32 Bait
Jace
She's going to be furious. She might actually kill me.
I knew my father would've seen this as too opportunistic a timing to have believed it to be real. But he knew where I would most likely be. And I played right into his hands.
The others would've never agreed. Luca might’ve. But I digress. We needed my father to come after me. I wake up to darkness and my body being jostled.
I'm in the trunk of a car.
I test the restraints on my hands and feet. They're tight. And there's a bag over my head for extra measure. I sigh and try to find a comfortable position. There's not much I can do here other than be along for the ride.
My father has to die.
He doesn't care about anyone except himself. Not even me.
I know, after he makes sure that I've suffered, he'll kill me too. I wonder if he already has plans to start over, make another heir.
I'm sure he has.
There's probably a woman out there already pregnant. As soon as he realized that I was dismantling his empire using all the information he gave to me.
I picture Isobel: her face, her eyes, her smile. I wonder if this will be the last straw. I didn't talk to her last time, and I didn't talk to her this time.
If you really loved me—if you really loved any of us—you would have trusted us enough to talk to us.
Her words echo in my mind like a sound chamber, but she doesn't understand my father as I do. Everything needs to be specific to look a certain way for my father to take the bait.
They couldn't be hovering around me and not the prototype. I also couldn't let Isobel keep suggesting being the bait. Honestly, she was the one who gave me the idea.
The first time she brought up how she should just go out into the field before she was ready as bait would hopefully be enough to stoke his anger and have Gideon come after her.
None of us were going to take that chance. He would not be touching Isobel again.
My father was a smart man, we weren't going to just catch him up without some serious manipulation.
As the tires screech to a halt, I relax my body and try to remain still. The trunk is opened and someone pokes me with what I assume is a gun.
When I don't respond, hands are on me, and I'm lifted out unceremoniously. I keep my body limp and have to keep from grunting as I'm hoisted over someone's shoulder.
“What did he want us to do with him?” the guy grumbles.
“Just throw him in a cell. Boss just wanted us to know that no matter what, we came back with him.”
So predictable. I can't help but grin to myself and I'm actually happy there's a bag over my head.
A door is opened, and I can feel the shift in temperature as we leave the summer heat. Wherever we are, we're obviously not in public, well not a public that isn’t paid for by my father; there's air conditioning, so we can't be too far off the power grid.
As the men move, I run through my mental list of locations Gideon has. I've narrowed it down to two locations that he could still have access to.
We walk into a room that has bright lights. I close my eyes and I'm dropped onto a table.
The hood is pulled off. I can see a bright light behind my lids.
“Is that—”
“Yes. Scan him and check him for any devices.” The goon is impatient.
I recognize the other man's voice. He's a doctor my father has had on payroll for as long as I can remember.
I feel the doc's hands patting me down, my belt is removed and they continue moving up.
There's some sort of scan done for any tracking devices.
Typical. Predictable.
When I first enacted this plan with Lucian, a prototype his own team had been working on was just completed. And I was now the guinea pig.
“All clear,” the doc confirms.
“Great, thanks doc.” The goon grunts out and I'm thrown over his shoulder.
If I’m correct, we should be entering an elevator.
I hear the telltale ding and smirk.
They throw me in one of the cells underneath the shitty office building Gideon is clearly hiding in.
As soon as I hear the men leave, my eyes are open and I'm scanning my surroundings.
The cell is what you'd imagine a jail cell to look like. Metal bars upgraded with an electronic lock, a thin cot on a bed frame that's bolted to the ground. A built-in toilet and sink. The shitty fluorescent light flickers at a constant rate.
Fucking hell.
I sit with my back against the wall, my arms resting on my knees. Nothing else to do but wait for Gideon to show his face and confirm his presence.
I know my father's game. He wants me crawling the walls, losing my mind.
But I'm not like the others he's captured before. He's forgotten that I'm his son, and he trained me to endure these situations.
Which I also know he anticipates, cause he makes me wait in the cell for about three days before he decides to show his face. In which I've only been able to drink out of the single water bottle they've given me, and a sandwich from the first night.
I prepared for all of my father's usual tricks.
My head is resting against the back wall when I hear the elevator doors open and the rhythmic beat of my father walking toward the cell.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?”
I lift my head and meet his cold, calculating gaze.
I know all his moves before he even decides to make them.
I'm watching him as he looks over my appearance, and I'm doing the same.
He's wearing a fitted suit, his hair is done, but his eyes have circles around them.
He's trying to look like he's put together but I know what he hides. I grew up under his roof.
Gideon enters the code to the door, each key beeping in the silence before I hear the mechanical sound of the lock unlocking, and he pulls the door open. Two large men are standing behind him.
