Chapter 1
One
Eight Years Ago
Calais, Maine
“There’s been an incident in the Middle East you might be interested in, love,” a sultry female voice called out.
Cosmos Raines groaned as he felt his body react to the voice. Maybe programming his new AI with Jessica Rabbit’s voice hadn’t been his brightest idea.
“There’s always an incident going on somewhere in the Middle East, RITA,” he replied, not looking up from the circuit board he was soldering.
“There’s a soldier missing,” RITA said.
Cosmos closed his eyes. “I’m sure the military is looking for him.”
“You will be needed to ensure the best outcome, Cosmos.”
Cosmos sighed and placed the soldering iron back in the holder. His nose twitched as the smoke tickled it. He pushed back his chair and rose, stretching his six-foot-two frame before slouching.
“Posture, love,” RITA said.
Cosmos scowled and glared at the camera on his desktop. RITA’s programming was advancing faster than he’d expected. She was also bossy.
“I’m not bossy. I care about you. You work too hard,” RITA said.
“How the hell—”
He bit off his question and decided he needed a cup of coffee and a sandwich. Maybe he needed to work on the robot he was designing instead of the artificial intelligence programming. If he’d done that in the first place, the robot could have made him a sandwich.
And cleaned up the warehouse a bit, he thought with a grimace when he noticed the trash can was overflowing and there was a stack of dirty dishes in the sink.
“It isn’t difficult to decipher your expression. Getting back to the missing soldier, I have a location lock on him,” RITA shared.
Cosmos paused in washing a cup and looked at the camera. “If you know where he is, why didn’t you just forward the information to the military?”
“I have. A team is in route, but you will still be needed.”
“For what?” he asked, wiggling his nose when he noticed the sludge coating the bottom of the coffee pot. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed it.
“Markos Aeto isn’t alone. It isn’t the male civilian he is with that concerns me—well, he does, but for a different reason—it’s the young girl.”
Cosmos frowned. “There’s a kid?”
“Cosmos, you need to read the report I’ve put together. This is something you will want to know,” RITA replied, her voice dropping even deeper with concern.
Ten minutes later, Cosmos murmured, “Aw, shit,” as he stared at the screen. “RITA, see what we can do to help those kids—without getting me killed preferably.”
“I’m on it, love,” RITA replied.
Undisclosed location in the Middle East
Darkness had teeth.
It chewed at the edges of Kiki’s vision as she crouched in the shadows of the crumbling wall, the acrid scent of sand, sweat, and blood teasing her nose. The sharp hum of the generator and the buzz of insects drawn to the halogen floodlights were loud in her ears.
In front of her, two men hung from a wooden A-frame—suspended by blood-soaked wrists, stripped of their dignity, beaten, and barely conscious. Brie knelt between them. Small for her age. Barely older than Kiki. Her face was tilted toward the dirt as if she was trying to disappear.
The men on the frame were not her target, but Kiki was tired of doing what she was told.
She didn’t blink. She blocked out everything else: the armed guards pacing, the laughter near the trucks, the weight of her own heartbeat pressing against her ribs. She narrowed her entire world to the A-frame.
A hand landed on her shoulder.
She flinched.
The touch was light. Slender fingers. But Kiki’s muscles tensed like steel coils.
Diana’s voice followed—low, urgent, barely audible beneath the throb of distant conversation between the men enjoying the pain of others.
“Focus, Kiki. You have to hold it. You have to help save Brie and Oscar. We are only concerned about them, no one else. Remember what you were told to do.”
Kiki swallowed. Her mouth was dry. Her throat burned.
Save them.
She nodded once, her eyes narrowing.
Where Brie is the light, I am the dark.
Sometimes, the world needs the dark.
So the light can shine.
She whispered the words in her mind. They weren’t necessary, but they helped drown out the noise of the world. She lifted her hands, palms outward. They were steady. Over time, she had grown stronger.
Much stronger than our handlers realize, she thought with grim satisfaction.
The man near the girl snarled and raised his pistol toward the bloody soldier.
A heartbeat later, the gunman’s skull exploded like a melon hurled from a rooftop.
Kiki gasped but didn’t flinch. Not this time. She froze for a second, shocked. She hadn’t done anything! That is not how she hurt others.
Gunfire erupted suddenly in the distance. She closed her fingers into a fist. When she did, the generator across from her shuddered, then blew apart in a shock of sparks and flame. The lights snapped out, throwing the compound into darkness.
