Chapter 23
Six years ago.
I’ve killed people in worse places than this.
The city hums outside—distant traffic, sirens, life continuing like nothing is wrong—but standing in this abandoned building with Ash and a body that isn’t a body yet, everything feels suspended.
Dust hangs in the air. The smell of rust and something electrical lingers faintly, like the place remembers what it used to be.
If it’s anything like me, then that was a lifetime ago.
Ash stands a few feet behind me, heat still crackling faintly along her skin. Not with visible flames, not anymore, but I can feel it. The aftermath of her power always lingers when she’s coming down from a fight.
Mine doesn’t linger the same way. It waits.
The shadows at my feet stir, subtle and restless, stretching forward like they’re curious. Hungry.
On the ground in front of us, the man struggles to breathe. Another Ascended who thought he could escape the Institute and disappear.
But Ascended soldiers like me and Ash are the reason most don’t run. Because it’s our job to find them before they slip too far out of reach, to give them a choice that isn’t really a choice. To bring them in or put them down.
The man is pinned in place, not by ropes or restraints, but by the absence of light itself. More of my shadows coil around his limbs, pressed tight enough to keep him still without crushing him. But they’re eager, waiting for me.
I reach into my jacket and pull out my gun. The weight of it settles into my hand like it belongs there. It always has, long before the shadows, long before the Institute. Long before any of this. I trust it because it’s not a part of me. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t want anything.
It doesn’t get one taste of chaos and become addicted, always wanting more.
That’s why I use it instead of them.
This is the part people think would be hard. The choice. The moment where someone’s life balances on a single answer, a single breath, a single word.
It isn’t.
The hard part is everything that comes before it. Tracking them down, cornering them, listening to them try to justify why they should be the exception.
The ending is easy.
The man coughs, blood streaking the corner of his mouth, his eyes darting between me and Ash like he’s trying to decide which one of us is worse.
The answer is both of us.
I step closer, leveling the gun at his head.
For a moment, I consider not even asking the question. It would be faster. No wasted breath pretending like he might give the right answer, the one that would keep him alive.
But Malcolm likes the question, the choice. So I give it to him.
“You’re coming with us,” I say. “You work for the Institute. You follow orders. You live.”
The offer hangs there. It sounds reasonable. It always does.
But it never is.
Somehow, they know that. Maybe it’s because they take one look at me and realize they don’t want to be like me. Stuck. Owned. I wouldn’t blame them for that. If I had been given the choice, I would’ve stayed dead.
His breathing stutters, and he swallows as he makes his decision. “No.”
Sometimes, there’s a second chance in situations like these. Sometimes, people change their minds when they hear their answer echo back at them.
I don’t give him that.
I pull the trigger.
The sound cracks through the building, deafening and final. The body jerks once, then stills. My shadows loosen their hold, retreating back along the floor and dissolving into the corners of the room like they were where they belong the entire time.
Silence settles, and I lower the gun.
Whatever part of me may have once hesitated or felt some hint of guilt burned out a long time ago. Or maybe it was never there to begin with.
“What a waste,” Ash mutters behind me.
After a few seconds to confirm my kill, I tuck my gun back into my jacket.
“How do you do that?” she asks.
“What?”
She gestures vaguely to the man with the hole in his head. “That. Like it’s nothing.”
There’s no judgment in it. No horror, only curiosity. Maybe a little unease. She’s been working with me for several months now, and she’s never flinched away from a dead body. Or me making a dead body.
“It’s not nothing,” I answer. “It’s just not something I think about. I was a mercenary before my Ascension. I’ve killed plenty of people. This isn’t any different.”
But that’s not entirely true. It’s just that the difference doesn’t matter.
Dead is dead.
Before, it was more of a choice, quite literally a job.
Now, it’s a means of survival, even though sometimes I’m not sure it’s worth the cost. They’re Ascended, like me.
If I stopped to think about it for too long, I might see a part of myself in them, feel some kind of connection and hesitate.
But I kill them because Malcolm believes they’re too powerful to be allowed off a leash, just like the one he’s got tied to me.
The problem is there are Ascended who are truly on Malcolm’s side, who need no incentive to do his bidding, who believe he’s creating something strong and good. Going up against Malcolm means going up against, potentially, the rest of his army.
It’s something Ash and I have talked about, but not in so many words, skirting around how we feel because we can’t speak the truth.
Ash shifts, crossing her arms as she studies the dead man on the floor. “We could’ve taken him.”
“We tried.”
“Not very hard. You gave him one chance.”
“That’s all he gets.”
She clicks her tongue, like she doesn’t agree but doesn’t have a better argument either. Then, “What if we stopped?”
I raise a brow at her. “What?”
Her gaze stays on the body. “What if we stopped killing the ones who say no? What if we didn’t bring the willing ones in? What if we helped them instead? Gave them another choice?”
I guess we’re not skirting around it anymore.
“Help them do what? Get hunted even further toward the edge of the earth?”
“Help them not get caught. Hide them. Move them somewhere the Institute can’t find them. We’re the ones finding them first, right? We could report them dead but keep them alive.”
I glance down at the man at my feet, blood pooling beneath his head.
Too late for this one.
“We could build something,” she continues. “Our own network, our own people. There are more of us popping up every month. It’s a never-ending hunting trip that we could turn into a…community.”
“You mean a resistance?”
