Chapter 22 The Present #2
The longer I postpone the choice, the more I start to resemble the thing I hated in my men the first time I saw them.
And maybe… I don’t hate that as much as I should.
“So… we never really talked about it,” I say as we turn away from the main hall leading toward the generator wing of the basement. “All I know is Nathaniel killed five people. What’s your… body count?”
Yeah, it sounds wrong when said out loud. But fuck it, I’m curious. And honestly, we’re way past awkward by now. We have feelings for each other, twisted as that sounds. Maybe that’s what peace looks like for someone like me? Finding comfort in shared damnation?
Talon flashes me a grin first.
“Do you mean pre-you, or pre-our world healing mission, or just… total?” he asks lightly.
“General,” I clarify, stepping over a fallen EXIT sign as the corridor slopes downward. “Full homicide résumé, please.”
Talon lets out a low laugh. “As if we keep count.”
“You know I was a soldier before all this,” Cassian says evenly.
“And I was in a turf gang,” Talon adds with a shrug.
Yeah… I can kind of see how those two facts would make it hard to get a neat little spreadsheet total. Still, they say each kill leaves a mark. That the human brain never really forgets—even if the conscious mind’s a mess, the subconscious keeps score.
“So, no number?” I press anyway. “Not even an estimate?”
Cassian exhales through his nose. “Let’s see. I won’t count my military days. After Sabine’s killer, I went after his accomplice—the bastard who made her kidnapping possible. After that…” His jaw flexes. “I hunted down other killers. Ones I heard about, ones I could find. Probably around a dozen.”
Talon lets out a low whistle, impressed and almost admiring.
“Wow,” he says. “Real nice, Cass.”
My skin prickles at the scope of it. It’s horrifying, and somehow comforting, in a twisted way. Talon claps slowly.
“And you?” I ask, turning to him.
He laces his fingers, tilting his head. “None, actually. After the turf business, I didn’t kill anyone. Not until I met this psycho and the doc, and we formed our little murder club.”
I slow my pace. “Wait—none? At all?”
“Not one.” He shrugs. “I wasn’t some justice crusader back then.
Didn’t think about souls or the afterlife or any of that crap.
It wasn’t until Cassian started preaching his gospel that I actually thought about the people who died because of me.
” His eyes flick toward me, then Cassian. “That’s when it started to make sense.”
People here are code for Lark and Rhea.
“You got indoctrinated, huh?” I echo, brow lifting.
“That makes my way sound like a cult,” Cassian says dryly.
“It is a cult,” Talon fires back, gesturing loosely between the two of them. “You recruited me with trauma, righteous violence, and speeches about how no one else has the guts to fix things.”
“You were looking for a purpose,” Cassian counters.
“I was,” Talon admits easily. “And it got me here, so I can’t complain, can I?”
He glances at me again. I can’t help but smile. He’s so goddamn unserious.
We move past a row of rusted medical lockers, the floor sloping downward. The hum of the generators fades; even the faint buzzing of the grow lights is gone.
“So if I were to put you in order…” I start, trailing off as the tile gives way to rough concrete. “Cassian’s at the top—by a lot. Nathaniel’s sitting at, what, five? Candy Maker included. And you’re sitting at…?”
“No, no, no,” Talon says, shaking his head. “Cassian’s definitely first, sure. But Nathaniel only killed the guy who murdered his mother. Everything else, I was part of. Plus, I did my share before the gang even started. I’m taking second place.”
I snort. “It’s not a competition.”
“Of course not.” Talon spreads his hands, the picture of fake innocence. “Just establishing the leaderboard.”
We move deeper into the old radiology wing. The lights here are a sickly yellow, making everything look older than it should. Dust clings to our hair and settles on my hoodie. When Cassian brushes his hand along a locker to steady me, a trail of grime smears across his palm.
“Guess cleaning day never made it down here?” I ask.
“Never saw the point,” Cassian says without looking back.
“Why radiology?” I ask as we pass a row of faded warning signs—CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS—their paint flaking like dried scabs.
Talon tilts his head toward them with something almost like reverence. “Lead walls. Lead floors. Keeps things contained. And nobody else comes this way.”
A single fluorescent tube flickers above us, then steadies. For a moment, I see Nathaniel and Mark, images flashing behind my eyes like a TV switching channels.
Distance doesn’t help. Turns out, getting farther from the scene doesn’t make it any less vivid.
“How many souls did you guys collect?” I ask finally, the question that’s been clawing at me since Death sent me here. “Death didn’t say how much work was left. Just told me to ‘get rid of all of them.’”
A moment of silence stretches between us.
Cassian’s the one who finally answers. “Twelve stones. I filled most of them myself, once I found out what they were.”
My mouth falls open. “Wait…what?”
“Twelve,” he repeats.
I blink. “As in… one-two twelve?”
“As in twelve separate murderers,” Talon says, rocking back on his heels.
My shoes scrape the uneven concrete. For a second, the hallway feels like it’s closing in. Twelve stones. Twelve potential wraiths. Each one created out of someone evil.
“That’s… a lot,” I murmur.
“Understatement of the century,” Talon says cheerfully.
We angle left where the main corridor tees into an even older wing. The air changes here. It’s less dust and more cool, mineral basement. We pass a dead vending machine, its plexiglass spidered through the center, a paper cup crushed in the delivery slot.
Cassian leads, scanning without looking like he’s scanning. I wonder if he’s been on edge about the wraiths this whole time. Knowing him, probably yes. The man could plan a battle mid-orgasm if he had to. Actually… given recent events, he probably did.
“Radiology’s this way,” he says finally, brushing two fingers against a wall sign.