That’s when the chaos really began.
From behind the low rock walls, the private security team she was with surged like wolves—hard, fast, brutal. She knew their firepower wasn’t for the benefit of the man who had been monitoring her every move since she was taken years ago.
His death would be collateral damage and worth it.
They definitely weren’t there to protect the other man strung beside him either.
They only cared about how Brie and she performed.
That was their mission. That had always been the mission. Kiki and Brie both knew the truth: they weren’t humans to the people who held them captive, they were assets.
The Founders had sent them into the field to temper them like swords. They were weapons with blood and bones and inconvenient hearts.
Kiki’s hand moved again, her fingers twitching. She kept her eyes focused on the A-frame. She curled her fingers—
—only to be caught mid-motion in a crushing grip.
“Don’t!” Andre snapped, his French accent obvious even in the single word.
A cloth snapped around her wrist, binding her before she could fight. The shadows behind her came alive as a figure wrenched her back into the darkness. She struggled, kicked, bit—but it didn’t matter.
She had accomplished her objective.
She glanced over her shoulder as she was dragged backwards. Hatred simmered low and hot in her gut.
She didn’t want to go back to the prison they called home. It was nothing more than a concrete box where her childhood had died four years ago.
“Let me go!” she hissed, reaching up to grab his arm.
Andre didn’t answer. He grabbed her hair, forcing her head forward as he shoved her into the waiting vehicle.
Through the blur of motion, she caught one last glimpse of Brie.
Her surrogate sister was being pulled from the chaos by two of the private security team. She was limp but alive.
Kiki’s lips twisted into a wry smile. Satisfaction burned like fire in her chest. Next time, she and Brie would accomplish their own mission. Kiki knew it. She’d seen it.
She ignored her handler’s barked order to lower her head. He couldn’t hurt her. No one could. Not any longer.
The man shot her a heated glare before he gave the driver an order in French-accented Arabic. “Go. Now.”
The vehicle lunged forward.
“You need to do as you’re told, Kiki,” Diana Mead coolly stated.
Kiki didn’t look at the woman beside her. She didn’t speak. Instead, she leaned her head back against the seat and stared out the window, the compound disappearing behind a curtain of dust and flame.
She knew what had always come next.
The experiments.
The silencing.
The black bags.
The glass rooms.
But it wouldn’t happen this time.
This time, she and Brie would run. They would break their chains before the shackles could tighten again.
They would escape—together.
She felt it in her bones, in her blood, in whatever strange, twisted power pulsed beneath her skin.
For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel powerless. The woman beside her, the one who had made her life a living hell, would die. So would Oscar. Brie should’ve left him lying in the sand.
She wasn’t sorry—not even a little.
It was hard to care about people when she knew what they were really like inside.
As for the soldier who had hung beside Oscar… she hadn’t touched him. Hadn’t seen his thread.
His fate remained uncertain.
But hers and Brie’s? That was already written.
Kiki smiled again—sharp and full of smug satisfaction.
Soon, they would be free.
And she would never, ever let anyone use them again.
The air still shimmered with the heat of the day, but that wouldn’t last long.
They’d been here for eight months. This was their third tour in this region, and Nikos Aeto didn’t know if he would ever get used to the dry heat and coarse sand.
The fine grains had infiltrated every pore no matter how much he tried to keep it out.
He crouched low behind the jagged ridge of boulders, the barrel of his M24 sniper rifle resting steady against his shoulder as he stared through the scope at the illuminated perimeter below.
The compound—if you could call a haphazard fortress of piled rocks, sandbags, and rusted corrugated metal a ‘compound’—was lit like a carnival in hell.
And dead center, beneath the humming glare of floodlights, hung his twin brother, Markos, just like the anonymous source said he would be. Nikos didn’t know if this was a trap or if there was a sympathetic mole inside. He didn’t give a damn about anything but his brother.
He studied the scene below. Markos was suspended by his wrists from a crude wooden A-frame. Blood soaked the front of his torn uniform. His head hung low in a way that made Nikos’s stomach clench with fear.
He forced himself to breathe in a slow, measured rhythm like he had been trained.
Focus, Nikos. You can’t save him if you lose your focus.
“Visual,” he murmured into the comm mic. “Target acquired. Center of the compound.”
A whisper of gravel signaled Lucas slithering closer on his belly. “I see him.”