“Think about it, Reese. What happens when there’s enough of us on our side that we don’t need him anymore?”
I stare at the body for another second, then tilt my head, considering. “Should’ve suggested that ten minutes ago.”
Ash lets out a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah, I’m working on my timing.”
My phone buzzes, his timing impeccable as always.
I fish my cell out of my pocket and answer it. “Yes.”
“Report,” Malcolm says, his voice the same as always. Calm and controlled, never hesitant or unsure.
I step back and turn away from the body as though I don’t want it to hear what I’m about to say. “Target located. Noncompliant. Terminated.”
“Efficient as always, Mr. Morgan.”
There’s something like approval in his tone, but not warmth.
Never warmth. Maybe respect, though I don’t like it or need it coming from him.
In another life, I might’ve sought it out—that approval from a father figure or someone I cared for.
Someone who looked at me like I was something worth choosing.
Someone who, in this life, I can’t touch, who believes I’m dead.
I may as well be.
“Reese?”
I realize my vision is darkened around the edges, and I evict the shadows from my mind.
“Return to the Institute. We have another assignment.”
“Understood.”
The line goes dead, and I lower the phone. For several seconds, neither Ash nor I speak, just standing there with a dead man to keep us company.
Then Ash asks, “How do you do that too?”
I turn to face her. “What do you mean now?”
“Talk to him like that. Pretend like you’re not…”
She gestures vaguely between us, and I immediately understand. Like I’m not what we both are—owned and controlled. Experiments that have been turned into weapons.
I slide my phone back into my pocket as my shadows ripple along the walls around us, restless again, as though they don’t like the direction this conversation is going. I don’t either. As much as I hate my life, the reason I haven’t run away is the reason I would’ve run away before I was trapped.
Trapped, yes. But trapped where I can make sure he always stays safe.
“I don’t pretend,” I say.
“That’s bullshit.”
Maybe. But it’s easier than the other truth—that I understand Malcolm, that I hate him, that I agree with just enough of what he says to make me nearly as bad as he is. That Ascended like us need purpose, some kind of structure and hierarchy. We’re not fucking property, but…
We are dangerous.
I meet her gaze, and she stares back, searching for something in me. Not weakness. She knows me better than that. Something else. A crack in my facade, maybe. Proof that I’m not as far gone as I look when I pull a trigger without blinking.
If I give into her idea, she just might find it. The idea of a future that doesn’t end with me taking orders over a dead body, a future that probably gets us both killed.
But one I’m willing to take a risk for.
So I hold her gaze a second longer and give her a truth, just one of many.
“Because I’m going to kill him one day.”
Present day.
The memory from six years ago fades, and the room around me settles into focus. I’m sitting in one of the armchairs in the study on the second floor of the safehouse, low light and the faint hum of electronics bleeding into the quiet.
Ash’s voice still lingers in my mind, from the day the idea of our resistance was born, as though she was the mother of the only thing that ever stood a chance against Bellrose Institute.
It always belonged to her more than it did to me.
That decision should’ve been a burden, a weight, but instead, it lifted so much off my shoulders.
Ash always made everything better.
I wish she was here to make things better now.
The screen on the tablet in my hands flickers softly, showing the feed from the camera inside Cason’s apartment. He found them all but kept this one, like he wants me to watch. And I have been. I’ve barely been able to set the tablet down and walk away from it for more than five minutes.
The call he had with his uncle made it even more clear to me how horribly wrong I was, just how misdirected my anger had been. I knew that already, but…well, I can’t remember the last time I felt the urge to apologize to someone.
But then he scrambled the audio during that last phone call, and maybe he won’t get an apology after all. I’m determined to figure out what the fuck that was about.
However, right now, my attention is entirely devoted to the sight of the green-haired man on the screen.
He’s on the couch, half-undressed, sprawled out like he doesn’t have a care in the world, like he wasn’t just in my basement yesterday swallowing my cum.
Like he didn’t look at me like I was something he both wanted and hated in the same breath.
My shadows glide across the wall behind me, waiting. Watching with me.
He moves, touching himself, breathing heavier. He takes his cock out and strokes it, and heat immediately pools low in my gut as my own dick hardens in my jeans. But I leave it, too busy watching.
I’ve never been with another man like the way I’ve been with Cason.
It’s not that the curiosity hasn’t lingered.
It has, but no one’s ever tempted me the way he does.
The few one-night stands I’ve had over the years have been with women, and fuck if I remember their faces, let alone their names.
If that makes me a piece of shit, fine. I own it.
There’s something different about Cason though, something that makes me want to remember, that makes me want to have more.
My jeans grow tight as the blood rushes to my cock. Cason continues jerking himself while his other hand roams his body, rubbing his chest, pinching his nipples.
Just as I’m about to give into my own desires, he speaks. One word falls from his mouth, soft and breathless.
A name. One that isn’t fucking mine.
“Harrison.”
My shadows react before I do. Everything in me goes still while they snap along the walls, stretching and pulling tight like they’re straining toward something that isn’t here. Toward someone who isn’t me.
If they could travel farther away, whoever Harrison is would surely be choking on them right now.
That memory comes back to me.
“Because I’m going to kill him one day.”
That was the plan. Still is the plan.
But I just might have to add another name to that list now. Because no fucking way does Cason Bellrose belong to someone who isn’t me.
Cason is mine, and it’s about time I make sure he fucking knows it.