1. Riley
RILEY
Iam dead.
This time for real.
There’s no sensation in my body because I no longer have a body. When I open my eyes, it stays dark. There is no sound, which is nice, but it’s also where the good news ends.
I wasn’t expecting heaven. God knows I wasn’t. If I hoped for anything at all, I hoped for nothing, for my mind to just disappear like it never existed.
But the dull pain that’s starting to throb in my temples feels like the opposite of not existing. I open my mouth and groan. I can’t hear a thing, but I can feel the vibrations of my vocal cords.
Soon, a warm hand touches my shoulder. Then I notice the cold, hard, and uneven ground beneath my back. The chill seeping deep into my achy bones. The moist, cave-like smell in the air around me.
Scattered memories play before my eyes. The storm clouds, dark and hanging low in the skies.
The long-abandoned petrol station. That fragment of a data plate.
That sole Wi-Fi bar, disappearing, and with it our last hope.
Then the roar of bikes. The rap of gunfire, lost in the rumble of the approaching thunder.
And that’s when it all comes crashing down.
I am not dead.
But soon I’m going to wish that I were.
I scream until my lungs are searing and until I start being able to hear my voice, albeit like from a distance. Soon, I also hear another voice, male and strained but soothing.
“You’re alright, Wolfie. You’re alright.”
“Corrado? Corrado!”
He helps me up and wraps me in a hug, the feel of it familiar down to the acidic reek of terror.
“I’m here, Wolfie. I’m here.”
“Fuck!” I mutter into his shoulder and then start crying, oozing onto his sweater, my whole body quaking with sobs.
As familiar with my tears as I am with his post-action smell of fear, he allows me wordlessly to let it all out. He knows it’s just my body’s reaction to high stress, not so different from his excessive sweating.
I cry until my face is swollen and my headache worsens. When I finally disentangle from Corrado’s arms, I find that my eyes have adjusted to the dark. I can see now that we’re in a cell, the iron bars fitted into a naturally occurring niche inside a cave.
There is barely enough room to stand. I can see no way out. It’s like being in a grave.
I groan, my lungs closing in, the ground destabilising under my knees.
“Where’s my camera? Where’s our kit?” I ask Corrado, my voice choked.
“They took it all.”
“Did it upload?”
He shakes his head slowly, mournfully. “No.”
Fresh tears well in my eyes, different from the earlier ones. These are not from a drop in adrenaline, but from a crushing sense of failure.
“Fuck!”
I get up, pacing. But I can barely make it two steps from the bars before I need to duck to avoid smashing my forehead against the limestone.
“Who are they? Do you know? Did you get a chance to see?”
Corrado sighs heavily. “Black hoods and skull masks.”
My legs buckle underneath me, and I crash back to my knees next to him. “Retrograde?” I reach out, frantically trying to grab onto him. My trembling hands close around his forearms as his do around mine.
“I think so,” he confirms quietly, almost apologetically.
“No! Fuck! No!” I cover my face, my chest constricting with panic.
My blood runs cold when it becomes clear to me what we must do, knowing that it’s the only bearable way out of this.
“We have to kill ourselves.” Nails dig into my palms when I ball my fists. “We have to find a way to self-destruct. NOW.”
“Wolfie!” Corrado gasps, his fingers curling iron-tight around my shoulders.
“No, listen to me, we have to! You know who they are ... you’ve seen what they’ve done. And you know who they’ll think we are!” I press.
He keeps muttering on repeat, shaking his head like a child, protesting feebly, desperately. “No, no, no.”
“Fuck!” I breathe hard through my nose, my voice breaking. “I kept saying that we should carry cyanide pills.”
“Wolfie, stop!” Corrado scrambles away from me, shrinking away from what I’m proposing. “We can’t. There’s always hope!”
“No, there isn’t!” I get up to my feet, towering over his crouching form as I advance upon him. “Not this time, Corrado! It’s Retrograde for fuck’s sake! It’s him! You know he’s a fanatic! He can’t be reasoned with. There’s no way out of this!”
Suddenly, a metallic clank sounds behind me. A dull thud echoes throughout the confined space. The cave is flooded with light as a lone lightbulb comes to life just outside the bars.
Heavy footsteps are drawing near, unhurried and relentless.
Corrado jumps up, and I crash against his chest. We’re holding onto each other for dear life as I keep insisting, even though it’s pointless now, “Maybe we could hang ourselves using our clothes. Corrado, please. Please!”
“Too late for that, Hotshot.” A gravelly voice comes from right behind me.
