1. Ronan and Thane
RONAN AND THANE
TWENTY YEARS PRIOR
Thane walks into the dim living room, his phone casting blue light onto his handsome face. Buried in the details on the screen, he deftly avoids Amelia’s race cars, then nearly wipes out when his foot lands on Oakley’s picture book: Neurology for Kids.
Fitting.
Ronan chuckles softly, setting aside a freshly folded tower of kid-sized shorts. “It’d be funny if you survived years of special ops only to be taken out by your son’s favorite bedtime story.”
Thane, still looking at his phone, gives an absent-minded huff.
Ronan reaches into the couch cushions and tosses Amelia’s dinosaur stuffy at his massive husband. “What gives?” he asks, keeping his voice down.
Bedtime was a battle royale they’d barely won.
Thane startles, then sends Ro an apologetic smile. “Sorry.” Sitting next to his husband on the couch, he says, “Anders said we needed to see this.”
“Wasn’t he on an op earlier? Going after some…pharmaceutical asshole with a minor in genetic engineering?” He looks at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. Are they still going?”
“Yeah.”
Huh. Thane and Ro retired from the team when they started having kids, and frankly, they barely skim the reports anymore. What could Anders possibly have for them? Unease settles in Ro’s gut as Thane angles his phone to share the screen.
Ronan recognizes this as live helmet cam footage, and that’s Anders cursing under his breath. He appears to be in an office building.
No.
A lab.
“What am I looking at?” Ronan asks. “Why are we following Anders on a live op?”
“I dunno.”
“Over here!” shouts another familiar voice off camera. Omar, Anders’ husband, runs into view. Eyes round with fear. “We found a little boy. He’s dehydrated, underweight. Five. Maybe six. Lacs on his back, buttocks, torso, and thighs. It’s pretty fucked up,” he says, his chest expanding rapidly.
“Take me to him,” Anders says, following his husband. “We’ve got Thane and Ro on the line.”
Omar pauses to look into Anders’ body cam. “Remember Silas Blake?”
That name rips the lid off a box Ronan nailed shut years ago. For a split second, the cozy living room dissolves, replaced by another room.
The cloying scent of baby powder and diapers. The unending stare of a teddy bear, its right eye a camera lens. The cold circle of handcuffs around his wrists and the suffocating pain of a cracked rib.
He flinches at Thane’s warm touch, then grips his husband’s hand.
“You’re safe. You’re home,” Thane says, his steady voice bringing Ronan back to the present.
Omar’s sympathetic expression fills the screen. He’s no stranger to grounding techniques. Everyone who is or was a Guardian has some kind of PTSD to work through.
Everyone except Anders.
Ronan’s trauma response is particularly insidious. It can go into remission for months, then comes roaring back for no goddamn reason at all. Omar has no idea what he’s done, simply saying the man’s name.
Silas Blake.
Ronan neutralizes his expression. Not wanting anyone to see him like this, he forces the memory down, back into the box.
“I’d rather forget him if it’s all the same to you,” he says, proud of how steady his voice sounds.
“Is this one of his operations?” Thane asks.
“Used to be.” Anders’ usually cheerful voice is far too serious. “The eugenics overlord I gutted earlier took over. Continued funding…whatever the fuck this is.”
So much for the box.
Ronan takes in their surroundings as Omar leads Anders down a series of hallways. “What the fuck was Blake doing with a genetics lab?”
Omar looks back with a grimace. “Nothing good.”
Anders and Omar pass a room that looks all too familiar.
Ro feels sick to his stomach. The sterile white walls on the screen are nothing like the sterile carpeted nightmare he escaped five years ago, but their purpose is the same. The fear is the same.
“Did you just pass a fucking nursery?” Thane asks, squeezing Ro’s hand.
“Empty. But yes.”
Omar and Anders turn a final corner, and Anders curses. Ronan puts his hand over his mouth.
Omar mentioned a little boy, but that didn’t prepare Ronan for the image being beamed in on his screen.
The boy is maybe their son Oakley’s age, but half his size.
The kid’s only clothing is a pair of filthy underwear, and he’s covered in dirt and angry-looking cuts to his chest and thighs.
His hair is sandy blond and his eyes are an unreal silver-blue.
More disturbingly, fresh blood runs from the kid’s mouth to his chest. He’s holding a half-eaten dead animal.
“Is that…? Oh God.” Ronan turns away, barely keeping down the contents of his stomach.
The kid’s eyes swirl black.
Everyone on the line stops breathing.
Did that really just happen?
“That’s… new.” Omar’s voice is shaking.
