Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
JAMES
Caden’s smirk was infuriatingly self-satisfied, and I hated myself for ever trusting this two-faced bastard. For actually thinking of him as a friend. How the fuck had I been so blind?
“My mission was a bit different from yours,” he said, his voice dripping with smug amusement. “While you were busy tearing down the root of our future problems, I was tasked with finding its solution.”
I glared at him, every muscle coiled tight. “What the hell does that mean?” My attention snapped to my mentor—my so-called father figure. The man who had orchestrated all of this.
Beside me, Emma stiffened, her breath hitching as realization dawned. Her expression hardened despite the turmoil brewing beneath it. “You want to use my untraceable translation to stop the future tracking.”
Caden’s smirk deepened. “That’s right. You, Miss Lawyer, turned out to be the solution we’d been searching for all along.” His words were laced with unnecessary viciousness, as if he enjoyed twisting the knife.
Godsdamnit. I had fought for this mission, bled for it, trusted them. And they had been playing a different game all along.
“How?” My voice was low, dangerous. “How the hell is she the answer to this bullshit?”
Stephen’s demeanor remained calm. “Because of the why, James. Can’t you see?
We need to understand why her haze is not being picked up by any LiaPrism.
If we can figure that out, we can replicate it.
We can protect our people, shield them from ever being tracked—should you fail to destroy every last one of them. ”
The irony of them trying to figure out the why of it, hit me like a punch to the gut.
All this time, they had been so focused on Emma’s abilities, desperate to unlock the mystery behind her untraceable energy—while I had…
I swallowed hard, fighting to keep my composure as feelings of immense guilt surged.
“So let me get this straight. You experimented on me, tortured me, maimed me for life, and bled me out solely to find out the reason for my weird-ass magic?” Emma’s disposition was remarkably calm. As if she were inquiring after a job posting, instead of the reasons for her multiple traumas.
Stephen nodded, confirming once and for all his involvement, and I saw fucking red.
Among my own feelings of guilt, betrayal and fury flared again, consuming everything in their path. My pulse roared in my ears, drowning out whatever bullshit justification he was about to give. The room closed in, my chest tightening under his words.
He had hurt Emma. My Emma.
The rage rising inside me wasn’t just anger—it was bigger, darker, rawer. Overwhelming. Violent. Ugly. I need to—
“I’m sorry.” Emma’s voice cut through my raging thoughts, low but laced with anguish. “But how the hell did you find me? Am I supposed to believe you just happened upon me and my translation in Boston—right when I crossed the road?”
Stephen shifted uncomfortably. “No,” he admitted. “That’s not exactly what happened.”
Emma tilted her head and studied him. “So you did already know about me? You tracked me down—and then stood there while I got hit by a car?” Her shoulders curled inward, as if bracing against the weight of what would come. “Without doing anything?”
Stephen dropped his gaze, discomfort twisting his features. “Actually,” he muttered, “if we’re being completely honest… I—kind of caused the accident.”
The words landed like a sledgehammer.
My fists clenched; every muscle coiled tight. The idea of killing the only father I had ever known—which had once seemed unthinkable—now felt almost inevitable.
“I needed you to translate,” he continued as if he hadn’t shattered every ounce of trust in the room. “And the only way to ensure you did was to put you in danger. I would never have let anything happen to you, Emma. If you hadn’t jumped over that car, I would’ve intervened.”
Emma stared at him, skepticism etched into every line of her face, and I couldn’t blame her.
“Did you know about this?” she spat, whirling on me, her eyes blazing with barely contained rage.
I shook my head, the urgency of it almost choking me. “Emma, I swear I didn’t. All I knew was that my role as Leader was to destroy the LiaPrisms. If I’d known their plan—”
“He’s telling you the truth, Emma,” Stephen interjected, too smooth for the torment he’d caused. “I told James I found someone who wasn’t traceable unexpectedly; he had no idea I’d been searching for you specifically during my time in Boston.”
But his words did little to soften the blow. “And what about Bill?” Emma sounded hoarse, raw, like she was struggling to hold herself together. “Did you have him killed too?”
Stephen’s face twisted in genuine confusion. “Bill? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Bill Ferrars. My former boss,” Emma clarified, her voice thick with the pain of loss, the grief clinging to her like a second skin.
His expression remained blank. It was clear he had no clue what she was talking about.
