Chapter 14
The man’s aura hit first, pressing against Audrey’s ribs. Air contracted in the alley as if he alone could impact gravity.
Everyone stayed silent. Down the street, a loose bottle clinked slowly across the asphalt.
Only three people had ever carried that weight: her mother, her sister…and herself.
His power was more than raw strength. And right now, whatever he was stood between her and everything she cared about. If she couldn’t match him, she might lose more than this standoff—any chance of finding the truth or reclaiming herself.
His stance wrenched at her memory—the cock of his head, his loose shoulders. He pushed his hood back. In the lamppost, recognition took the air from her lungs. He had the same fine bone structure as in the files, the same disturbing resemblance to Ryker.
Mihail. The photo from Emerson’s tablet.
Amusement shone in his ink-black eyes while the wind teased his longer curls away from his face.
Emerson stepped in front of her, all towering muscle. He switched instantly into that melodic alien language, spitting out a string of words.
Mihail stopped a few paces away, arms folded. He looked like he’d joined a quiet conversation, but Audrey felt every one of his senses crawling over her. Amusement faded to interest in his face.
Tall and severe, he reminded her of Ryker, but with a different energy: less fearsome, less like a tyrant. That made her nervous.
She slammed her shields back into place.
Mihail’s attention slid lazily toward Emerson, his face turning into bored contempt. He replied in Voírían, the language flowing from him like silk.
Emerson answered curtly, spreading his arms in mock invitation. “Back,” Emerson growled in English, his gun not wavering from Mihail’s chest.
Mihail moved forward anyway, straight into the barrel. His tone stayed composed. “I think we need to be clear about who’s actually in charge here.”
Emerson moved.
Audrey barely saw the motion. Emerson lunged, gun raised. But an invisible force pushed him sideways into the asphalt. The crack carried through the alley and Audrey’s teeth.
Mihail stood exactly where he’d been. Only the slight clenching of his hands suggested effort. “I’m the only one who barks orders around here,” he said to the unconscious man at his feet.
The whole exchange had taken less than a breath.
In one blink, Emerson stood; the next, he was spread out on the road like a thrown-away puppet.
Audrey struggled to accept that massive, lethal Emerson was down, and Mihail hadn’t even sweated.
Fear slid cold through her. This was why the Aggregate wanted Mihail so badly, but he wasn’t even the most wanted.
She acted before she finished thinking, jerking the gun up, arms trembling. The barrel locked onto him. The weapon was too heavy and cold for its light trigger. The pressure dropped. Metal tinged against the ground behind Mihail.
Mihail didn’t even glance her way, unimpressed by the gun. He only looked down at the unconscious man. “Fucking idiot,” he said.
“Did you kill him?” Audrey demanded.
Black eyes slid toward her. “No,” he said. “If I wanted him dead, he’d be dead.”
Audrey raised the gun higher. He grinned at it. “Are you going to use that on me?” he asked. “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
“And why not?” she snapped.
“Because I'm willing to tell you the truth,” he answered. “About you. About what's actually happening. Unlike our mutual friend Alex.”
The name punched the air from her lungs and sent a flare of betrayal across her thoughts. Audrey’s grip faltered. The confusion warred with doubt as she forced herself to ask, “What do you mean?”
“Who do you think informed us you’d checked in with our little Hunter?” he said lightly.
Her eyebrows knitted. Mihail could have been bluffing. Alex had hidden things before, but betraying her on that level? She wasn’t ready to believe an alien stranger over a friendship she’d trusted for years.
Mihail gestured offhandedly between them.
“You’ve been a difficult pawn,” he said.
“Your mother couldn’t track you. We could barely track her.
But when our friend told us you’d teamed up with the Aggregate Hunter, we saw an opening.
So, we made sure you two and Sophia converged in the same place.
” He checked his watch. “She should be here any minute.”
As if called by the words—
“Taking me down will be a lot harder than that Ezebethian fuck of an Aggregate Hunter.” Her mother’s voice slid out of the shadows.
Audrey stopped. It was like she was eight, hearing her mother’s stern voice. The cadence was the same, only harsher and bitter now. “I’m surprised Ryker didn’t come himself,” Sophia said.
“And how are your nerves?” Mihail hit back.
“Solid enough to get you out of the way,” Sophia replied. “You have something I want.”
Her insides twisted. She reached out with her aura, searching for the familiarity she remembered but found only rage—a burning furnace.
