58. Ryker
RYKER
The hallway swallowed us the second I stepped through the door. Concrete. Fluorescent lights that buzzed enough to make your teeth ache. The air smelled sterile in the same way hospitals did, except hospitals at least pretended mercy lived there.
This place didn’t pretend shit.
The Pied Piper walked ahead of me without looking back, hands loose at his sides, posture relaxed, like I wasn’t a dangerous animal he’d just taken off a leash. If I had an opportunity to kill the son of a bitch, I’d take it knowing I wouldn’t walk out of here alive either. I was okay with that.
I flexed my fingers as I followed. My wrists were raw, the skin split in thin lines where the rope had bitten deep.
My shoulders screamed with every movement.
My body remembered the last year in flashes, pain and rehab and the bitter humiliation of needing help to stand, to walk, to breathe through tubes.
And somewhere under that pain was something worse. A pressure built in my head, as if my skull still contained the echo of a room I couldn’t remember.
I kept my distance behind him.
“You’re limping,” he observed, still walking.
I stared at the back of his head. “You’re observant.”
He glanced over his shoulder, faintly amused. “You still want to pretend you’re not injured.”
“I’m not pretending anything.” My voice came out rougher than I intended. “I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
I replied with silence.
He stopped at a door with no label. No window. Only a keypad and a camera lens aimed at him. It clicked open without him touching anything.
He looked back at me. “After you.”
I didn’t move right away. I paused to calculate how many exits, how many corners, how many places a gun could be mounted and still look like a smoke detector.
I stepped into a narrow room with white tile, a stainless-steel counter and sink, dispensers for gloves and masks, and a stack of folded blue gowns that seemed like they belonged in an operating suite.
He watched me track every detail, and I hated that he watched like that, as if my awareness was a trait he’d bred into me and now wanted to see it perform.
“Do you wash your hands before you cut people open?” I asked.
He didn’t flinch. “Do you?”
I held his gaze. “What is this?”
“A transition,” he said simply.
He reached for a gown and held it out to me.
I stared at it. “You want me to dress up?”
“I want you to understand where you are,” he replied. “And what kind of place this is.”
My fingers curled into fists. “I already understand.”
His smile barely moved. “Do you?”
The gown remained extended between us.
I didn’t take it.
He didn’t lower it.
That was the thing about him. He could wait. He could hold a moment until it turned rotten.
I took the damn gown. I shrugged into it, the fabric rough against my skin. My wrists stung when the cuffs dragged over them. I ignored it. I tied it behind my back, clumsily since my shoulders were still tight.
He watched every second before he stepped to the sink and turned the water on.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “You’re really doing the whole performance.”
“This isn’t a performance,” he said, and washed his hands as if he was about to walk into surgery. “This is what I am.”
The water ran. The soap smelled sharp, clinical.
Chlorhexidine.
My stomach lurched, the memory cutting through my skull. Sloane’s voice flickered through me, soft and steady in my mind, like she was standing behind my ribs holding my heart in place.
Anchor.
I focused on her. Her mouth. On the way she’d looked at me when I told her I loved her and meant it like a confession.
The Pied Piper shut the water off and dried his hands on a disposable towel. Then he slipped a pair of black gloves on his hands, slow and deliberate. Not blue nitrile. Not latex.
Black.
He walked to a second door. It opened automatically.
And everything inside me went cold.
The air changed. Not the temperature. The weight.
The smell hit me first. Disinfectant. Plastic. Formula. Something faintly metallic that didn’t belong to any clean place.
Then the sound.
A low, constant murmur under the hum of machines. Tiny cries. A soft mechanical shush. Footsteps padded in rubber soles.
It wasn’t a basement. It was a ward.
My breath caught before I could stop it.
Rows of bassinets lined the room beyond the glass, each one with a white blanket tucked tight, each one with a tiny shape beneath it.
A nurse in scrubs moved between them, checking tags, adjusting monitors, making notes on a clipboard like she was doing a normal job in a normal hospital.
Except the scrubs were too clean. The badge on her chest didn’t have a name.
Just a number.
I stepped forward without meaning to, drawn by the most primal part of me.
The part that remembered Evelyn’s laugh. The part that remembered Gavin’s hands on my cheek when he was only months old, when I thought our futures were together.
My breath went shallow.
The Pied Piper watched me. Watched it land. Watched my heart break in places I didn’t allow anyone else to see.
