Chapter Ten Elliot
He’s going to deliver the evidence he has.
That's what Jace tells me before he leaves, adjusting his jacket, checking the paperwork one last time. The Whitmore intel is solid. The Cyprus accounts, the shell companies, the network of handlers and facilitators. Everything Abernathy needs to justify keeping me alive.
"Stay inside," he says at the door. "Don't answer if anyone knocks."
"I know the rules."
He pauses. Looks at me. Something flickers in those grey eyes, something I'm learning to recognize as the closest he gets to emotion.
"I'll be back by 1300," he says. "Three hours."
"I'll be here."
He nods once, then he's gone. Three deadbolts engage behind him, and I'm alone.
I stand in the silence of the apartment and press my hand to the bite mark on my neck. It throbs under my fingers, a pulse of pain that feels almost like comfort.
He'll be back. Three hours. I just have to wait.
I don't know yet that I won't make it that long.
My body aches in places I forgot I had. The bite mark on my neck throbs when I turn my head. The scratches down my sides sting when I stretch. Between my legs, there's a soreness that feels like proof of something I'm still trying to understand.
I chose this. I asked for it. And he gave it to me.
The memory surfaces in fragments: his hands in my hair, his voice in my ear, the way he said good boy like it was the most natural thing in the world. The way I fell apart and he caught me. The way he held me after, talked me back, made me feel like something worth being careful with.
I press my face into his pillow and breathe.
It smells like him. Like soap and skin and something darker underneath, something that might be violence or might just be the absence of softness.
I don't know what I'm feeling. Relief, maybe. Terror, definitely. And underneath both, a warmth that spreads through my chest like infection.
I chose you. Whatever you are.
I meant it. I still mean it.
I just don't know what it means yet.
I make coffee. The machine hisses and gurgles, filling the apartment with the fresh smell of grinds. I pour a cup, wrap my hands around it, let the heat seep into my palms.
The apartment is quiet. Too quiet. I've gotten used to Jace's presence, the subtle sounds of him moving through the space, the weight of his attention even when he's not looking at me.
Without him, the silence feels heavy. Expectant.
Like it's waiting for something.
After my coffee, I eat an apple and then decide that I need to shower.
The water stings the scratches on my sides, turns the bite mark on my neck into a pulse of sensation. I stand under the spray and watch the bruises darken, purple blooming across my hips where his fingers dug in.
I should be horrified. Part of me is horrified.
But a bigger part of me traces each mark with something that feels almost like pride.
He did this to me. He wanted me enough to leave evidence.
I think about Moore. About the careful, clinical way he hurt me, always mindful not to leave marks that would show, always preserving my market value. His violence was calculated, impersonal. I was an object to be used and maintained.
Jace's violence is different. Possessive. Personal. He marked me because he wanted to, because I asked him to, because something in him needed to see his claim written on my skin.
It's not healthy. I know it's not healthy.
But it's the first time anyone has wanted me enough to be unhealthy about it.
I turn off the water and stand in the steam, dripping, thinking.
What happens now?
He delivers the intel to Abernathy. He buys us more time. We get to exist in our own version of happily ever after, keep existing in this strange bubble where a monster makes me breakfast and fucks me until I forget my own name.
I'm getting dressed when I hear the footsteps.
Thump, thump, stutter, thump.
Not Jace. I know Jace's footsteps by now, the controlled cadence, the deliberate weight. These are different. Multiple sets. Moving fast.
My body freezes before my brain catches up, muscles locking, breath catching in my throat.
Don't answer the door.
I'm not going to answer the door. I'm going to stay quiet, stay hidden, wait for them to leave.
But they're not at the door.
The sound is coming from the hallway. From inside the building. From the service steps that are usually locked.
And then I hear the locks.
Not knocking. Not asking for entry. The soft, precise sound of a lock being picked, tumblers clicking, deadbolts disengaging one by one.
I have maybe thirty seconds.
I move.
The knife. Second drawer. I grab it, the paring knife I didn't take before, the one Jace left for me like he knew this moment would come.
The bathroom. Lock on the inside. I can barricade myself, buy time, wait for—
The door opens.
Three men in grey. Tactical gear. Faces blank, eyes flat, moving with the synchronized precision of people who've done this hundreds of times.
