14. Novak
FOURTEEN
Novak
I stood at the window, staring out at the trees beyond the cabin, but I wasn’t seeing them.
The quiet pressed in, wrong. It itched under my skin, a slow, needling irritation I couldn’t reach to tear out.
I flexed my hands at my sides, jaw tight, measuring my breathing, measuring the room, as if there was something here to neutralize.
There wasn’t.
I should have stayed.
Said something or done something? Thanked Caleb? After that—after heat and hands and the way he’d sucked me down—there should have been a sequence. A response. A next step.
I didn’t have one.
It was never covered in the convent’s assassin 101.
I dragged a hand over the back of my neck. The memory hit again, clean and sharp. Caleb’s grip on my shirt. The force of it. The decision. The kiss—Christ. Real. No angle to it. No control to maintain. No reading him, adjusting, giving him what he needed, so it ended clean.
He’d wanted me, and this had been different, which meant I didn’t have a script for it.
Tree branches rattled together in the wind, and for a second, it pulled me somewhere else.
The convent. Same line of trees, tall and still, watching.
I’d stood at a window then, too, smaller, running through possibilities before stepping back into the room.
What they expected. What would keep the peace? What would stop the pain?
I reached for my phone anyway, my thumb hovering over the screen as I started to build the search—what to do after mutual blowjobs, what to say, how to act like a man who hadn’t been put together out of damage and survival—but I didn’t unlock it.
I let my hand drop and shoved the phone back into my pocket.
Caleb deserved better than a version of me who learned patterns, mirrored reactions, and passed as something close enough to human to get through a room without setting it on fire.
He was safe, for now, and I could stay up here for a little longer to get my head straight, to work on being human so I fit in Caleb’s world. But his voice carried up the stairs, cutting clean through everything.
“In the comms room! We’ve got footage to review.”
Saved by the mission imperative.
The screens were already open on the table, surveillance feed paused mid-frame, and Caleb stepped aside enough for me to see it clearly.
“No sign of any other juveniles, but I found Noah, the older brother.”
Noah stood just inside the perimeter fence, shoulders tight, eyes tracking something beyond the boundary, a slightly more grown-up version of the kids back at the center—same posture, same watchfulness, coming from being corrected too many times.
He held a compact carbine low against his thigh, military issue, short barrel, suppressed, the kind of weapon issued to people expected to control, not protect.
Caleb zoomed in on the feed, sharpening the image until the details resolved.
“He’s wearing a collar,” he said as the band at the boy’s throat came into focus. Black. Functional. No ornament. My attention locked on it instantly.
I felt sick.
I knew what it was.
Caleb rewound the footage. “Interesting,” he said, scrubbing back a few seconds and letting it play again at half speed.
The kid moved with intent, checking left and right, cutting his profile behind trunks, using the trees as cover, the way you’re taught when you expect to be watched.
He edged toward some unknown perimeter in small increments, testing the line without committing, until he took one step too far—and it hit.
Anyone would miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for: a fraction of a second where his shoulders locked, breath snagging, a flinch he crushed down.
My pulse kicked hard, a violent spike that had nothing to do with the room, and for a second it wasn’t a plan so much as a surge—heat and pressure climbing my spine, narrowing my vision until all that existed was the collar and the line he couldn’t cross.
Every part of me leaned forward, already closing the distance, already calculating how fast I could get there and how many bodies I’d have to put down to reach him.
Break the perimeter. Kill the relay. Rip the collar off.
If it took bone and blood to do it, then so be it.
The sequence stacked in my head faster than I could breathe, brutal, efficient, unstoppable.
Too far.
I locked it down hard, dragging control back in by force, choking the impulse before it could turn into action.
Caleb leaned in. “Range, signal, and power. If we kill the relay—or flood or blind it—we can spoof his position and keep the system reading him in bounds. Then we cut the collar and extract.”
