Chapter 11 Confession 19
? Arden ?
I don’t remember deciding to stop moving.
My body just went quiet, like it reached a limit and shut itself down to keep me alive.
I could hear things around me at first, voices blurring together, hands touching my skin to see if I would react, but none of it felt meant for me anymore.
It was like being buried with my eyes open.
I was still there, still thinking, still aware, but trapped behind something thick and unmoving, watching the world pass without being able to reach it.
Inside that stillness, time stopped being linear.
It sagged and warped, stretched thin and then collapsed in on itself, until minutes lost their edges and hours became indistinguishable.
I wasn’t asleep, not truly, but I wasn’t awake either.
I was suspended in a place where thought circled itself and began to feed.
With nothing else to hold on to, my mind turned inward and started tearing at whatever it could reach.
Faces surfaced without warning. Viktor first, intact enough to recognize, then Leah, then Thorne, each one arriving only to decay in front of me.
Kane and Rafe followed, then Halden, then Florence, Alexander, Monty, Heath, Mickey, Matthias.
Skin slackened. Eyes dulled. Mouths sagged open in silent screams. They crowded around me in stages of ruin, a gallery of people I loved and lost and feared, all of them dead. All of them watching.
Only Viktor and Halden remained cruelly warm.
They took their places at either side of me, close enough that I felt their breath even though I had no body to feel it with.
They spoke without stopping, without drawing air, their voices sliding straight into my ears as if my skull were hollow.
So pretty. So dead. So perfect. The words looped until they lost meaning and became pressure, but I couldn’t scream.
I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t lift a finger or close my eyes.
There was no fight left in me. There was only endurance, and the creeping certainty that my mind had decided this was the toll for survival.
Thorne was dead. Alexander was dead. Also—the thumb drive.
It sat there on the bed. It seemed to be the only thing in my real surroundings that I could make out or latch to.
Thorne’s parting gift; all my horrors recorded.
The longer I focused on that drive, the more I pulled away from Viktor and Halden.
It took hours, maybe days, before I could curl my fingers around the cold, grey drive.
It was smaller than my palm and light as a tiny stack of papers, but I knew it contained the weight of four broken, bleeding hearts.
Then I saw the note next. It was folded on the bedside table and had my name scrawled on it. It took another hour to grab it, unfold it, and read Heath’s words. Gone to bury Alex. Mickey is next door on bedrest.
It took everything I had to make it there, the thumb drive tucked in one hand, Heath’s note in the other, and my good ear prickling with the noise from Mickey’s TV. “Mick?” I asked hoarsely.
With bloodshot eyes he looked over at me, “Get over here, bella. You need to see this.”
“This is an on-going situation,” the reporter on the TV said. She stood outside a hotel, the news headline ticking across the bottom of the screen: SIXTY-SEVEN brUTALLY ATTACKED AND SHOT AT HOTEL VIKTORIA.
My eyes slowly rose to the hotel’s sign, the ‘i’ and the ‘a’ bulbs out so that only a cruel VIKTOR stood out in bold red light. “Kane,” I whispered.
“Rafe went after him,” Mickey confirmed just as the news reporter continued.
“Two suspects are now in custody and being questioned. New York citizens can rest assured that justice will be served.”
“Arden… no,” Mickey said, but I was already placing the thumb drive on his thigh, crumpling Heath’s note, and striding down the hall back to my room. “Arden!”
I ignored him, prying up my floorboard and grabbing everything I needed, chucking it into a duffel bag. I kept pushing forward, not thinking, not feeling, just knowing. The motions were familiar. I had a job, the most important job—saving Creed.
“Arden, please,” Mickey begged. He was trying to chase me down the hall, but he couldn’t with his injuries.
“Go back to bed, Mick,” I muttered and yanked open the panel in the hall where the weapons cache was, sliding a Glock into my waistband.
“You can’t just go shoot up a police precinct!”
I turned and looked him dead in the eye. “I’m not going to. I’ll blow it to pieces first. Then I’ll shoot up the rubble and anything twitching that thought it could lay its hands on my family.”
“Cazzo,” Mickey cursed. “Did Dr. Sable give you cocaine to wake up? Put the bomb duffel down, Arden.”
I stared at him for a long moment, Viktor’s and Halden’s voices filtering back through my skull.
My fingers twitched. “Do you know the only thing Alex truly asked of me when it came to his legacy?” I threw open the apartment door, my voice breaking around his nickname—something he deserved to have heard me say and never got to.
“To be explosive, Mick. To take it all fucking down. People have to be watching first to make that happen. Even if it’s innocent people. ”
“Arden,” he said one final time. “This path Creed is choosing…you can’t come back from it. If they lock you up, there will be only so much the Ravens can do to get you out.”
I turned back to him, some of the hardened pieces of my heart softening at his distraught look.
