Chapter 36
It turns out that, yes, I’m still mad at Reese.
As soon as we woke up this morning, he asked the same question. “Are you still mad at me?”
Since I wasn’t cum drunk like I was the night before, the answer was easy.
“Yes.”
Now we’re standing out front of the safehouse beside my car that Sebastian had someone go get from the Institute. It’s not that I’m that angry with Reese, but I have things to do.
“I downloaded a lot of data from the Bellrose servers,” I tell Reese as he leans against my car, annoyingly blocking the driver’s side door with his arms crossed.
He’s really not happy that I want to leave.
“I want to go through it, but if I try to unpack it all inside my head, it’s going to overwhelm me.
If I can upload it to the hard drive I have at home, it’ll be easier to sift through bit by bit. ”
“Sebastian has a computer here.”
I give him a look. “I spent years and a lot of fucking money on my setup. I’m using mine.”
He lets out a huff through his nose. “And I can’t come with you, why?”
I cross my arms too, mirroring him just enough to be annoying. “Because you lost that privilege when you promised to let me go somewhere else alone and then broke that promise.”
Reese pushes off the door like he’s about to physically block me again if I so much as breathe in the direction of the handle. “And you proved you can’t be trusted to stay alive for more than five minutes without supervision.”
“Well,” I deadpan, “and here I thought we had something special.”
“We do. That’s the fucking problem.”
I bite back a smile and sigh instead, taking a step closer. “Reese. He let us go.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means something. He had a gun to my head. He had both of us in a room full of his little soldiers, and he let us walk out. He’s not going to turn around less than twenty-four hours later and come after me. That’s not how he plays.”
Reese’s jaw tightens. “You don’t know that.”
“I know him,” I counter. “He’s not impulsive. He’s calculated. If he makes a move, it’s going to mean something. It’s going to be a part of something bigger. Not whatever you’re imagining right now.”
“I’m not imagining anything. I’m planning for it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m planning on not living in a constant state of paranoia.”
“You should be.”
I roll my eyes, unable to stop the faint grin from tipping up the corner of my lips. “You’re exhausting.”
“And you’re reckless.”
“I thought about legally changing my middle name to that actually.”
He exhales slowly, like he’s trying very hard not to throw me over his shoulder again and drag me back inside. Honestly, fifty-fifty chance he’s considering it.
“I’m not shutting it down,” he says finally.
I blink. “What?”
“The resistance,” he clarifies. “I’m not dismantling it. I know I told Malcolm I would, but I’m not.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, not surprised. “I figured.”
“That means…” He takes a step closer this time, his gaze locking onto mine, intense and unyielding. “I just made you a target.”
“Pretty sure I already was one.”
“Not like this. You hated being leverage before, but now that’s exactly what you are. More than ever. Now you’re pressure. Now you’re the easiest way for him to get to me.”
I open my mouth to argue, then close it again.
Okay. Fair.
“I’ll be fine for one day,” I tell him, softer this time but no less firm. “I’m not going off-grid. I’m going to my apartment, which you still have a fucking camera in, by the way. I’m going to figure out how to dump everything I pulled out of those servers, and then I’ll come back.”
“You have no idea what he’s planning.”
“Neither do you,” I shoot back. “Which is exactly why you should stay here and figure that out instead of babysitting me. You said that something felt off. If Malcolm is setting something up, you and Baz are the ones most likely to see it coming with how long you two have been fighting against him.”
His expression shifts. Not fully convinced, but…considering.
“This is the quickest way for us to figure out exactly what Malcolm is up to. You stay here and work with your people while I go do what I do best. That’s your lane, Reese. Not hovering over me while I try to download my brain into a hard drive.”
A beat passes. Then another.
“Felix.” I’m not above playing my last card. “I’ve been gone for two days. I asked the neighbor to feed him, but he’s still probably plotting my murder.”
That gets the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth, and he mutters, “Traitor.”
“Absolutely,” I confirm. “But he’s my traitor, and I’d like to keep him alive.”
Reese studies me for a long second, weighing something I can’t quite see. Then, finally, he exhales. “One day.”
“Look at that,” I say with a grin. “Growth.”
“One day,” he repeats, sharper. “You check in. You don’t disappear. And if anything feels off—anything—you leave immediately and call me.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Cason.”
“Reese.”
