Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Dahlia
“Spero!”
I jolt upright, expecting to wake in the Exchange Hub and for Spero to be bundled in my hide jacket. I blink the La Ma’s heavy hold from my eyes and focus on my strange surroundings.
I reach up and wipe a hand down my face, smearing something thick along with sweat. I realise it’s blood.
Panic floods me.
Searching the unfamiliar room, I find myself on a small, springy bed, wearing a large black shirt, and… Lagos sits in the corner with his elbows on his knees.
My heart pounds.
His presence immediately suffocates me, and a hazy memory tumbles back to light. I was lifted, carried, and his face hovered over me. There was blood on the walls?—
Spero!
“Where is my baby!” I bark, scampering to my feet, bracing myself for a fight with a seven-foot monster of a man. I was wrong. I can’t trust him. I was wrong, and Maple was wrong to trust me.
Lagos’ intense stare pushes me backward until I feel something at my feet. My eyes cut to the floor and when I see my beibao , I squat to find the small hacksaw from within it.
“It’s not your baby,” he says.
Fuck. He knows.
“Where is he?” I fumble with the saw, my stomach clenching with fear.
“Alive,” he states plainly.
“I will hurt you,” I warn, straightening and wielding the weapon in front of me. And with him sitting and me standing, we are almost the same height. “I will,” I repeat, glaring at him.
He huffs. “A papercut.”
My eyes grow as I look between the massive Xin De male and the tiny hacksaw, reality sinking in.
“Tomar,” I spit out. “Where is Tomar? We had a deal.” Retorts stack on my tongue, desperate lies and warnings.
“ Maple had a deal. You got on a boat with two strangers, and that fucking Shadow baby. Then the second you’re on your own, you offer yourself and the fucking infant up to an Endigo. You lied to us! There is no deal anymore.”
Glaring at me, he leans back, unaffected by the way I brandish the shiny, serrated implement.
“Shadow baby?” The term slithers under my skin along with his demand from earlier: ‘Kill it.’
I edge away from the bed, gaining a better stance, trying to figure this all out.
“You don’t know, do you, Lace Girl?” His dark utterance pours down my spine like liquid ice.
Oh, God. What?
What does he know?
“Don’t know what?” I ask.
Lagos’ onyx-coloured gaze rolls over me. I can barely decipher his pupil from his iris. As he takes in the hacksaw and my defensive position, the corner of his mouth lifts in what might be considered cruel amusement if he were human, but he isn’t. Humanity has been engineered out of him, paired with thousands of years of evolution and gene manipulation, and there it is— what he is.
A heartless Xin De male.
"You’re a bit feisty to be a Lace Girl.”
“Well—" I shuffle, holding the saw higher, feeling the weight of his presence like a blanket that snuffs out the air. “You're awfully brutish to be considered evolved ,” I punch out, shocked by the strength in my tone.
His grin falls. “Evolved.”
“What’s a Shadow baby?” I demand. He knows something about Maple’s baby. Maybe he knows why The Trade can’t find it, or maybe Tomar does. I have to know.
He rises to his feet, his sheer, bulking height forcing me backward a step to keep eye contact. Without another word, he walks to the door. To him, the conversation is over.
Oh, no, it isn’t.
“Tell me!”
Uninterested, he grabs the handle and pulls. I fly across the room and slam my back to the door. Literally using my small body to block his exit. Between him and the door—I regret it immediately.
My heart thunders in my veins as I peer up at the huge male looming over me like a great forest tree over a single flower in a field.
His growl cuts the thick air, and I lift the hacksaw higher. Warning him. “What is a Shadow baby?” I demand, my voice trembling along each word, but my chin refuses to lower. “I won’t just go away. What is wrong with Maple’s baby? Why can’t The Trade find him?”
He snatches my throat before I can finish. Lifting me until my body dangles and my feet scrape the floor, he leans the rest of the distance. His lips meet my ear. “Listen closely, little Lace Girl. You keep that nail file.”
I gasp for air and desperately try to flatten my feet to the ground.
Lagos presses his chest to the serrated edge of the saw and rubs up and down until the blades shred a line through his black shirt but barely graze the tattooed skin beneath it. “Hold it nice and tight.” Hot breath hits me, and I swallow in his fist. “Because you’re going to need to use it one day, especially if you plan on trading your body to a fucking Endigo again.”
A distorted memory comes back. The sight of harrowing slashes of crimson. The crack of broken bones still echoing from the blood-stained walls to the blood-coated ceiling. Lagos didn’t just kill the man—he ripped him apart.
The Endigo man was a mutant, sure. A distorted byproduct of the Gene Age, but he was alive. A living, breathing thing, but apparently no more than an annoying insect, insignificant and grotesque, to Lagos, who, even with his leer and dark presence, is undoubtedly handsome.
I try to breathe and be strong, forcing the words through a squeezed voice box. “What. Did. You. Do to him?”
He chuckles cruelly. A throaty sound that presses on my lungs. “I pulled his spine from his back while he pressed his cock between your thighs,” he hisses the words, hatred deepening his voice, and I recoil. “You’re welcome, little Lace Girl.”
“Lagos,” Tomar’s voice comes from behind me. A knock beats at my spine, snapping the heavy tension between us.
Lagos lifts his head while lowering me to the floor, and when he releases my throat, I grasp it in both hands, feeling the slim column, soothing it.
I gasp for air.
“ Move ,” Lagos growls, jerking away from me as if he’d rather fling himself off a cliff than be that close to me.
I know I lied and stole their services—their help—without offering an exchange or trade, but… His hatred and rage run deeper than makes sense.
Does he think I stole Maple’s baby? How does he even know her?
Was he intimate with her?
No way. I am confident Maple was loyal to her Ward, and I can’t imagine Lagos having a shred of softness to offer a woman. I can’t visualise him pressing his rough lips to hers, or pulling her small body against his, or running his huge hands up her thighs and squeezing— I need air. My lips part as my head spins, and the lowest part of my stomach clenches.
Right , I’ve decided. I do not like him. And it’s a contradiction, hating a man who saved me from whatever the Endigo man was going to do, because I did regret it. I did want to run. I’m glad I am not alone in that room with him, but Lagos doesn’t need to be cold and monstrous.
He is a murderer, and he clearly has no respect for life.
Adding space for the door to open, I move to the side, expecting Tomar to step in, but he doesn’t. Lagos strides from the room and slams the door in my face.
My eyes widen. Then I hear the door lock from the other side.