I knew the system. Not this hardware, but the way it taught compliance through pain, escalating in measured increments until the body learned before the mind had time to question it.
I went very still.
I could feel Caleb’s attention shift to me. “You with me, Novak?”
I kept my eyes on the screen. “It’s not just distance,” I said, grabbing back all the control I could find.
“There’ll be layers. Distance first. Then, there is an escalation in pain if they test it.
They won’t just let him walk out. They’re hard to remove, built to resist anything short of dedicated tools—hardened locking mechanism, probably keyed to the system as well as physical restraint. ”
“You’ve seen this before.”
“Something close.”
“Okay, well, we’ll need to factor in bolt cutters, or a cutting torch if it’s reinforced.
..” he rubbed a hand over his face, and I heard the rasp of two-day stubble.
“…even then, you risk triggering a failsafe if it’s wired into the relay.
There are bolt cutters in the storage area, but no cutting torch that I know of. ”
On the screen, Noah caught my attention as he edged back inside the boundary, shoulders tight, breathing shallow, learning the line without needing to see it.
Conditioning in real time. Another guard approached his position, grabbed his shoulder.
We didn’t have audio at that point, but I could see the larger man was asking questions, and the way the teenager tried to laugh things off, and then the bigger guy put an arm over his shoulder.
Seemed like the teenager had been successful in making his excursion seem innocent.
Good play.
“…thinking we surveil for five days, work out security rotations, and I’ll get into their systems and see what I can find.” Caleb was still talking, and I tuned back in.
“You can hack them without them knowing?”
He smirked and cracked his knuckles. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
I nodded, and when Noah finally left that camera position, I backed out of the room. “I need to… I… I’ll find bolt cutters.”
“Are you okay?” Caleb asked with a frown.
“I’m good,” I responded. Liar.
I was in the room, stone under my bare feet, the collar sat tight against my throat, a constant pressure.
“She’ll come,” Gabriel whispered, crouched over Brother Lucien’s corpse, carving away skin and muscle to reveal bone. Sister Mary Agnes would come soon.
There were too many wounds he’d inflicted on the corpse to count, clustered across his face, chest, and abdomen, where the skin had been tested after death, as he checked when the blood had stopped coming.
Brother Lucien’s muscles and bones were beautiful ? —
Gabriel had peeled back skin, methodical enough that the structure beneath showed through. White. Smooth in places where it shouldn’t have been. Bone where there should have been expression.
Interesting.
That was the word that sat with it. Not horror. Not shock.
We were passing the time while waiting for her.
Raphael had positioned himself in the corner before she arrived, and for some reason, he dragged me with him, my back against his chest, his arm locked across me in a restraint, and his cock hard against my ass.
Gabriel was stabbing the corpse, feral as fuck, and Patrick was rocking in the opposite corner, his mind having broken a long time ago.
Raphael saw her before I did.
He loosened his hold enough to let me breathe, then rose from behind me, unfolding slowly.
He didn’t rush. Didn’t hide. He looked at her, really looked, and then lifted one eyebrow, a small, almost polite acknowledgment, as if she’d interrupted something minor rather than walked into a room full of ruin.
She inhaled to speak, the control in her hand, and all four of us fell to the floor.
White-hot pain cut the moment clean in half, forcing me down to a crouch, before I could think, before I could do anything except exist inside the pain and wait for it to end.
I met Raphael’s gaze as he squirmed, but he was smiling, a toothy grin, a snarl of sorts, and a blade in his hand.
I don’t know where he got it, but it was there, palmed and ready to go.
Don’t move , he telegraphed with his brilliant turquoise eyes.
I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
I woke with my hands at my throat, trying to drag a collar that wasn’t there anymore from my neck, breath dragging in hard, the cabin dark around me, the reminder of the pain as clear as if the system had never switched off.
The door slammed open, Caleb with his weapon drawn, half crouching, scanning the room.
“What the fuck, Novak?”