Chapter Seventeen — The Man in the Theater
Chapter Twelve — The Program
The recording screen stayed black afterward.
No music.
No dramatic ending.
Just silence.
Avery stared at her own reflection faintly mirrored in the dead monitor while grief
hollowed her out all over again.
Vinny had known.
Not suspected.
Known.
And he still stayed beside her anyway.
The realization hurt so badly she almost wished he’d hated her instead.
Blaine shut the monitor off completely.
The room dimmed instantly beneath the industrial lights overhead.
Rain hammered softly against the embalming chapel ceiling while distant city sirens
echoed through Poison City above them.
“The Black Vein Program,” Avery whispered. “What is it?”
Blaine didn’t answer immediately.
That frightened her.
He crossed slowly toward the toxin cabinet again before speaking.
“It started as containment research after the Collapse Wars.”
Avery frowned slightly.
“That was decades ago.”
“Yes.”
His silver eyes flicked briefly toward her.
“Contamination changed the city faster than infrastructure could adapt. Air toxicity. Genetic
damage. Chemical mutation.” His voice remained flat. Controlled. “The Houses needed a
way to weaponize survival before society collapsed entirely.”
Weaponize survival.
The phrase sounded horrifyingly believable.
Blaine removed another vial from the cabinet.
This one nearly black.
“You know Breath was originally developed for military filtration.”
Avery blinked.
“What?”
“The city tells civilians Breath is medicine.” Blaine rotated the vial slowly between gloved
fingers. “It was designed for battlefield conditioning.”
Cold slid down her spine.
Everything in Poison City suddenly felt sharper.
The pills.
The ration shortages.
The Houses controlling oxygen itself.
“They control who breathes,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
The simplicity of the answer made it worse.
Blaine finally looked directly at her again.
“Black Vein expanded after they realized contamination could be refined.”
Avery’s throat tightened.
“Refined into what?”
His expression darkened slightly.
“People.”
Silence swallowed the room.
Avery stared at him.
“No.”
“Yes.”
He set the black vial carefully onto the table between them.
“They stopped trying to cure contamination years ago.” His voice remained coldly calm.
“The program shifted toward engineering survivable variants.”
Avery thought about her poison, Blaine’s immunity, Vinny’s files.
The city had never been trying to save people.
Only control them.
She had grown up being tested. Blood draws she didn’t understand. Evaluations that never
explained what they were looking for. Registry classifications that followed her into every
district she tried to move to. She had assumed it was fear — the city documenting its
monsters so it could track them, contain them, keep the damage manageable.
It had never occurred to her that they were taking notes.
That every symptom she’d ever presented, every exposure, every accident — all of it had
been data. That the city hadn’t been trying to protect people from her. It had been studying
what she could do.
The journal suddenly felt heavier at her hip.
All those names she’d been carrying.
They hadn’t just been her victims.
They’d been research.
She sat with something else too, beneath all of it, something she didn’t want to look at
directly.
Relief.
The terrible specific relief of knowing she hadn’t killed him. That the poison in his blood at
the end wasn’t hers — not the natural spread of what she carried, not the consequence of
every moment he’d stood too close. Someone injected him. Someone chose that. The thing
she’d spent weeks believing she’d done to him, the thing she’d been writing in her chest
next to his name — it wasn’t true.
She immediately felt guilty for feeling relieved.
Which was, she thought, exactly the kind of thing Vinny would have found both completely
predictable and deeply unfair.
Blaine leaned lightly against the counter.
“They categorized subjects by viability.”
“Subjects.”
Not people.
Never people.
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“Some adapted to toxins.” His gaze drifted briefly toward the scars near his wrists. “Some
adapted to pain. Some developed neurological resistance.”
Avery slowly realized what she was hearing.
“You were born there.”
Blaine went still.
Then:
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
Wrong.
Avery saw it instantly.
Blaine noticed her noticing.
For the first time since meeting him something flickered through his expression that almost
resembled discomfort.
The assassin hated being read.
“You don’t talk much,” Avery murmured softly.
“You talk enough for both of us.”
Despite everything the corner of her mouth twitched slightly.
Blaine stared at her.
Then looked away first.
That surprised her more than it should have.
The room fell quiet again afterward.
Not hostile.
Just heavy.
Avery slowly unstrapped the leather bag from her hip and placed it carefully beside her on
the metal table.
Blaine’s gaze immediately shifted toward it.
The journal.
Still watching it like it contained answers.
Maybe it did.
Avery hesitated.
Then slowly pulled it free.
The velvet cover looked worn darker beneath the industrial light. Frayed edges. Water
damage. Pressed flowers tucked carefully between old pages.
Blaine stayed perfectly still while she opened it.
Avery turned pages slowly.
Names.
Dates.
Memories.
Not victims.
People.
Blaine watched silently as scraps of fabric and handwritten notes slipped between pages.
Mara — smelled like oranges.
Lina liked yellow birds.
Derrick sang badly when he drank.
The assassin’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly with each page.
Not pity.
Recognition again.
Like something inside him kept adjusting every time Avery contradicted the monster he
expected.
Then she reached the newest blank page.
Her hand froze.
Vinny’s page.
Still empty.
Avery physically couldn’t turn to it yet.
The grief hit too violently every time she tried.
Blaine noticed immediately.
“Why haven’t you written his?”
Her throat closed.
“Because then it’s real.”
The answer came out smaller than intended.
The room stayed silent for several long seconds afterward.
Then Blaine said quietly:
“Most people forget the dead quickly in this city.”
Avery stared down at the journal.
“I don’t know how.”
Something unreadable crossed his face.
