Chapter 25
Seven years ago.
Darkness doesn’t end. It lingers.
For some time—minutes, hours, days, I don’t know—it feels like I’m still falling through it. No ground. No air. No pain. Just…nothing.
Then something drags me back.
It starts with pressure—a tight, crushing weight in my chest like something is trying to force its way out of me. My body jerks, lungs seizing, and suddenly…
I need air.
I gasp, and the sound tears out of me raw and broken, as though my throat isn’t used to working anymore.
My hands claw at nothing as my lungs burn, dragging in air that feels wrong.
Pain follows, delayed, my brain catching up.
It hits all at once. My chest, my ribs, my lungs.
I choke on it, breath stuttering as I try to make sense of what the fuck is happening.
I was shot.
The memory slams into place.
Gun. Impact. Cason.
My eyes snap open, and there’s nothing but white. The blinding light overhead forces them shut again immediately. My vision swims, spots bursting behind my eyelids as my heart kicks hard against my ribs.
I’m alive.
But I don’t think I should be. Because I felt it. I felt my heart stop. I felt…
Cason.
I felt his tears drip onto my cheek.
The last look on his face flashes in my mind. Shock, fear, and something else I didn’t have time to translate before everything went dark. Tears streamed down his face as he clawed at me, screaming.
My hand flies to my chest. There are bandages there, thick and tight. I press harder, searching for something—blood, a wound, proof that all of this makes any kind of sense—but all I feel is the dull ache of something that should have killed me. It doesn’t hurt as badly as it probably should.
My breathing comes faster. Machines beep somewhere to my right, sharp and incessant, reacting to the spike of my heart. I force my eyes open again, slower this time. Again, I see white. White ceiling, white lights.
It’s not the basement. It’s not where I died.
Where is he?
I push up onto my elbows, ignoring the way my chest protests, the way my vision tilts dangerously.
The room comes into focus in pieces. More white walls, monitors, IV lines running into my arm, equipment I don’t recognize but instinctively don’t trust. It looks like a hospital room, but… that doesn’t feel right.
The machines continue their steady rhythm, tracking every uneven breath, every spike in my pulse.
Shadows flicker in the corner of the room.
At least, I could’ve sworn they did. But when my gaze snaps over, they’re perfectly still. I can’t see them move, but…I feel them. They shift around the edges of the room, something dark and wrong responding to the panic curling in my chest.
The door opens, and they’re forgotten.
A man steps inside like he belongs here. Like everything here belongs to him.
In his forties maybe, composed, immaculate in a way that feels deliberate, not effortless. No wrinkles in his suit, not a strand of hair out of place. His gaze is immediately on me, intense and assessing, like he’s been waiting. Not for anything specific, just waiting for me.
He’s familiar, but I can’t seem to place him. However, something in me, something instinctive, goes still.
“You’re awake,” he says, his voice calm and measured, not surprised.
My throat feels like sandpaper when I speak. “Where am I?”
The man doesn’t answer right away, just steps further into the room, hands clasped behind his back as he studies me as though I’m data. Statistics. A result.
Eventually, he gives me an answer. “Bellrose Institute.”
Bellrose.
Cason.
“You’re Malcolm.”
I’ve only ever seen Cason’s uncle in photographs or from a distance. Up close, he’s exactly what I expected and nothing like it at the same time. He’s more severe, more controlled. He’s the man whose nephew I took, the man who I’m sure is going to show me the other side of the coin.
He doesn’t respond, but I don’t need him to.
“Why am I here?”
A faint smile touches the corners of his mouth, but there’s no warmth to it. “Because you belong to me now. As long as you’re the asset I’m hoping you’ll be.”
I don’t understand what the fuck he’s talking about or what the fuck that has to do with any of this. So I try to rewind and go back to the beginning.
“I died.”
“You did.”
The confirmation hits harder than denial would have.
“And yet,” he continues smoothly. “Here you are. Thanks to me.”
I stare at him, trying to understand. Trying to piece together how the hell any of this has happened, why I’m not in a hospital. Why I’m even alive.
“Thanks to you or because of you?” I ask, feeling like the distinction is important.
His lips twitch. “Both.”
Shadows shift again, more noticeable this time, a subtle darkening along the corners of the room. Like they’re listening. Like they’re reacting to him. Not to his movements like they should, but to his words.
He must see it too because interest flickers in his eyes. “Fascinating.”
I don’t like the way he says that. I don’t like any of this.
He steps closer to the side of the bed, just within reach, close enough that I could grab him. And maybe I would. Maybe I would choke the life out of him if only my body wasn’t still catching up to the fact that it’s alive.
Or if he wasn’t Cason’s uncle.
Cason.
My thoughts keep jumping around, but now they finally stick.
“Where is he?” I ask, the question cutting through everything else.
Malcolm tilts his head, studying me. I don’t believe he’s having to think too hard of who it is I’m talking about, but his gaze is unreadable as he answers.
