Chapter 4
Saint
Present Day
They call this place the Sanctuary. It’s a sublevel beneath Kenyan University, where the elite bury what they don’t want anyone to know about.
I am the biggest kept secret.
The concentration of the antipsychotic in my blood is diminishing. I feel it going, the fog thinning by degrees, the world sharpening back into edges.
Every breath is a small collection of needles. The fluorescent hum overhead is stitched directly into my optic nerves.
I’m strapped to a mattress that smells of industrial bleach and evaporated defeat. The cuffs are thick leather. They don’t give, not against ordinary muscle.
Mine is not ordinary, but I know that pulling against them now would be effort spent on the wrong problem.
“What’s unresolved becomes immortal,” I whisper to the corner of the ceiling.
Dr. Wick wrote it in her leather notebook last week. She thought it was a symptom. She didn’t understand it was a prophecy.
I close my eyes and replay the night in the dormitory. The draft under her door. The smell of her fear and something underneath, something warm I’ve been turning over in my mind like a stone in water.
I picture her fingers closing around the note.
Slightly trembling.
The delicate articulation of her wrist.
She thinks she escaped something.
She doesn’t know I’ve been the thing holding everyone else back.
“Saint? You’re tracking again. Good.”
The nurse is a blur of starch and peppermint over the clipboard. The look of a person observing a science project that might explode but loves to fuck in secret, but loves to fuck in secret.
“Go away,” I rasp. “Before I find a way to make you part of the floor.”
She doesn’t flinch. They train them for this. “Dr. Wick will be in at six. Try to keep your heart rate down.”
She leaves.
The door clicks.
I stare at the ceiling and count the holes in the acoustic tile. Four hundred. I’m on four hundred and thirteen when the lock turns again.
It’s too early for Dr. Wick. And this door doesn’t open. It’s shoved.
First comes Valen. My half brother enters like he owns the room because men like him were raised to believe ownership is a birthright.
Charcoal suit. Clean hands. Eyes cold enough to make violence look administrative.
He looks at my restraints with a flicker of distaste, as if my being strapped down is a personal scheduling inconvenience.
“You look pathetic, Saint. Father would be disappointed.”
“Your father is a pussy,” I say, and the monitors begin beeping. “Say his name again, and I’ll eat your throat.”
“See?” Zero appears behind him, already plugging his tablet into the wall jack.
He’s all sharp angles, quick fingers, and terrible instincts disguised as confidence.
“Totally lucid. That’s our Saint,” Valen adds.
Garret leans in the doorframe, silent and armed, jacket hanging heavy with enough firepower to change the architecture of this floor. He doesn’t smile. Garret never does when he’s hoping someone gives him a reason.
Then the twins move in.
Dravin and Draven. Identical faces. Different damage. They glide into the room with that synchronized, predatory stillness that makes people forget there are two of them until it’s too late.
“Ready to walk?” Dravin asks, pulling a serrated blade from his belt. “Or are you enjoying the view from the mattress?”
“Get. Me. Out.”
The blade goes through the leather like paper.
“Azriel,” Valen says.
My youngest half brother steps out from behind Garret. He’s the only one in the room who looks like he genuinely doesn’t want to be here.
He hands me a duffel bag, knuckles pale. “Put these on. We’ve got five minutes before the loop breaks.”
I sit up.
The room tilts.
I grab Valen’s jacket to anchor myself, and he lets me. His eyes go to ice, but his body holds still.
“Careful,” he says. “I’m the only reason they haven’t lobotomized you.”
“And I’m the only reason you’re still breathing. You need a monster? Here I am.”
I dress quickly in black tactical pants, a thick black hoodie, and boots.
When I catch my reflection in the metal above the sink, I look exactly like what I am: a ghost haunting its own body. Pupils blown wide. Years of broken sleep hollowed around my eyes.
We move through the hallway in formation, me at the center, the others a shell around me.
An orderly rounds the corner carrying a medication tray.
He freezes.
Draven has him against the wall before the tray hits the floor, and pills scatter across the linoleum in cheerful primary colors. “Not a sound. We’re just taking our friend for some air.”
The orderly nods.
I step on a blue pill on my way past. No more pills.
We hit the stairwell, and I start to feel it. The adrenaline winning, the antipsychotics fully routed, my heart a sledgehammer against my ribs.
By the time we burst through the fire door into the cold night air, I’m not just awake.
I’m hungry.
The sky hits first. Too wide. Too black. Too open after years of ceilings pressed low over my head and lights that never went dark. For half a second, my body reaches for a wall that isn’t there. My hand curls around empty air, fingers closing around nothing.
I hate that.
I hate that freedom can still feel like another room I don’t know how to survive.
So I breathe once. Hard.
Then I move.
The black van has been stripped of everything unnecessary. I take the back bench. My hands shake from the sheer compression finally finding room to expand.
Valen lights a joint. “Sokolov is at the warehouse. He thinks twenty men and a steel door make him safe. He’s about to learn what happens when his people break the rules.”
Zero doesn’t look up from the tablet. “He has the ledger, the names, and enough proof to burn half the Order before sunrise. Scholarship students. Prey lists. Payment trails. Everything they pretend doesn’t exist.” The van goes quiet.
That’s why they came for me.
Not because they want me free.
Because the monster in the basement has finally become useful after months.
I lean forward until I can smell the weed on his breath. “That’s because he hasn’t met me. The thing they’ve been keeping in a box for years that wants to turn the world into a red smear.”
“Good.” Valen smiles, and for the first time tonight, I see the family resemblance. A smile that promises a funeral. “Because I’m not paying you in therapy. I’m paying you in blood.”
I close my eyes. Twenty minutes to the warehouse.
Twenty minutes of pressure building, tightening, looking for an exit point.
But the image that surfaces isn’t the target.
It’s an empty hallway, and the sound of a girl fighting her demons trying not to cry.
Amy.
It’s like I can feel her from here. She’s in her room, staring at the note on the floor.
She doesn’t know what’s circling this campus. She has no idea.
But she will.
“Sokolov has twenty-two on the floor,” Garret calls from the front. “Military trained. They won’t roll.”
“Good. I don’t want them to roll. I want them to fight.”
The twins check their magazines.
I reach into the duffel and pull out my brass knuckles, heavy, cold, notched from encounters I couldn’t always be precise about. I slide them on.
I take out the plague doctor mask and robe.
“Saint,” Azriel says, quiet and final. “When this is over, when we get the ledger. You stay away from her.”
I tilt my head. The smile comes slowly. “You think you can protect someone from the air they breathe, Azriel? How do you keep someone safe from the darkness she’s already invited in?”
“She didn’t invite you,” he says.
“She cried out in the dark, and I was the only one who listened.” A beat of silence. “You want to keep her safe. I want to know what she sounds like when she isn’t afraid.”
Valen cuts through us both. “Three minutes out. North bay. Don’t make noise to wake the dead.”
The van slows.
The industrial district opens around us, warehouses rising like tombstones against the black water.
Zero counts down.
The lights die.
I jump out before the door is fully open, boots hitting gravel, the cold air a full-body slap. The adrenaline is a wave that takes everything.
I walk straight for the north loading bay, brass catching the moonlight.
Sokolov thinks he’s dealt with monsters before. He’s never dealt with someone who has nothing left to lose.