“You don't trust that you could take me on yourself? You had to bring help?” I know I'm egging him on, poking the bear. But I know it’s needed. I need him to be angry with me. To take out this anger on me. I deserve every single thing coming my way.
His face doesn't show anything, but I can see the clues that he can't hide.
The slight flare of his nostrils. The almost-imperceptible twitch in his jaw. The way his eyes track over me like he’s cataloging every failure he thinks I’ve made.
“Grab him. Let’s go.”
No acknowledgment. No reaction. Not even the courtesy of anger.
Just orders. Like I’m an object he’s moving.
A piece of furniture. Hands close around my arms immediately, rough and impersonal.
They haul me up, and I let them, keeping my body loose.
Compliance keeps them predictable. Resistance makes them trigger-happy.
We reach the elevator. They shove me inside, and Gideon steps in last, entering a code on the panel with practiced ease.
“Don’t forget, Jace. I raised you. I know all your weaknesses.”
He says it like he’s talking about the weather. Never mind that I’m his son and he’s taking me to his interrogation room, where he’ll torture me until he gets all the information he can get out of me.
I’m not a threat or even a disappointment anymore.
Just a problem to be solved.
He thinks he knows how this ends.
He doesn’t.
Time stops meaning anything after the first few hits.
Minutes. Hours. A whole lifetime. It all folds together into one long, dull ache that sits behind my ribs that reminds me I’m alive.
Gideon gets nothing out of me. He knows that. I know that. But that isn’t the point for him.
By the time they drag me back into the cell, my legs barely work. My vision fades in and out, and the world tilts even though I’m lying flat on the concrete.
The restraints dig into my wrists, the skin raw. My chest rises in short, thin breaths—shallow enough not to hurt as much, enough to keep from making noise.
Blood trickles from somewhere near my temple, seeping into my hairline. My shirt is soaked through with a cold mixture of sweat and whatever the hell they poured on me.
I force myself to breathe.
In.
Slow.
Out.
Slower.
Just enough to stay awake, to hold onto that sliver of light. Not what he wants me to be. Damn. The room won’t stop wavering.
I blink hard, trying to bring the flickering light above me back into one piece, but the edges of my vision keep fuzzing out. My wrists burn. My bones grind every time I inhale. There’s dried blood caked under my nose, down my jaw.
I need to move.
Not much—just enough.
The doc scanned me top to bottom earlier. Nothing pinged. Nothing showed. Exactly like Lucian promised.
Prototype: sub dermal micro-mesh lattice. Essentially invisible under any conventional medical or tactical scan, because there’s nothing solid to detect—no metal, no chip, no battery. Just a woven conductive web integrated into the tissue beneath my shoulder, dormant until activated.
I suck in a breath and drag my shoulders back so I can shift slightly on the floor. The restraints bite deeper into raw skin. My fingers curl. My chest tenses. I push my shoulder blades together—hard. A flame of pain rips across my ribs. Good.
The lattice doesn’t have an on-switch. It activates through biometrics—body stress markers and a deliberate muscular contraction pattern that’s impossible to perform accidentally. A second shock flares through me, like static crawling under my skin.
A slow prickle radiates outward from my shoulder.
Feels almost like something is sliding under my skin.
If Lucian was right, it would take the mesh about sixty seconds to fully power up on bioelectric energy and start transmitting.
Undetectable. Untraceable. No signature a scanner would pick up.
Gideon’s men could slice me open and wouldn’t know what they were looking at.
A faint vibration pulses outward, like a tiny muscle spasm under the bone.
Activated. I exhale a shaky, broken breath through clenched teeth.
My head drops back to the floor. They have the signal now.
They’ll be coming for me soon. Isobel won’t be coming.
Fuck—Isobel. My chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with broken ribs.
She’s going to kill me. She might cry first, then kill me.
I swallow hard, tasting copper.
But at least she’ll get the chance. I know I hurt her. I know from her point of view, it was a betrayal. I couldn’t risk it not being believable to Gideon. There was no way I could’ve gained his trust while also protecting her.
Isobel is strong. She may not realize how strong she is, but she’s a survivor at her core. It killed me to see her fading away on Gideon’s screens. But Gideon kept me away from her, seeing her as a distraction; I could only do so much.
But I was the reason she was there. It was my fault she was in his hands. My fault that her beautiful skin was marked.
I put the terror in her eyes.
I close my eyes for half a second. Let another wave of pain wash over me. Let the tracker do what it’s built to do.
“I’m coming home,” I whisper—barely a breath, barely sound.
And then I go still again, waiting for Gideon’s footfalls…or my team’s.
Whichever reaches me first.