Erasure.
I know what they are the moment I see them. Not Acquisition, not a welfare check, not some bureaucratic formality. These are the ones who make people disappear. The Disposals.
I run.
Not toward the bathroom. There's no point. They'll break through the door in seconds, and then I'll be cornered, trapped, finished.
I run toward the bedroom window. The one Jace said was weak enough to break.
I don't make it.
The first man catches me around the waist, lifts me off my feet like I weigh nothing. The second one grabs my arm, twists, and the knife clatters to the floor. The third one moves in with something in his hand, something small and metal that glints in the light.
An injector.
I scream. I kick, bite, claw at the arms holding me. My nails rake across someone's face and I feel skin tear, feel blood under my fingertips.
It doesn't matter.
The needle finds my neck. Cold pressure, then a sting, then a spreading numbness that starts at the injection site and radiates outward.
My limbs go heavy. My vision blurs.
The last thing I see before the darkness takes me is the apartment door, standing open, letting in the grey light of a morning that was supposed to be different.
Jace, I think. Jace, I'm sorry. I didn't answer the door.
And then nothing.
I wake up in pieces.
First, the cold. A chill that seeps through my clothes, through my skin, into my bones. I'm lying on something hard, something metal, and the cold radiates up from it like I'm lying on a slab of ice.
Second, the restraints. My wrists are locked above my head, cuffed to something I can't see. My ankles are similarly bound, spread apart, secured to the surface beneath me.
Then, the light. Bright, white, clinical. The kind of light that doesn't leave shadows, that exposes everything, that makes you feel like a specimen under a microscope.
I know this feeling.
I've been here before.
No. No no no no no.
The panic rises like bile, flooding my system, making my heart race and my breath come in short, sharp gasps. I pull against the restraints, feel the metal bite into my skin, feel the futility of resistance.
I'm back. After everything, after Jace, after the illusion of safety and the reality of belonging to someone who chose me, I'm back where I started.
Strapped down. Exposed. Waiting for the pain.
"Ah. You're awake."
The voice comes from somewhere behind me. I can't turn my head far enough to see, but I don't need to. I know that voice. I've heard it in my nightmares for three years.
Alfred Webb walks into my field of vision.
He's exactly as I imagined from Jace's descriptions. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, with the kind of face that looks like it's never known warmth. He moves with a deliberate slowness, each step measured, each gesture precise.
He's wearing a lab coat.
Just like Moore.
"Elliot Rowe," he says, consulting a tablet in his hands.
"Asset number 437. Originally acquired by Ministry of Acquisition as a child, out-lasted more clients than anyone before, transferred to Senator Moore for an eighteen-month term, returned to circulation due to diminished functionality.
" He looks up, and his smile is a wound.
"Now the property of a malfunctioning Reaper who seems to have forgotten his place in the order of things. "
I don't speak. I can't speak. My throat is locked, my tongue a stone, my body remembering all the lessons it learned about silence and stillness and making yourself small.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Webb says. He sets down the tablet, pulls on a pair of nitrile gloves. The snap of the latex makes me flinch. "Not unless I have to. You're not the problem here. You're just... leverage."
Leverage. A tool to get to Jace.
"He'll come for me," I whisper. The words scrape out of my throat like broken glass.
"I'm counting on it." Webb moves closer, peers down at me with clinical interest. "That's the whole point, you see.
Jace Harrison is the most efficient killer we've ever produced.
Fifteen years of perfect service, two hundred and seventeen confirmed eliminations, zero emotional attachments.
" He tilts his head. "And then you came along. "
He reaches out, touches the bite mark on my neck. His finger is cold through the glove.
"He marked you," Webb observes. "That's interesting. The Foundry trains that impulse out of them, usually. The desire to claim, to possess, to leave evidence of attachment." He presses harder, and I hiss at the pain. "But not Jace, apparently. Something in his conditioning has... degraded."
"He's not degraded." I don't know where the words come from. Some suicidal impulse that makes me speak when I should stay silent. "He's just different."
"Different is another word for broken." Webb withdraws his hand, examines his gloved finger like he's checking for contamination. "And broken tools get repaired or replaced. It's the way of things."
He turns, walks to a table I can't see, and returns with something in his hands.
A collar.