Caden’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think that was Stephen’s doing. If it was, it’s news to me.”
Stephen shook his head firmly, his wariness hardening into resolution. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. If a human was killed, it wasn’t by my order.”
Emma pushed to her feet and started pacing the room in slow, measured steps, her fingers curling and uncurling at her sides. Every few moments, she shook her head, her movements tight, controlled—but the turmoil brewing beneath them was impossible to miss.
Then, at last, she spoke.
“You traveled a hundred years into the future.” Her lips moved with intention, as if she were piecing the truth together one jagged shard at a time.
“You saw how humans would use tracking devices to erase us, using the tracking technology of the LiaPrism. And you decided the only way to stop it was to make James the next Leader of Cyclos, to put him in a position where he could destroy every single one of those, before the Great Exposure.”
Stephen nodded, his face a mask of grim determination.
Against all odds, my voice held steady. “Meanwhile, you went out of your way to find someone with untraceable translation. You found Emma, forced her into training with me—and then unleashed your pet, Caden, and his Radicals to abduct and torture her, all to uncover why her haze couldn’t be tracked. ”
His eyes flickered with a hint of annoyance.
“They weren’t Radicals,” he corrected, his tone growing colder.
“The only time you’ve actually encountered real Radicals was at the border of Antwerp when you picked up Maria and when they attacked Cyclos with the Amplifier.
All the other times? They were Caden’s men—Offensives. ”
My blood ran cold as his words settled over me, heavy and suffocating. Those men I’d tortured. The ones I’d killed in the caves… They were Caden’s men. Not Radicals.
My thoughts were spiraling in a chaotic loop. Had the Maumars known? Who else was fucking involved?
I whipped my head toward Caden, and he instantly met my stare, that infuriating smirk still carved into his face—clearly guessing at what was going through my mind.
“Eliot?” He lifted a shoulder in an effortless shrug. “Yeah, he’s one of mine too. Planted him in Cyclos a long time ago.”
Motherfucker.
But it didn’t add up. “If they were trained Offensives, how the hell did Emma escape fifteen of them at Coastal by herself?” I shook my head, skepticism running through me. Emma was powerful, but that… that was highly improbable.
Caden’s face remained unreadable, his tone cold, calculated. “Actually, we only needed her to translate inside the building. By escaping and using her powers on my men, she gave us everything we needed. We let her go. Let her believe she had bested us.”
“Bullshit, I saw the bodies,” I snapped, my hands shaking with fury.
Caden shrugged, casual as ever. “Illusions. Playing dead. Tactical retreat.” His delivery was so detached, so unaffected, it made my blood boil. “She did manage to kill two of them, though, so that’s something.”
A sudden darkness flickered in his eyes—a shadow I’d seen before, when his men were wounded or killed on the battlefield at Crown. But the smug mask never slipped. He was hiding his true feelings, and I wasn’t interested in digging deeper.
Emma sat back down, her gaze finding Caden’s before she spoke—calmly, almost unnervingly soft. “What did you find out?” There was a strange kindness to the question which seemed completely out of place. “About my magic?”
Fuck, in the heat of everything, I hadn’t even thought of that. The idea of someone like Caden knowing the truth about her sent more than a ripple of dread through my entire body.
Caden seemed just as taken aback by Emma’s sweet tone. He blinked, his usual smugness faltering for a moment, before he cleared his throat and straightened.
“Not much, to be honest,” he admitted. “As I told you back then, we didn’t find anything conclusive in your blood. We lured out your haze, contained it, filtered it through every possible source we had to determine how yours differs from ours. And found absolutely nothing.”
I let out a quiet breath, a flicker of relief washing over me despite the whirlwind of confusion still spinning around us.
Caden glanced at Emma, his mask still intact, unreadable, but her unshaken calm seemed to disarm him a little.
“It was only ever about preserving the safety of our people. Saving their future. You hold the key. That’s it.
” Caden’s voice was flat, emotionless. If it was meant as an apology, he still had a lot to learn about remorse.
His words sounded more like a dry, calculated statement rather than anything resembling real regret.
Emma nodded slowly, her demeanor composed, though I could see the chaos simmering beneath it. “Which is why you killed Rex when he hit me. You only wanted to use the amount of violence you thought was necessary to trigger my energy.”
Rex? Who the fuck was Rex?