Then:
“I think that’s why Vincent Moretti loved you.”
The words landed like a blade sliding carefully between ribs.
Avery looked up sharply.
Blaine held her gaze steadily.
No mockery.
No manipulation.
Just truth.
And somehow hearing a stranger say it hurt worse than hearing it from Vinny ever had.
Three people tried to kill Avery before dawn.
Blaine killed all of them in under ninety seconds.
Avery stood frozen near the chapel stairwell while blood spread slowly across cracked tile
floors beneath flickering emergency lights.
The first assassin never even reached the bottom step.
Wire flashed through the dark—
Then his throat opened silently.
Avery physically flinched.
The second attacker fired twice through the chapel windows above.
Blaine moved before the sound fully echoed.
One knife.
Directly through the eye.
Precise.
Cold.
Effortless.
The third almost escaped.
Almost.
Avery heard him screaming upstairs through the embalming chapel while rain hammered
the roof overhead.
Then silence.
Heavy silence.
A few seconds later Blaine returned down the stairwell wiping blood carefully from a thin
black blade with almost clinical calm.
Avery stared at him.
“You killed them.”
Blaine looked mildly confused by the statement.
“They were trying to kill you.”
“That doesn’t usually happen in front of me.”
“Now it does.”
His tone remained perfectly even.
Which somehow made the violence worse.
Blood streaked across the assassin’s gloves and collar beneath the dim industrial light
while thunder rolled somewhere far above Poison City.
Avery suddenly understood why people feared him.
Not because he enjoyed violence.
Because he didn’t.
He killed the way surgeons cut flesh.
Necessary.
Precise.
Emotionless.
That was far more terrifying.
Blaine crossed toward one of the fallen attackers and crouched beside the body.
Avery forced herself not to look at the dead man’s face.
“Low-tier scavenger contract hunters,” Blaine murmured.
“How can you tell?”
“They smelled like amphetamines and panic.”
Avery stared at him.
“You can identify people by smell?”
“Yes.”
“That’s horrifying.”
“It’s useful.”
He searched the body quickly before removing a thin black token from the dead man’s coat
pocket.
A silver ivy symbol curled across the center.
The same symbol from Vinny’s recording.
Blaine’s expression darkened instantly.
“That’s new.”
Fear sharpened beneath Avery’s ribs.
“What is it?”
“Not House-issued.”
He stood slowly, turning the token between gloved fingers.
“The Black Ivy faction usually stays hidden.”
Faction.
The word felt wrong.
Too organized.
“You’re saying there’s another group besides the Houses?”
Blaine looked at her evenly.
“There are always groups behind the people pretending to rule.”
That sounded like experience talking.
Avery’s eyes drifted toward the blood on the floor again.
One body twitched faintly.
Not dead yet.
Fear hit instantly.
“Blaine.”
The assassin already noticed.
Of course he had.
He crossed calmly toward the dying scavenger while the man struggled weakly against
collapsed lungs and blood filling his throat.
Avery expected Blaine to finish killing him.
Instead he crouched beside the body and pressed a knife lightly beneath the man’s jaw.
“Who sent you?”
The scavenger coughed blood.
“No names…”
Blaine pushed the blade slightly deeper.
“Wrong answer.”
Avery’s stomach twisted.
Not from fear.
From how quiet Blaine remained doing this.
Like interrogation meant nothing emotionally to him anymore.
The scavenger’s eyes darted toward Avery briefly.
Terror flooded his expression instantly.
“Poison Girl…” he rasped.
Avery physically stepped backward.
The man started shaking harder.
“She’s real…”
Blaine’s silver eyes flicked once toward Avery.
Then back.
“Who hired you?”
The scavenger swallowed blood.
“The Theater…”
Blaine went still.
Only slightly.
But Avery noticed.
“What theater?” she whispered.
The dying man laughed weakly through blood.
“You don’t know?” His terrified eyes fixed on Avery again. “Then you’re already dead.”
Blaine shoved the knife deeper instantly.
Clean.
Fast.
Merciful.
The man went still.
Silence swallowed the chapel again.
Rain.
Breathing.
Blood dripping slowly across tile.
Avery stared at Blaine.
“The Theater?”
Blaine wiped the blade clean carefully before answering.
“It’s a myth.”
“That sounded less mythical upstairs.”
His jaw tightened faintly.
“The Theater recruits assassins, experimental survivors, political ghosts.” He slid the knife
back beneath his coat smoothly. “Nobody important admits they exist.”
Avery’s pulse slowed dangerously.
“And you?”
Blaine looked at her.
Too calm.
Too unreadable.
Then:
“I used to work for them.”
Cold slid through her instantly.
Of course he did.
Because apparently every horrifying thing in Poison City eventually connected back to him
somehow.
Avery looked away before he could see how unsettled she suddenly felt.
The assassin noticed anyway.
“You’re afraid of me now.”
Not accusation.
Observation.
Avery stared at the blood pooling across the floor.
“You killed three people without blinking.”
“They would’ve killed you.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you sleep at night.”
Something flickered across Blaine’s face then.
Gone too fast to fully read.
Not anger.
Something emptier.
“I don’t,” he said quietly.
The answer lingered heavily between them.
Then suddenly the old chapel speakers crackled violently overhead.
Both of them froze instantly.
Static screamed through the room.
Then a voice purred softly through the intercom:
“Well.”
Smooth.
Male.
Amused.
“That’s disappointing, Blaine.”
The assassin’s entire body went rigid.
Avery felt the shift immediately.
Danger.
Real danger.
The voice laughed softly through the static.
“You were supposed to kill the poison girl.”