“He’s alive. Safe.”
Relief hits fast and hard, followed just as quickly by something else, something darker and more dangerous.
“Good,” I mutter with a slight nod of my head.
Malcolm watches with quiet interest. “You know you can never see him again.”
There’s an underlying threat in his tone, one I’m not sure if it’s directed toward me or Cason. It’s clear that Malcolm is responsible for my current situation and probably more than I realize. It’s not so difficult for me to imagine he’d threaten his own nephew.
What I felt before grows, becoming stronger, uglier.
No one will ever fucking hurt Cason.
Not as long as I’m fucking breathing.
“You don’t belong to the world you died in anymore, Mr. Morgan,” he continues as he rounds the bed until he’s standing at the foot of it, staring down at me. “You belong to me.”
“You don’t own me.”
The shadows in the room react to my voice that’s rough but somehow steady. They press into the corners, flutter around the edges. My fingers curl against the sheets. I can feel it now, feel them. The difference, the wrongness. There’s something under my skin that wasn’t there before.
“Legally, you’re dead,” Malcolm says, and the words settle in, heavy and absolute. “You’re safer if you don’t exist. More importantly, everyone else is safer. You have nothing now but what I choose to give you. Resources. Purpose. You’ll find soon enough that I do own you.”
I swallow, my throat even drier than it was before. “And if I refuse to be whatever it is you expect me to be?”
He purses his lips and turns away, his gaze landing on the shadows moving across the wall.
“You and Cason were never meant to grow as close as you did. I saw the look in his eyes and heard his screams as he was dragged out of that basement. He didn’t even know I was there because all he cared about was you.
” He faces me again, something wolfish in his expression now.
“Turns out, more things worked out to my advantage than I anticipated.”
I fall still. It clicks into place with a brutal kind of clarity that cuts through the lingering haze in my mind.
He’s using his own nephew as leverage.
My jaw tightens, but I don’t give him anything else. No visible reaction, no shift in posture. Nothing more that he can use against me. But inside, something dark unfurls, slowly and violently.
No one threatens him.
No one fucking touches him.
I was already starting to feel possessive over Cason before Malcolm’s men stormed in and stole him away from me, but it appears death has amplified the obsession. I was ready to run away with him, and now here I am about to sell my fucking soul to keep him safe.
Malcolm watches me like he’s expecting something. Maybe a fight or defiance, just one single mistake.
I don’t give it to him.
Leaning back against the pillows, I ignore the ache in my chest, forcing my breathing to even out, forcing my expression into something flat and indifferent. Empty.
“Understood.”
The word tastes like ash in my mouth, like giving up. But I know I’m not. I’m just waiting for the right moment to strike. Even the shadows at the edges of the room are still, as though waiting for a command I’m not going to give. Not yet.
Because now, I really do understand.
The shadows aren’t part of the room. They’re not tricks of the light or whatever the hell my brain is trying to rationalize. They’re mine. I know it because I can feel it, feel them.
I didn’t come back alone.
The realization hits with an impact like the bullet, imbedding itself deep. I don’t move, don’t react, but inside, there’s a split second of pure, unfiltered panic.
What the fuck is this?
They shift again, just barely, as though they’re responding to this newest spike in my pulse. Like they can feel me as much as I feel them.
Somehow, I manage to keep my breathing even, my body still.
Malcolm sees them. He has to. That’s what was fascinating.
Whatever the fuck is happening, he knows exactly what it is.
But I can’t give him one more thing to have over my head, so I don’t show my panic, my weakness.
I bury it. Shove it down deep, lock it behind the same walls I’ve used for years, the ones that kept me alive long before any of this.
Malcolm smiles, satisfied.
“Take the time you need to recover,” he says, his tone as conversational as ever. “When you’re ready, we’ll get to work.”
He heads for the door, and I stare at his back instead of letting my eyes wander where they really want to look. When he reaches the door, he pauses to peer at me over his shoulder.
“Get them under control. You’ll need them soon.”
And then he’s gone, the door closing behind him with a soft, final click.
My breathing picks up, pangs shooting through my chest with each sharp inhale. I stare up at the ceiling, watching as the shadows swirl above me in a vortex, proving that Malcolm knows a hell of a lot more than I do.
But I do know one thing.
I died, and something came back with me, like it sunk its claws into my soul before it slammed back into my body.
I can feel it in my skin, in my lungs. In the way the shadows breathe with me instead of around me, like they’re a part of me.
I don’t think controlling them will be the problem.
I’ll play along. I’ll heal. I’ll learn whatever the hell this is and become exactly what he thinks he owns.
Because right now, Cason is alive, and as long as he is, I can wait.
The shadows stretch further along the walls, deeper, darker, like they understand something I haven’t said out loud yet.
Like they already know.
That one day…
I’m going to kill Malcolm Bellrose.