Chapter 36
My back is raw meat. Every breath tears through me, fire blooming from the crater in my shoulder where a bullet tore through. The exit wound pulses with each slowing beat of my heart. My chest is wet, the air thick with the smell of iron and rot.
Chains bite into my wrists, pulled so tight I can feel the bone grinding in the sockets. The floor beneath me is freezing concrete, coated in my pooling blood.
I should be dead by now.
The only reason I’m not is because they pumped me full of something—adrenaline, coagulants, who the fuck knows. Just enough to keep my eyes open. Just enough to prolong the agony. Whatever it is, it’s wearing off.
Footsteps echo in the room.
I force my eyes open. The overhead lights stab straight into my skull, turning the room into a haze of white and pain. Through it, a tall silhouette sharpens: draped in an expensive suit that doesn’t belong anywhere near blood.
“Hello, son.”
I laugh, breaking into a wet, broken cough. Blood drips down my chin.
“Sterling.”
He circles me, “You look…diminished. I must say, I expected more of a fight.”
“Happy to disappoint.” My gaze fixes on the polished leather of his shoes.
“Quite the spectacle you’ve been running across the South.
” He squats down in front of me. “You’ve always been a fucking embarrassment.
But this? Leaving a trail of bodies, burning clubs, and compounds?
It’s almost poetic.” He reaches out and smears the blood on my chin with his thumb. “So…predictable.”
His finger lingers on my jaw. I don’t pull away. Inside my head, I’m carving the skin from his bones.
“You and I,” he says, rising, “we’re more alike than either of us wants to admit.”
“We’re nothing alike.”
“Aren’t we?” He walks over to a table, picking up a familiar-looking knife. “We both understand power. That it’s not given, it’s taken. We both know the old bloodlines are obsolete. The Sovereign, as it was, is a rotting corpse. We need something new.”
“That why you sent Lev to kill me? You trying to start your shiny new world with my corpse?”
He pauses, twirling the knife between his fingers. “You know what your problem’s always been, Priest? You could have been great. You were supposed to be great. I sent you to Valcross to forge that greatness. I gave you purpose, strength, identity. You’d be nothing without me.”
“That what you tell yourself? You sent a four-year-old boy to hell and called it training. Men are sent there for a year, maybe two, if they can survive that long. You left me there to rot for sixteen fucking years. You let them break me, starve me, bleed me dry until I forgot what my own name sounded like.”
His smile doesn’t waver. “Control was the point. You were supposed to be a symbol of what the Sovereign could be. Refined power. But instead, you became—”
“Do you know what they did to us?” I snarl, yanking at the chains.
“They starved us until we turned on each other. Weeks without food. The older ones would kill the smaller ones for rations. Then they stopped giving us rations altogether. We had to make our own. I was nine the first time I tasted human flesh, Sterling. Tell me again about control.”
Blood drips from my mouth as I spit onto the floor between us. “I became what you made me. Your fucking monster.”
He walks back over, crouching in front of me again. The point of my own knife presses into the skin under my chin.
“I gave you a chance to be something more—a leader, a king. But you chose—”
“I chose to survive. Something you’ll never understand.”
“Survive? You call this surviving?” He gestures at me. “You’re dying, Priest.” He presses the knife harder until it draws blood. “You’re a dog, and I’m putting you down.”
He straightens with a sigh, wipes my blood from the blade with a monogrammed silk handkerchief.
“But not yet. First, you’ll confess on record. You’ll own the chaos you’ve caused—the deaths of Dalton and Alistair, your attempted assassination of me, and the Commanders. You’ll be the monster the world believes you are. The perfect villain to bury the old Sovereign.”
“No one will believe you. You might have them fooled now, but they’ll see through your lies.”
He smiles. “Oh, Priest. You’ve already given me everything I need.”
He starts pacing, hands clasped behind his back.
“Years of erratic behavior. Unprovoked violence. Ignoring protocol and direct orders. You’ve refused antipsychotics.
You don’t sleep more than two hours a night.
You haven’t passed a psych eval in six years.
Dissociative episodes. Hallucinations. Self-harm.
Your kill count is unconfirmable—because you have a habit of mutilating your targets beyond recognition. Do I need to go on?”
He turns and kneels again.
“You crucified a handler on the border of Ukraine. Strung him up outside his home, because he questioned your kill order. You executed a mole in front of his family. You skinned an Associate alive for waking you up too fast. You made a translator swallow her own tongue. You drowned a Servant in bleach. You killed your bunkmate during recruit training—do you even remember his name?”
He tilts his head. “You said, ‘he looked at me wrong.’”
My jaw clenches, throat pulsing with hatred. He stands, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve.
“Those are a fraction of your unauthorized kills. Everything about you screams instability. The psych reports. The body count. The disciplinary logs. Every scar on your body tells the same story—and now, it’s mine to weaponize.”
He steps closer, lowering his voice until it’s almost a whisper against my ear.