“Ah, yes,” Mihail said lightly. “Your daughter. I hear you’ve been searching for her.” He looked at Audrey. “Odd, given she’s nowhere near your power level.” He paused. “Just a telepath, right?” The word landed like an insult.
Audrey didn’t like what his tone implied. He seemed to be three steps ahead of them.
Sophia laughed.
The sound scraped across Audrey’s skull. When Sophia moved into the light, Audrey stared. Her mother wore black, military-grade clothes and a switchblade at her thigh. She looked like a soldier, not like her mother.
“You’re mistaken,” Sophia said, her manner even and cold. “If that's what you believed, Ryker's even lazier than I thought.”
“Then let’s not waste time,” Mihail said.
Sophia’s lip curled with disgust. “I have something you want. You have something I want.”
“Indeed. You come back to support the Separatists, and I give you your daughter,” he said lightly, gesturing toward Audrey casually. “Do what you want with her. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Idiots,” Sophia hissed. “What I want is for this to end.”
“It doesn’t end until we’re free.”
Brief optimism sparked: maybe her mother wasn’t here to eliminate her, as everyone believed. A quiver of possibility surfaced—maybe—
Mihail moved. The distance between him and Sophia vanished. He shoved Audrey aside and put Sophia against the wall in a single, fluid motion. Her mother fought like a wild animal—but Mihail was stronger, faster. Audrey had never seen such speed. Rope flashed from his pocket at the ready.
By the time Audrey steadied, Sophia was bound, crashing to the pavement. Audrey stared, disbelieving that her mother was down.
“You’ve been suppressing your powers,” Mihail said calmly.
Sophia strained against the bindings, jaw locked.
“Damn it, Sophia,” Mihail snapped.
Audrey backed away, eyes moving between her mother’s bound form and Mihail’s looming silhouette. Then she saw it: Sophia’s left hand was missing two fingers—the same as at the crime scene. It was the detail Audrey could never forget.
After the fire gutted their house and tore her family apart, investigators found severed fingers among the ashes.
That grisly discovery became the key evidence that put Audrey behind bars, accused of murdering her own mother.
Now, standing in front of the woman who was supposed to have killed her family, Audrey didn’t know what to say.
Even when she’d stopped looking, a need to know what happened that night—and prove her own innocence—burned inside her.
Cold realization climbed her neck. She turned to Mihail. “You said she had something you wanted. What is it?” Audrey asked.
Mihail didn’t take his eyes off Sophia. “We had an arrangement,” he said. “She wants to break it.”
Audrey searched his face, his aura, for anything—affection, resentment, anything that suggested what he and Sophia might be to each other. There was nothing except hard, practical interest, like he was talking about a malfunctioning weapon.
Shaking his head in disgust at Sophia, he turned back to Audrey, tracking the way she moved and the gun in her hands between them. “Sophia and I go way back,” he said. “You, I don’t know as well. Yet. That’s…inconvenient. We’ll fix it.”
Mihail moved with her, matching every step until her back hit the brick. The wall scraped her shoulders, and his body blocked her flank. There was nowhere to go.
She hated feeling small and trapped. He had half a foot and seventy pounds on her, all leveraged to keep her caged.
Audrey saw it: herself dying here, in a piss-stinking lot, without one honest answer. The gun was the only thing keeping him a few feet away. Or at least that’s what she thought.
“You’re aiming the wrong weapon,” he said. “The dangerous one is standing behind it.”
Confused, Audrey narrowed her eyes at him but didn’t reply.
While they stood in silence, the feeling between them changed, pressure increasing like the atmosphere before a storm. Audrey had the strange, fleeting sensation that something around her had just…noticed. Behind Mihail, one of Emerson’s shell casings rolled a few inches across the pavement.
Mihail’s eyes clocked the movement, then slowly went back to her. “Tell me, what’s your plan? Shoot me and toss my body to Emerson?” His mouth curved. “Or just your bare hands—”
She fired before he finished. If guns couldn’t stop him, she’d find out the hard way.
The kick jolted up her arms, reverberating along her bones.
He barely twitched. With his hand lifted, he showed her the bullet resting between two fingers. Mihail studied it like a bug he’d plucked from his sleeve.
“Primitive,” he whispered, tossing the bullet onto the ground.
It clinked onto the asphalt and disappeared inside the shadows.
His posture asked, That it? Then he looked back up at Audrey, his eyes roaming over her unabashedly.
“You solve everything with weapons. We solve things with evolution.” He smiled.
It wasn’t kind. “Evolution always wins.”