Chapter 27
Time dragged as they waited for what came next. Audrey pressed for information, but all she gleaned was her captor’s name—Katja, or Kat.
Kat wasn’t talkative. Or maybe she simply didn’t care to speak English.
Stranger still, Kat’s mind wasn’t just shielded; it was muffled.
Audrey was used to thoughts bombarding her, or—with other trained telepaths—confronting a barrier.
But Kat was unique. Instead of a torrent of thoughts or an impenetrable wall, there was only dry static, like a radio dialed to emptiness. The strangeness unsettled Audrey.
After a while, Kat offered her a glass of liquor and a cigarette. The gesture jolted Audrey, her heart skipping a beat. She took them without pause, desperate for warmth, numbness, something human.
Stockholm syndrome?
She didn’t care. Boredom and terror were slow poisons, and keeping her hands busy was a mercy. So, Audrey drank and smoked whatever she was offered. Whoever owned this place had an endless stash.
Still, she stayed alert. Every action, every word, could be important. And she wouldn’t stop listening until she got what she needed to get to her sister again.
A bizarre clock hung on the wall, crammed with too many numbers and alien symbols to decipher. Audrey couldn’t guess the hour—midnight? Near dawn? Did it even matter on a moon locked in perpetual dusk?
Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, Nepra sat frozen in twilight. Audrey forced herself to remember where she came from.
Earth.
Prison.
Sudden chimes and a mechanical voice demanded a passcode. Both Audrey and Kat snapped toward the door as it slid open. Voices spilled into the room first—male, irritated. Somebody laughed—Nikos, by the sound of it.
Then the room changed.
It wasn’t simply quiet—everything froze. Nikos stopped laughing. Kat stiffened.
This person, whoever they were, seemed to instinctively command everyone’s attention and halt the room’s energy. And Audrey felt it before she understood it—a presence.
A shadow appeared over the threshold.
Barefoot.
Cigarette between his lips.
Then he lifted his head.
Recognition punched the air from Audrey’s lungs.
Oh.
Fuck.
She couldn’t breathe or look away. The worst part was sensing he might feel the same shock. For a split second, Ryker froze too, his discerning gaze fixing on her.
Of course, it was him. Number One.
It took her several seconds to process. Her mind refused to connect this half-dressed, visibly strung-out man with the versions of him she already knew. The figure from Mihail’s memories. The predator from Sarai. The image that had towered over the courtyard like a king.
Her glass shook. She downed the liquor for something to do, coughed at the burn, and stared. He looked exactly as he had the night she’d watched him tear into that woman at the club—and utterly different.
She’d seen him before, but this was the first time he felt brutally real.
Inside this disorganized apartment, he wasn’t a projection, a story, or a psychic ghost sliding into her head.
He was a man in the room, breathing the same air.
Every earlier version of him was incomplete compared to the force that stood here now.
Still, shock and surprise churned inside her.
Disheveled and strung-out, this wasn’t the man from the hologram—the king. This was a weapon someone forgot to put back in its case.
Audrey knew the feeling.
Half-dressed in boxer briefs and a long-sleeved shirt that couldn’t mask the fury bleeding from him, he appeared dragged from the claws of vice. Though haggard, he cut a vicious figure. His eyes—blown wide, pitch-black—were an abyss. Intelligence sparked behind them, ancient and razor-sharp.
Audrey had the disturbing thought that if their lives had been different, she might have become something very much like him.
And a feeling in her, something violent and familiar, recognized it. She forced the thought down. He could hear it.
“Ryker.” Kat’s silk-sheathed fury broke the taut silence. “You can’t ignore this anymore.”
Audrey didn’t need to read her to know Kat was barely holding herself together. Rage shimmered off her like fumes.
The entire building orbited this man.
She’d pictured this meeting a hundred ways: Ryker in the cold, calm of his hologram. Ryker in Taryn’s broken memories. Ryker, at the center of her family’s destruction. But not this man—naked, drugged, coming apart at the seams, volatile in a way that was entirely unpredictable.
Could I kill him like this? Her hands heated as she held herself back.
He lit his cigarette with a snap of conjured flame. He exhaled, and smoke surrounded him like a dragon. “You interrupted me for this?” He glanced at Audrey. “I thought she was supposed to stay locked up until Mihail came back—”
Kat broke him off without flinching, like one of the few still permitted to interrupt. “That was never the plan. Now that we know where Mihail’s held, we need a decision—tonight. From you.”