We stare at each other for several seconds, both of us too stubborn to back down.
Then I step forward, closing the distance between us, and grab his shirt, yanking him down into a kiss before he can try to argue even more.
It’s quick, just enough to distract him so I can turn us around.
As soon as I let him go, I open the driver door.
Before I can get inside, Reese grabs hold of the door and locks his gaze with mine. “I want you back here tonight.” His tone leaves no room for argument. “Bring the damn cat if you have to.”
“Aw, do you want to raise a cat with me?”
His eyes roam my face for a few seconds before he says, “I want everything with you.”
My heart does a flip in my chest, and if I didn’t already know what it felt like for it to stop, I’d swear it just did it again.
“Me too,” I whisper.
Then I give him one last swift kiss before climbing into my car because if I don’t go now, I’m not going to want to at all. He shuts the door for me and steps back, and I can see how much it pains him to let me go.
But I’ll be back.
And as long as we survive this, we’ll have everything together.
Felix is pissed.
That’s the first thing I learn when I step into my apartment. The second is that I own a tiny, furry missile of judgment. Before I barely get the door shut, he comes bolting out from the bedroom, launches himself onto the couch and meows loudly like he’s filing a formal complaint with management.
“Missed you too, you dramatic little gremlin,” I mutter as I move into the kitchen.
He leaps down and follows after me. I fill up his food and water dishes quickly so I can head to my desk.
My fingers barely touch the keyboard before the connection snaps into place.
Data pours out of me, clean and organized, slotting into folders and files, so that it’ll be easy to go through it all.
It takes me less than two minutes to dump everything out of my head and into the hard drive. Which is a sentence I really wish didn’t make sense.
By the time I’m finished, my screen is a mess of categorized directories, flagged documents, and encrypted files I already know how to open without even trying.
Felix hops up onto the desk and sits directly in front of the screen.
“Bold of you to assume you can interfere with what is essentially my brain now.”
He can’t. I don’t even need to be touching the computer, so I get up because I can’t sit any longer.
Instead, I pace, back and forth across the living room, shoes kicked off and the floor cool against my bare feet as I flip through files by nothing but brain and radio waves.
There’s a lot, but it’s definitely less overwhelming than if I had tried to do this in my head alone.
The screen flickers behind me. Documents open and close and rearrange. Data scrolls faster than any human should be able to process. But I’m not processing it like a human. I’m absorbing it. 1s and 0s fly around the apartment, code only I can see as I continue pacing.
Felix watches me like he’s deciding if it’s finally time to look for a new owner.
Part of what I discover is what we already knew. The Institute has been tracking flatlines, flagging survivors, predicting Ascension probability. Reese does a version of the same thing, just…less corporate evil.
But then there’s something else. Something worse.
Files shift in my vision, layering over each other until a pattern starts to form. Protocols, medical logs, internal memos. Terminology that makes my stomach turn.
“P0E iteration cycles,” I read aloud because, somehow, that makes it less fucking terrifying. “I guess ‘die, revive, repeat’ didn’t test well with focus groups.”
Serial death. Repeated murder.
Or, in other words, torture.
We knew Malcolm had purposefully killed at least one person to manufacture an Ascended soldier, but…fuck. This is…
Overkill.
Literally.
Malcolm found a secret to creating Ascended. If they don’t Ascend the first time, he tries again. And again. And again.
A knock at the door makes me jump, which is embarrassing. But in my defense, I just obtained nightmare fuel. I glare at my computer like it’s the one to blame before stalking over and yanking the door open. Lane smiles at me like I didn’t just look two seconds away from committing a felony.
“Hi.”
I blink. “Hi?”
He tilts his head. “You look…alive.”
“For now.”
“Harrison was worried about you.”
Lane then produces said husband of his, reaching over and grabbing Harrison by his sleeve, pulling him into view through the open doorway.
“I was not,” Harrison snaps, straightening his suit jacket. “Curious, maybe, but not worried. However, for some strange reason, my husband likes you, so we’re checking on you to make him happy.”
I snort. “I knew you both loved me.”
Harrison rolls his eyes.
Lane says, “I did mention wanting to check on you since, you know, you literally died.”
“Yeah, that keeps coming up,” I respond dryly. I hesitate for half a second, then step back and gesture inside. “I’m a bit busy right now, but you can come in.”