I freeze, violent shivers running through me like mortal throes, my heart leaping out of my chest. Unlike me, Corrado is facing whoever it is. His body starts quaking uncontrollably in my arms, his teeth chattering.
The cell door scrapes the ground with a screech as it opens.
A pair of very large, warm hands closes firmly around my waist. Corrado’s hold on me tightens, his breath sour in my nostrils and his whimpers loud in my ears.
But we’re pulled apart as two men drag him away from me, whilst the man behind me holds me in place.
My body feels soft and small pressed against the bulk of his, his stomach sculpted against my back, the muscles in his thighs rock hard against my ass. I’ve been in situations like these before. But never have I felt so completely, so viscerally at someone’s mercy.
His hands move up, and he whips me around to face him. I catch his scent, masculine and surprisingly fresh. My eyes land on his chest, every bulging muscle outlined by the straining fabric of his black T-shirt. I drag my gaze up to his face.
A face he hides from the world behind his skull masks. Only the eyes are familiar—from news, both fake and real. I would recognise those eyes anywhere.
Set beneath severe eyebrows, their colour is like molten mahogany, their gaze intense and discomforting enough to make me drop my own to the less familiar portion of his visage.
His mouth surprises me. Its corners are a little upturned, lending it a permanent, sarcastic half-smile.
The lips are softer and fuller than I expected and shockingly sensual.
Somehow, I never considered the possibility that he might be good-looking.
It unsettles me as I take in the well-defined jaw, the olive shade of his skin, the rich mid-length hair.
Aron Krasnik. The Necromancer.
Retrograde is the most unpredictable and violent rebel group, and he is their notoriously vicious, psychopathic leader.
An Old Testament god of a world broken beyond repair.
There is not a Continuum soldier who is not scared of him.
And in his eyes, we’re as good as one of those soldiers, fit to meet the same bloody end.
“No need for introductions,” he says. “You know who I am, and I know exactly who you are, Tamara ‘Riley’ Volkova.”
His voice is low and deep, and its timbre sends shivers through me. I can’t take my eyes off him. This can’t be real.
“What?” he asks curtly, noticing my attention. “What were you expecting, a monster?”
The two men holding Corrado snicker.
“I didn’t expect you to be handsome,” I say matter-of-factly, and they all howl.
The right corner of Aron’s mouth hikes up in a lop-sided smirk.
“And I didn’t expect you to be so honest,” he retorts. “That’s good. It’ll make things easier.”
His accent is harsh, his r’s sharp and hard-rolled, his t’s and d’s spoken with an emphasis like the thud of a falling hammer.
“We’ll tell you anything you want to know. We’re on your side! You must hear us out!” Corrado pleads, his pitch high and words tumbling out too fast.
“Oh, there’s plenty I want to know, trust me,” Aron replies, his eyes glinting with cruel excitement that turns my knees to jelly. “But first things first.”
Without any change in his facial expression—without any warning whatsoever—he slaps me so fast I barely register it until my skin starts burning and my ears start ringing. I press my hand to my cheek, gaping at him. Corrado gasps loudly.
“What? Modern-day Joan of Arc can’t handle being slapped?”
Who the hell is Joan of Arc?
“Nah,” Aron drawls nonchalantly. “Come on! I’ve seen the photos of you from Berev. That bullet must have hit your liver, right? Nothing else bleeds like that.”
“You should know,” I remark quietly, and he roars with amusement before slapping my other cheek, harder than before and just as fast.
The impact echoes loudly throughout the cave, emphasised by its eerie acoustics.
“There you go! You’ve been shot on the job. What’s a few slaps, right?”
He hits me again, alternating the side, the blows as well as his voice getting louder.
“You’re not going to cry if I keep slapping you, are you?”
Slap.
“No,” I confirm quietly. “Not for some time anyway.”
Slap.
“You’re tougher than that, is that right?”
Slap.
“Not so much tougher as used to it.”
Slap.
“Yeah, you’ve had men hit you worse, haven’t you? Those bruises you had in those shots from Ornaton? That must have hurt way more than this, right?”
Slap.
“Yes, but you’re getting there.”
My remark earns me another malicious peal of laughter. The pins and needles in my face are getting worse, searing into my flesh.
“I didn’t think you’d be so fucking hilarious, Riley. This is great. We’ll have lots of fun, you and I, I can already tell. But back to the topic. How tough are you, really? I know you’ve been shot, and I know you’ve been beaten up. Ever been raped?”
He makes to slap me again, and I squeeze my eyes shut, preparing for a blow that never comes. His hand stays frozen inches from my face, and he’s looking at me expectantly.
“Well?” he urges me.
I breathe deeply through the nose, helplessness coursing through my veins like rage.