Ryker’s expression morphed into disdain.
“I already told you, I don’t give two fucks about this Simas girl,” he said, gesturing quickly with the cigarette as if the decision was already his to make.
He looked at her for the briefest second—measured and assessing, like he’d already decided she was trouble.
“Put her with the telepaths. I’m not dealing with her.
And in case any of you need reminding, I’m not the one you should be taking this to. ”
No one in the room believed him.
He lifted a hand and counted on his fingers. “One: I don’t care about her. Two: not my decision. Three: I don’t have to do anything tonight.”
“Listen to me, you selfish prick,” Kat hissed. “You can’t walk away from this choice. Not after everything we’ve spent years building. Fuck, all of us have been building this network since before your Conscription.”
Ryker exhaled more smoke. “Empires don’t hunt people.” He took a drag. “They correct imbalances.”
“Another one of your excuses,” Kat shot back, “and a terrible one, too.”
Their argument descended into something feral. Old wounds. Old power struggles. They spoke with the ease of people who had been hurting each other for years.
Audrey watched them with nausea curling low in her stomach. Were they lovers? Enemies? Both? Jealousy flickered through her aura—powerful, unwanted. She drowned it.
Their argument deepened. Audrey caught only fragments—the Simas bloodline, gold triads, abilities she supposedly didn’t have.
“I examined her myself,” Kat whispered to Ryker. “Her pnévma is powerful.”
Ryker let out a bitter snicker. “I’ve been examining the Simas family for years. She’s nothing but a telepath. A strong telepath, but that’s it.”
Tension wound tighter inside her.
Then Ryker—moving so fast it seemed impossible—suddenly had Kat pinned against the wall with his forearm on her throat. Despite his impaired state, his authority was unmistakable.
He wasn’t losing control; he was proving it.
Kat didn’t struggle but simply waited.
“I could kill you,” he whispered. “I could kill you in seconds and not blink. I don’t give a shit who you think you are to me. I run this. And I say no.”
Even Nikos couldn’t keep eye contact when Ryker spoke like that.
But Kat’s icy stare didn’t break, like she’d dealt with far worse and had survived.
Audrey’s breath faltered. This was not the man she’d seen tormenting people from afar. This was something that cracked under pressure and was still lethal.
Eventually, he released her—slowly, deliberately. He lit another trembling cigarette, tattoos writhing faintly along his arm like living ink. Kat straightened her jacket as if nothing had happened.
Ryker stared at Kat for a long moment, as if determining how much he could get away with.
“You want me to test her?” he snarled. “Fine. Let’s see what Mihail thinks he brought me.” His eyes dragged over Audrey with contempt.
But she also felt curiosity from him, and something else she couldn’t name.
No one relaxed.
Kat’s voice lowered. “Just do it.” Her eyes flashed toward the walls, the windows, the people in the room. “Before you decide to burn the entire room down again.”
The room was still.
Ryker steadied himself against the doorway. His hand fumbled, missing the frame once before gripping it. Audrey thought he might collapse. But then he straightened, staying upright anyway, through will, or pure spite.
His abdomen rippled, muscles flexing beneath the thin material of his shirt, and Audrey wished—for everyone’s sanity—that he would put on a damn pair of pants.
His jaw worked restlessly—clench, unclench, clench.
His eyes were unfocused, pupils engulfed in pits of black.
He lit another cigarette with unsteady hands, snapping his fingers as fire ignited out of nothing.
He shouldn’t have been interesting.
And yet he was.
She had the sinking sense he was going to cave in to Kat’s demands. That realization sent gratitude through her, toward Kat of all people.
Unlike Audrey, who kept every emotion close behind a shield, Ryker’s moods spilled off him in waves.
They were unchecked and intoxicating. He could stop it, but he chose not to.
An intimidation tactic. His half-lidded eyes dragged over her.
Audrey felt it then—a prickle under her skin—like some primeval force had noticed her.
He wanted her to squirm.
She didn’t. Ten years in prison had trained that out of her.
For one disloyal second, she had the absurd urge to steady him, to understand what he had taken, to feel whatever let him stand there with that much power and still remain in one piece.
Then their minds brushed. It felt like a spark, like flint striking steel.
And her head betrayed her with flashes: the club, his body moving inside someone else—
Were those her memories? Or his leaking into her head?
It didn’t matter, because he knew. His lips curved into a cruel little smile, a serpent’s smirk, showing her that her head wasn’t her own in his presence.