Chapter 47 #3
Elora’s stomach heaved. She pressed her hand harder against her mouth, fighting the urge to vomit. Her other hand dug into the cold floor, claws threatening to scrape against the surface.
The guard’s boots shifted as he took Amara from Thorn. “Yes, sir.”
The feet moved away, the door opened and closed, and then there was silence. But Thorn hadn’t left. His polished shoes remained in view, barely a foot from where she hid.
A direct attack would be suicide. Elora froze beneath the bed, barely allowing herself shallow breaths. Each heartbeat felt like a hammer against her chest, threatening to betray her presence with its thunderous rhythm.
A breeding program. The words echoed in her mind, terrible and unmistakable. Not just an experiment—a systematic plan. Amara had been a test subject, and from the sound of it, not the first.
Elora’s vision swam, the room tilting around her.
She couldn’t blink away the sight of Amara’s wrists raw from the restraints, couldn’t unhear Thorn’s voice discussing ovulation cycles with the dispassion of a farmer inspecting breeding stock.
And the guard, standing there, following orders as if escorting someone to dinner rather than participating in something monstrous.
The polished shoes finally moved away. She heard Thorn gathering items, the clink of glass vials being arranged, papers being shuffled. The door clicked shut behind him.
Elora remained frozen beneath the bed, her body locked in place as her mind raced through the horrifying implications.
Her stomach churned with acid that threatened to rise into her throat.
This was beyond the cruelty she’d expected from Thorn.
Beyond even the experiments he’d performed on her. This was a systematic violation.
Florence’s warnings about the Empire’s desperation suddenly made terrible sense. The rallies had worked—villages were keeping their children, refusing to send them to The Institute. Fewer students, fewer servants, fewer bodies to maintain the machine of Imperial power.
So, Thorn had found another solution.
Why rely on reluctant villages when he could create his own servants? Children born within these walls, never knowing anything else, raised from birth to serve without question.
Her lungs burned. She realized she’d been holding her breath, her body forgetting even its most basic function. She tried to inhale, but her chest felt crushed under the weight of this revelation.
A maternity ward. Here, in The Institute. How many others like Amara were trapped there now? How many were already pregnant?
The room spun around her. She needed to move, to act, but her limbs wouldn’t respond. Thorn’s casual cruelty had always been calculated, but this—this was something else entirely.
Did the Empire know? Did they approve? Or was this Thorn’s initiative, his solution to their dwindling numbers?
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered except ending it.
Elora finally dragged air into her lungs, the action painful and forced. She slid out from under the bed, and stood in the empty laboratory, surrounded by the tools of Thorn’s perversion of alchemy and medicine.
Her trembling hands reached for the door handle.
Easing the door open, she peered into the corridor.
Empty. The silence felt oppressive, broken only by the distant hum of alchemical equipment.
Looking to the left, there was a thin line of golden light spilling from beneath the door at the end of the hallway.
Thorn’s study. The air carried his unmistakable scent—expensive cologne barely masking the acrid tang of chemicals— that once froze her in place with terror.
Now it ignited something primal within her, a burning need for retribution.
She could kill him like she came to do. But then what?
The Institute would continue. The Empire would send another to take his place, someone who would discover his research and continue where he left off.
If Florence’s plan continued—if the villages kept their children—the Empire would only expand his program.
She imagined Amara lying in some sterile prison, her body no longer her own. Treated just well enough to carry a healthy child, then sent back to that cold table once the baby was taken away. Used and reused until her body failed.
To the right stood the staircase that would lead her back up, out of this nightmare. Leave Thorn alive. Return to The Hive, and alert Florence of the Empire’s adaptations to her plans. Maybe she could come up with a solution that would save the wards and also take Thorn out in the process.
But leave Thorn alive now… when she is right here, ready to go for the kill.
She remembered Gerard’s face—that split-second when recognition dawned in his eyes, when he understood that his own cruelty had fashioned the weapon of his destruction.
How satisfying it would be to watch that same realization transform Thorn’s features into being the last thing he ever sees.
Her gaze darted between the sliver of light beneath Thorn’s door and the darkness of the stairwell. With a deep breath she shifted, allowing the shadows to cloak her, and chose which direction to go.