“You wanted children. Didn’t you?”
My hands curled into fists under the gown. “Don’t.”
He didn’t stop. “After Evelyn.”
My stomach turned. I could hear the blood pound in my ears.
“And after Gavin,” he added without a hint of any emotion.
My vision sharpened with violence. “Don’t say their names.”
He looked almost amused, like my rage was a compliment.
I took a step toward him, but he didn’t move. He didn’t need to.
“You’re going to tell me what this is,” I demanded. “Right now.”
He paused. “This is the future.”
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. “Those are babies.”
“Yes,” he said, as if agreeing about the weather.
A baby cried somewhere deeper in the room. The sound hit me straight in the sternum.
My skin buzzed with anxiety.
My mind tried to claw backward through missing time, through pain and hospital lights and the year I’d been convinced I was only recovering, only broken, only trying to survive.
The Pied Piper leaned slightly closer; his voice hushed enough that the nurses wouldn’t hear through the glass.
“Do you know what the most common mistake is?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“People assume the worst thing I can steal is their life,” he continued. “They’re wrong.”
Nausea rolled through me. The glass in front of the bassinets reflected my face in fragments. A man in a blue gown with empty eyes. A man who had thought he’d already lost everything worth losing.
My fingers clenched and unclenched. “What did you do?”
His gaze stayed on the room, not on me. Like he was admiring his own work.
“I stole your future. While you were strapped down and broken. While your body was recovering. While everyone else believed you were being kept alive in the rehab facility.” He turned his head slightly.
“I took your sperm.”
The words didn’t just land.
They fucking shredded me.
My mind tried to reject what he’d said, tried to shove it away because the shape of it was too vile to hold. A sound left my throat, a noise that was raw and involuntary.
My hands shook under the gown.
I saw it in flashes, the year after the beating. The hospital bed. The haze. The moments where my head hurt so bad I couldn’t think. Nurses leaning over me. A shadowed man in the corner that I’d written off as a nightmare. The way my body had felt invaded in places I couldn’t name.
The flashes that never became memories.
Because they weren’t rehab memories.
They were him.
The goddamn Pied Piper.
I’d felt it. I’d always felt something wrong under the recovery story. A shard of glass that didn’t fit the pieces around it.
He’d made sure it never fit cleanly enough for me to grab onto.
I stared through the window at the bassinets, and bile churned in my stomach.
“Inventory,” he said, like he was reading from a report. “Raw material.”
My voice came out shredded. “You’re a sick fuck.”
He nodded, not offended. Almost pleased. “I’m efficient.”
I took another step toward the glass, closer to the babies, and the nurse looked up for the first time.
She didn’t react like someone seeing a stranger.
She reacted like someone seeing a specimen.
Then she looked away.
Like I was normal here.
“You made … little versions of me.” My voice cracked on the words I couldn’t stop. “You made them without my consent.”
The Pied Piper’s gaze stayed steady. “Not little versions of you. Better versions. Cleaner. Controlled from the beginning. All boys.”
A baby’s cry rose and then softened, soothed by a nurse’s hand.
I couldn’t breathe.
Because that cry sounded human. It sounded innocent. I knew innocence meant nothing to him.
“Little boys with my blood and your hands on their throats,” I whispered.
He smiled faintly. “Now you’re understanding.”
My hands clenched so hard my nails bit my palms. “Who carried them? Were there ever girls? What happened to the ones who didn’t make the cut?” I gritted my teeth.
He looked at me with dead eyes, void of any emotions. “That’s not for you to know.”
A line of boys. Raised in this place. Conditioned by him. Pointed at targets the way he’d described. The way he’d always done, grooming darkness like it was a profession.
Not just killers.
Agents.
A continuation.
A legacy.
My legacy.
Stolen.
A pulse of grief hit so hard it felt like a fucking noose around my neck.
Evelyn’s face flashed through my mind, her laughter in my ear on nights when we were still young enough to believe we’d get time together.
Gavin’s two toothed grin. His unconditional love.
Then the memory of their deaths, the hollow after, the way I’d thought the worst thing life could do was rip them away. I’d been so fucking wrong.
The Pied Piper watched my expression shift. “That desire in you. To build a family. To leave something behind that isn’t pain. That’s not weakness, Ryker. That was my leverage.”
My vision blurred at the edges. Rage and grief stacked so high my body didn’t know which to obey.
I forced air into my lungs.
Sloane.