“You think no one will believe me? You’ve spent your entire life proving me right.”
He pulls back, and laughs. “Face it, son. You were never going to die a hero. You were built to die a message. And by the time I’m done, your ashes will be the foundation of the new world. Polished. Controlled. Efficient. Everything you never were.”
I lift my head. My body’s failing. Blood streaming in rivers down my arms, pooling beneath my spine.
“I’m not your fucking son.”
His smile tightens. “No. You’re worse. You’re my biggest regret.”
The heavy steel door groans open. I hear him bark to his men,
“Give him another injection and bring him to the Ceremony Hall. I don’t have all damn night.” The door slams shut.
Footsteps approach and two men in black tactical gear enter.
“Fucking traitors,” I snarl. Or try to.
They grab the chains and drag me forward. My arms scream. My knees catch on the floor. Every jagged movement sends fire through my shoulder. Blood paints a slick path behind me.
I don’t know how I’m still bleeding.
How there’s still anything left to lose.
I try to lift my head. But the world won’t stay still. It rolls. Tilts. Fades in and out in flashes of light and memory and blood.
A needle stabs into my thigh, and liquid fire rushes through my veins. The adrenaline hits wrong. My heart seizes. My chest jerks like I’ve been defibrillated. Muscles twitch uncontrollably.
“FUUUUCK!” I roar as every nerve misfires at once.
They drag me through the double doors into the Ceremony Hall—the place where recruits kneel to take their oath and traitors are dragged to be judged and executed.
One of the oldest Sovereign buildings in the South, built on the buried ruins of the original Vault back when the Section was nothing but a fucking hole in the ground.
Fucking fitting Sterling would drag me here. He’d want his new world to begin on the bones of the old one. The perfect stage. The perfect birthplace. The perfect place to kill me.
They throw me down, my knees crack against black marble polished so bright it reflects some twisted corpse back at me.
Takes me a second to realize the corpse is me.
My vision blurs at the edges, swimming, collapsing inward. The vaulted ceiling above dissolves into dark arches.
Dozens of excited voices echo through the chamber like they’re waiting for champagne to be popped. Because that’s what this is. A fucking coronation. His victory lap.
My funeral.
Hands grab me and a cold iron collar clamps around my throat. A lead chain is hooked onto it and yanked so hard my spine screams. My vision whites out. I nearly go under. But I force it back—bite down—drag myself up out of the dark rising to swallow me whole.
I will not give him the pleasure.
They haul me toward the platform. The spotlight bursts on—so bright it burns straight through my skull. The hall vanishes into a wash of blinding white.
Until my eyes adjust.
And I see them.
Rows of men in tailored suits, rings glinting, faces carved from stone. Men who trained with me, commanded me, pretended to shape me into something useful. Men who smiled at my back while sharpening knives behind it. Commander Mercer and Whitney. The North High Chancellor and his Commanders.
Mercer’s gaze flicks to mine for a fraction of a heartbeat. Something moves there—guilt? Pity?—but it dies before it can live.
Dalton died for you, you fucking bastard. Willing to try and put a bullet in me. Still trying to impress the father who put a kill order on him years ago.
The chain rattles violently as I’m shoved down.
A guard plants a boot between my shoulder blades and grinds me into the marble until my ribs creak.
My blood spreads beneath me in pools. I don’t know how I’m still bleeding.
I should’ve run dry hours ago. Maybe this is it—what dying looks like. Feels like.
My vision dims again, my pulse stuttering.
Then Sterling steps out from the wings and climbs the steps of the podium.
“This is the new Order. One of structure. Of control. Where chaos like this…” he flicks his fingers at me “…will no longer be allowed to poison the Sovereign from the inside.”
He paces slowly, hands clasped at his back, like a fucking professor giving a lecture.
“This is the end of answering to an outdated council. The end of primitive brutality. We are not barbarians. We are not weapons. We are leaders. Refined. Enlightened.”
The crowd murmurs approval.
My skin crawls.
I try to lift my head. Muscles tremor, failing. I taste blood. Feel it pooling in my mouth, sliding down my chin, soaking my chest.
“But to usher in this new era,” Sterling continues, “we must cleanse ourselves of the past. We must make an example.”
A side door groans open and chains drag along the floor. Alistair is shoved into the hall. He stumbles, wrists bound, face beaten into something that barely resembles what he was. Betrayal sits heavily on his slumped shoulders. Defeat in the bow of his head.
But when his eyes meet mine—there’s apology, regret. There’s the silent understanding of a man realizing too late that the world he served never intended to let him live.
He shakes his head.
And I—I can’t even hate him. Not now.
Not as he’s marched to die for the same man who destroyed me.
Alistair gave everything for Sterling, all for a father who planned to bury him alongside me.
And this room packed with polished traitors—they all know it.
They all came to watch. To celebrate. To witness the first brick laid in Sterling’s new empire:
My death.
The monster made for killing. The son made for death. And for the first time in a long goddamn time…I feel it.
The end.