I closed the distance between us quickly and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
Then I cupped his face and locked my eyes with his.
“Make sure that thumb drive remains safe until my signal. Then I want it everywhere, Mick. Anywhere with a screen should have that footage playing.”
“Thorne was the only one who could do something like that,” he argued.
My heart re-hardened at his name. “And he’s the one who stole the drive. If I had to guess, if you go to his office in Hong Kong, you’ll find what you need to make it happen.”
“You really want the world to see you like that?” he asked.
“No.” I stepped into the hall and cast him one last long look. “But it’s not about what’s happening in the recording. It’s about the fact it was being recorded at all, that the compound existed, that S.I.N. exists.”
“And how will I know when to show it to the world if you’re all behind bars?” He insisted.
I managed a grim smile. “Look for the flames.”
The police precinct was across from the cemetery and I found that convenient in the grand scheme of things, but I also knew I was going to need to be quick.
I was sure Mickey had called the Ravens by then, telling them exactly where I was headed, but the fucking thing was…
I had nothing to lose except two very important people, and both of them were locked up in that building.
I genuinely would have rather sentenced myself to jail time with them than risked losing them again.
But first, the bomb. It had to be big enough to draw attention but small enough that it wouldn’t hurt Creed. I needed all eyes on it and not on me when I slipped into the precinct.
I crouched out back in the shadows, twisting wires and holding my lighter between my teeth for good luck. Finishing the final touches, I sprinted down the alley, crouched and hit the detonator.
Nothing.
I stood with an aggravated shout, charging toward the thing in rage—before it exploded and I flung backward.
My good ear rang so badly the world came back warped, like I was underwater, shapes swimming in and out of focus as I rolled onto my side and coughed.
Pain registered slowly, blooming in waves instead of spikes, my skull throbbing like it had been split.
I forced myself upright, swiping at my mouth, my fingers coming away gritty and red.
The precinct loomed, alarms screaming, lights flashing in frantic pulses.
Smoke curled up into the night sky behind me, people shouting somewhere distant, boots pounding toward the blast site.
I staggered to my feet and moved, every step an act of will, my body lagging a half-second behind my thoughts.
I slipped in through a side entrance that had been blown ajar, ducking low, keeping to the shadows, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
Inside, everything smelled like burnt wiring and panic.
Radios squawked. Officers ran past without looking twice, all of them pulled toward the explosion.
I kept my head down and my gun close, my vision tunneling again, the world narrowing to corridors and doors and the singular, desperate need driving me forward.
Then I saw Rafe, his shape at the end of the hall, cuffs biting into his wrists, shoulders squared despite it, his face wrecked.
It was swollen and cut. Everything in me snapped toward him, my gun lifting, shots ringing out that I barely registered as my own, bodies dropping that stood in between me and my family.
Kane was fighting too, throwing his weight into officers, teeth bared in a snarl.
Rafe joined him, his eyes locked on me with an intensity that cut through the ringing in my skull.
I thought if I could just reach them, if I could just put my hands on them, the tilt in the world would right itself.
Thorne would still be dead but I wouldn’t be alone in it.
Then something slammed into my side and the hallway spun, my gun skittering away as hands grabbed me.
I thrashed, lungs burning, my gaze never leaving Rafe as they dragged him back too, his resistance wordless and violent.
Metal closed around my wrists before a door opened and swallowed all of us.
We were shoved into a holding cell, Kane shouting profanities and Rafe moving to my side in an instant.
Just beyond, the outer wall to the precinct was completely gone from the bomb.
Everyone on the street could see straight through to us, soot and ash hanging in the air, little fires burning as firefighters hosed down desks and file cabinets.
The flashes of the reporters came, pictures and footage snapped of the three of us.
I sat on the cell’s bench. Then Rafe and Kane collapsed on either side of me, all of us with grim expressions.
My hands were cuffed behind me, but both Rafe and Kane’s were secured in front of them from being questioned by the police.
The crowd beyond was yelling toward us, question after question.
Reporters demanded to know who we were, whether we were terrorists, and why we’d done what we’d done.
“For Thorne,” Kane said softly, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“For Creed,” I whispered.
Cheers, Rafe signed and wiped the blood running from his nose, his cuffs rattling, to the great escape.
My eyes drifted up to the cameras in the crowd, the world finally watching, knowing that somewhere Viktor could see us, see me, staring him down through the screen, and that he would know from my eyes alone that I was coming for him, for S.I.N.
, for them all, that a jail cell and measly bars were nothing for Creed.
I knew too that the Ravens were watching, that Mickey had that drive, and that Thorne was with us.
I could feel him sitting on that bench, his warmth burning through me, pushing me. C'mon, little flame. Ignite.
The tiniest smile hitched my lips as I stared straight into the closest camera. “May all the devils on earth burn,” I promised, and it was a promise I would keep.