They’ll send their knives. I welcome it. They think me broken, but I still have teeth. And behind them, there are older shadows, Cadmus. I’ve heard the name whispered for years, half-prayer, half-warning.

My rebellion won’t just provoke the Crown. It will wake something worse. I let my mind travel through the facts to ground me mentally.

The Crown is almost a literal monarchy with Cadmus as its dark knight. The Crown is a shadow political faction within the government. A clandestine network of politicians, military contractors, and intelligence officials who manipulate events from the inside.

Cadmus is the sole invisible enforcer of the crown. Unofficially orchestrating covert operations.

Their aim, to the best of my knowledge, is to consolidate power by propaganda, destabilizing dissent, and creating fear so citizens accept tighter control.

I was fine with it, as it served my purposes in securing my unique place in the world, but now I have brought the apocalypse upon my world.

***

The alert blinked across my console just after midnight, pale white against the dark.

No headers, no sender ID, just a packet that shouldn’t exist. I almost closed it.

Cadmus’s tricks had multiplied these last weeks, half the feeds poisoned with lies, half with empty noise.

Still, something in the hair on my arms told me to stop.

I keyed the decrypt.

The screen filled slow, each line resolving like an old scar torn open. A face appeared, gaunt, hollow-eyed, a scar at the temple. For a second, I thought it was another Crown actor. But then he laughed, broken, stuttering. And the sound punched me in the chest.

Cassian.

Eight years gone. Buried in the rain. My brother.

The feed didn’t stop. They had him under light, his wrists bound. A Crown officer off-screen barked words I couldn’t hear, and Cassian’s mouth moved like a puppet’s.

“Lucian. They saved me. They remade me. One day, they said, I’d be their voice.” His eyes flicked to the lens, just for a second, and something in them begged, See me beneath this.

My body froze.

Then, the last line. His voice cracked as if pulled from bone: “Remember the brook.”

The screen went black.

I didn’t remember standing, only that the chair behind me had fallen, its legs splintered. My throat burned, but no sound came out.

The Crown hadn’t sent propaganda. They’d sent a verdict. They had taken my brother, carved him hollow, and dressed him in their mask.

And now every time I closed my eyes, I heard the laugh again, looped, broken, inside my skull.

I pressed my palms into the desk until they shook. The glow of the dead screen lit nothing but my own ruin.

I steel myself to mentally contain it for now; they want me too broken for whatever comes next, but I won't let myself break.

***

An alarm slices through the bunker at 02:14. Breach detected. Not amateurs. The pattern is surgical: thermal sweeps, coordinated entry points. Professionals. Loyalists sent to cut me out before I rot the rest of the tree.

I move without thought. Weapon case. Biometric lock. The weight of steel is familiar in my hands. The bunker was designed for sieges. Tonight, it will serve as a tomb, maybe theirs, maybe mine. Either way, blood will mark the floor.

I trigger the false corridors. The first breach team pours through the wrong wall, swallowed by flash charges. Their screams echo down the ventilation shafts, sharp and brief. I watch on the monitors, expressionless. Another feed drops. Another corridor fills with fire.

My reflection stares back at me from the dark glass of the screen. Eyes hollow, jaw tight, a man carved down to bone. This is what she left behind. And still, I can’t hate her for it.

I lean toward the mic, my voice carrying through the empty halls. “You came for me. You should have brought more.”

Gunfire answers. I welcome the sound. Let them come. If the Crown wants me buried, they’ll have to dig through their own dead to do it.

The gunfire rattles the walls, a hard metallic chatter that vibrates through the floor. Dust shivers down from the ceiling.

My systems trace heat signatures across the entry points, three-man teams fanning out, tight formation, methodical. Not Crown street soldiers. These are clean, disciplined. Cadmus fingerprints, maybe. Or the Crown trying to prove they still have order in their veins.

I move down the main corridor, boots silent on steel grates. The bunker isn’t just concrete and wire. It’s a labyrinth I built, part sanctuary, part weapon. Most men trust walls to protect them. I prefer traps. The kind that bleed invaders dry.

The air tightens, warm with cordite and sweat. I pause at the junction, ear tuned to the rhythm of boots approaching. Three sets. Close. I let them come.

Their beams slice across the dark, thin white arcs moving over the walls.

I wait until the lead man clears the threshold, then trigger the plate beneath his foot.

A hiss of pressure, then steel bolts fire upward through his legs, pinning him to the ceiling with a wet crack.

His scream ricochets down the hall. The other two swing their rifles, disciplined, but too slow. I’m already moving.

I fire twice. One drops with a hole between the eyes; the other staggers, armor absorbing the first shot but not the second. His weapon clatters across the floor. Silence follows, broken only by the gurgle of the pinned soldier above, blood dripping steady onto the steel below.

I step over them and collect their rifles. Modified, suppressed, standard issue for a unit trained to erase quietly. Not the Crown’s style. The Crown preferred the theater, spectacle. Cadmus plays for permanence. My throat tightens. So they’ve come.

On the monitors, more blips fan across the lower levels.

Twelve total. Coordinated. They’re not just here to kill me, they’re here to wipe the slate clean.

Remove every trace. Crown, Cadmus, it doesn’t matter which flag they fly.

Vera was right to run. Anyone who stands still long enough in this war is erased.

Her face flickers again on the projector as if mocking me.

Vera, alive in pixels while flesh-and-blood soldiers die in my halls.

I don’t know if she’s safe. I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive me.

But I know this: if they catch her, they’ll hollow her out until there’s nothing left but obedience. That, I won’t allow.

A sharp hiss in the vents breaks my thought. Gas, thin and fast, pouring through circulation lines. They’re trying to flush me out like a rat. My filters hold, but only for an hour—long enough to take them down. Not long enough if reinforcements are pending.

I climb to the second tier. From here, I can see them on thermal, two advancing in the east corridor, three sweeping the server vault.

I touch the detonator clipped to my vest. The vault is rigged.

One press and decades of secrets, surveillance, the Crown’s archives, all burn with them.

It feels right. Let them choke on ashes.

The east corridor squad advances into range.

I fire once, the round sparking off the wall beside their heads.

Not to kill. To herd. They retreat exactly where I want them, into the kill box.

The charge goes off under their feet, a roar that shakes the floor.

Smoke boils upward. When it clears, only fragments remain.

The purge runs faster on my screens. Whole sectors dissolve.

Networks I bled for collapse into static.

The Crown will never rebuild them. Cadmus won’t find scraps worth salvaging.

But with every file erased, with every bridge burned, I feel my anchor slipping.

I’ve built my life on control. Without the system, what am I?

A man with too many ghosts and too much blood on his hands.

Footsteps approach again. I shoulder the stolen rifle, every muscle locked.

For a moment, I wonder if I’ll see her, if Vera will step out of the shadows like a hallucination, eyes sharp, voice steady.

But it’s only another soldier, face hidden by a visor.

I put a bullet through it before the thought can linger.

The bunker shakes. Breach charges on the north wall. Reinforcements. They’re not stopping. My lips curl into a bitter smile. Good. Let them keep coming. Let them see what it costs to touch what’s mine.