“BEC,” Anders whispers furiously. “He’s a fucking BEC. Get Edison on the line!”
The boy hisses at the two operatives.
Omar somehow quells his reaction. He speaks in soothing tones, pulling a piece of hard candy from his tactical vest, distracting the kid while Anders palms his rapid injector. As soon as the kid reaches out for the candy, Anders jabs the kid in the arm.
The kid passes out, mid-scream. Anders catches him before he falls and carries him out, walking quickly past that horror show of a nursery.
Jake’s voice comes over the comms. “We need to go through the servers, but from what we can glean on-site, Silas Blake had been trying to produce genetically modified children before Ronan took him out.”
Ronan’s breath hitches. Took him out.
The wet crunch of breaking Silas Blake’s nose with the cuffs, the satisfying give of his teeth, the bulging, bloodshot eyes staring back at him from the mirror as he choked the life out of him. The pool of blood spreading on the carpet, right in the middle of all those empty cribs.
A nightmare Ronan hoped he’d be able to put away forever. One day.
Anders looks down, his camera capturing the small boy. “Jesus.”
“There’s an entire cabinet in here full of birth and death certificates,” says another operative in the distance.
“Bring everything,” Jake orders, switching the call to his camera. He takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly before addressing Ronan and Thane. “What, if anything, can you two add to what we’re seeing here? Ro, I’m sorry to bring you in, but you spent the most time in one of Blake’s spaces.”
Jake understands PTSD more than almost anyone. The others might be able to ignore their psychiatric damage, but, like Ronan, Jake never had the option of ignoring its effects on him.
Ronan racks his brain, helpless as the ghosts of his past escape their vault. He wonders whether he has anything of value to offer.
After a moment, he says, “We need to source where Blake learned about the legend of black-eyed children. Did he come upon it naturally, say, in a lit class? Or did he know about Edison?”
Jake’s mouth drops open, surprise evident in his eyes. “That is not common knowledge,” he says, a warning in his voice. “And this is an open line.”
Ronan slowly raises his brows.
“You’re right,” Jake concedes. “We need to figure out if that kid was genetically modified or if that trait is, uh…naturally occurring.”
Ro nods along. “I’d bet my next payout that it’s a modification.
” He taps his lips. “Also, Blake seemed to like multiples of things. Multiple locations, multiple women to impregnate, multiple streams of ill-gotten gains. I’d be very surprised if this is his only lab site.
” His hand tremors in Thane’s. “Or if that’s the only kid. ”
“Oh, this is so bad,” Jake says, rubbing his eyes, yawning. “Sorry, been working this op since four-thirty this morning.”
“No worries, my friend,” Thane says, gripping Ronan’s shoulder as he addresses Jake.
“Just remember, Blake was about as complex as a paperclip. You gotta ask yourself, ‘What would a vapid narcissist with a lot of money and a metric fuckton of overconfidence do?’ Nail that, and you’ve got a ninety percent chance of figuring out his moves. ”
“Accurate,” Ronan says. “Also, that kid? Looks just like Blake.”
Memories are one thing, but this is somehow more horrifying.
It’s the monster’s face, young and feral and covered in blood, staring back at him from the screen.
Ronan had forgotten about those eyes. He doesn’t remember Blake’s eyes being that exact shade of blue or his hair being quite so light, but the soullessness is an exact match.
The fear he felt in that room, the fear he’d channeled into murder, floods back. A chill crawls up his spine, like a dead man’s feet walking across his soul.
“How much like Blake?” Jake asks, his eyes widening. “Like, are we saying he genetically manipulated his kid or his…clone?”
Jake practically vomits that last word.
“Blake was enough of an egomaniac to clone himself, so…double-check against the DNA we got from Blake’s body.” Ronan shudders. “The eyes and hair are a little different.”
The thought of a DNA dupe of Silas Blake walking around, breathing, existing in the world after Ronan personally ensured he was dead and buried, sits like an unexploded bomb in the conversation. Jake scrubs his hands through his hair.
From his expression, there’s more.
“Jake?” Thane asks. “What are you not telling us?”
He looks skyward, then says, “The team saw multiple dead animals, small ones like squirrels, rats, et cetera.” He pauses. “Guys, they were… It looked like they were tortured before they died.”
Ronan’s blood runs cold. He hates how this takes him right back to that fucked-up room, the teddy bear watching him, feeling Silas Blake’s eyes on him. And now that man’s mimic is out in the world, already repeating his father’s cruelty. Ronan turns to Thane, his eyes pleading with an unsaid ask.