And considering this building’s history, it’s not hard to believe that radiology was where most of the real monstrosities happened.
The place is too secluded to have ever been normal.
The hall slopes gently, then levels out. A pair of double doors waits ahead, the push bars lashed together with a leather belt. The tape along the edges has aged to the color of old tea. Talon slips the belt free and nudges the door; it sticks for a moment before giving way under pressure.
Inside lies a suite of sorts. Just… make it lead and concrete and without any windows.
“Why does it always feel like the apocalypse was three years ago in these places?” I ask, scanning the room.
“I guess because many people died here,” Cassian mutters.
“Yeah… You may be onto something.”
We pass a door marked HOT LAB in peeling vinyl letters. The pass-through hatch is clamped shut with two steel C-clamps and a strip of angle iron screwed into the frame.
Cassian stops where the tile ends and raw concrete begins, the color somewhere between ash and a bruise.
A maintenance door waits there, paint scraped off around the knob in a perfect halo.
He pulls a heavy ring of keys from his pocket, an ugly, clinking thing that looks like it weighs as much as my forearm, and finds one by touch.
“Wow,” I say. “You actually locked it.”
He looks over his shoulder. “Yeah. In case we lost sight of you and you decided to wander. Didn’t want you ending up here alone.”
“As if I’d do that,” I mutter.
The door grinds open, hinges surrendering a long, metallic creak.
The room beyond is bigger than I expected.
It looks like a service landing that was cleaned once, maybe years ago.
Concrete walls, low ceiling, a mess of pipes overhead.
Someone’s dragged in a few tables and shelves, scavenged equipment stacked wherever it fit.
An old orange extension reel hangs from a hook beside a city map pinned up with magnets.
“When they built this place, they meant it to last,” I murmur, running my fingers along the rough wall.
Cassian shrugs. “Yeah. It was sealed off years ago. We just… claimed it.”
“Must’ve taken some work,” I say.
He gives a small nod and gestures me forward. We take the stairs down two short flights to a slab of floor poured rougher than the rest. He angles us to the right, toward a section of wall that doesn’t quite match. Same dull paint, but newer.
“Here,” he says.
Here turns out to be a rectangle the size of a door.
Cassian keys the top lock, spins a recessed wheel, then shoulders the plate open with a grunt. It swings inward on hinges thick enough to belong to a vault.
Beyond lies a squat concrete room. The ceiling’s so low Cassian ducks on instinct.
In the center of the room stands a welded table—an altar-that’s-not-an-altar, built from a salvaged X-ray gantry plate.
Twelve containers rest on its surface. They aren’t identical, but they echo one another in shape and weight. There are ammo cans with gasket lids, two metal flight cases lined with foam, and a squat lead box with a grooved handle that makes my fingers ache just to look at it.
Each container has been strapped closed with ratchet bands.
Each one is marked with chalk — thin white lines, drawn cleanly, forming a language of circles and crossings I recognize from Nathaniel’s meticulous hands and Talon’s rougher imitations.
“Well,” Talon mutters, breaking the silence. “Here we are.”
Indeed. Here we are.
And whatever I thought would happen once we came here seems completely absurd now.
I take one step closer. The back of my neck prickles, like the fine hairs there are trying to stand and there’s no room.
I wasn’t supposed to be this person. I was supposed to be… God, what? A regular human? An abused wife who didn’t know it? A woman who never had to look at a pile of boxes and think: Each of these could open its eyes and kill me.
“Twelve,” I say again.
“Twelve,” Cassian confirms.
The terrible thing about a sleeping bomb is how unsuspecting it looks. For all I know, it could just sit here like this for the next five hundred years.
A memory cracks through me: the wraith screamed when she realized I could hurt her. The air turned white, and I felt as if I were being pulled through a keyhole and filled with knives.
One wraith nearly unmade me.
Twelve is… math I can’t forgive.
I stand there another minute. Maybe two. Then, it’s over.
“Okay,” I say at last, quietly. “I’ve seen enough.”
Talon’s voice softens in that rare way he reserves for just the two of us. “Distraction achieved, Little Grim?”
I inhale all the way, finally. “Yeah. I think… yes.”
Cassian watches me for a long beat, his eyes scanning my face as if checking for cracks. “And the other problem?” he asks, carefully. “Measured against this one, does it feel any smaller?”
I let the question hang. Mark’s voice is not in this room; I can feel the rightness of that absence down to my bones. But I also feel the tether I’ve made out of indecision. The longer I keep him on the hook, the more I belong to the act of holding.
“It does,” I say. “Not small. But finite. Manageable.” The words feel strange and exactly true. “I’m ready to make a call.”
Cassian gives a single nod. “Then let’s go back.”
He closes the room the way he opened it—click, clack, thunk—and shoulders it once to be sure.
We climb in single file. Dust lifts behind us and settles without care.
At the last bend before the active wings, Talon bumps my shoulder.
“You good?” he asks.
“No,” I answer honestly. “But I’m decided.”
“Well, that’s good enough.”
We turn toward the main hall, toward the generator wing and the scream I pretended was weather. Nathaniel will be ahead somewhere with his sleeves rolled, mouth set, and his eyes bright and full of a certain cruelty. I guess I’m the one about to stop that.
Cassian’s hand finds the small of my back and rubs once.
“So what’s the command, Skye?” he asks.
I look into his eyes. There is only one answer, and it is going to sound dramatic as hell. It’s also the only way out. Anything else won’t hold.
I straighten, let the words come like I’m not afraid of them at all.
“I’m going to kill Mark,” I say.
And for the first time in forty-eight hours, the decision is clean.
The arc of my ex-husband’s life is over.
I’ll be the one to finish it.