“You could have brought her back.” The blue-eyed man knows I can hear him, cut off in my prison of steel and electricity. “You could have brought back my Rose, but you let her rot because you hate me.”
When he comes, he sends away the scientists studying my existence. Sometimes months pass without a visit, and sometimes he comes every day, but his hatred for me, for my kind…that never changes.
“You don’t know what hate is yet,” the man whispers, his words a promise. He turns his back on my prison.
Hate. If hate is what he wishes…then hate is what he will get.
MY EARS ARE RINGING, THE sound of the gunshot bouncing around inside my head and blinding me. My momentum as I lunge for Sofia sends me sprawling to the ground, and it’s not until I realize she’s moaning, half screaming, that I shake away the fog and crawl toward her.
Her hand is covered in burns where the plas-pistol exploded, and she’s bleeding from cuts on her neck and shoulders where the fragments caught her. There are a dozen reasons why these weapons are banned, the least of which is that they outfox even state-of-the-art security systems—the main reason is that you’ve got a greater chance of killing yourself when it goes off than of actually hitting your target.
I gather Sofia up into my arms, panic shooting through my system and washing away everything else—my anger that she’d been planning this, my fear about what will happen to her when she’s arrested, the bitterness lingering on my tongue after speaking to Lilac LaRoux. I pull Sofia against my chest, and she doesn’t resist, pain overcoming everything else she feels toward me right now. She’s swallowing hard, choking against the need to cry out, cradling her wounded hand against her chest.
“Shh, it’s okay,” I murmur, my lips against her hair. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
Cormac drops to his knees on her other side, his horror all over his face, in his voice. “Oh God, Sof.”
As if the sound of his voice opened the floodgates, suddenly other sounds start to register. Voices shouting, someone gasping, a roaring surge of whispers on the still air. I lift my head, expecting to see LaRoux on the floor, and find him bent over someone else, speaking frantically.
“Darling,” he’s saying, that too-cultured voice choked with emotion. “Look at me—it’s Daddy, look at me.”
Tarver’s ripping the lining out of his tuxedo jacket, his face white, jaw set and determined. He eases the figure on the floor up—it’s Lilac—so that her head rests in his lap. “It’s just her shoulder,” he’s saying in a shaking voice, starting to bind the wound with the strips of silk. “She’ll be fine, it’s just—”
LaRoux snaps something back at him, face transformed in that instant by such fury, such hatred, that I can’t tell what he’s saying.
Tarver, however, remains calm, meeting that icy-blue stare with his own. “You want her to bleed to death?”
Jubilee’s beside him, pulling off her belt and handing it over to help strap the makeshift bandages in place, fixing LaRoux with a look that seems like it should do to him what the bullet didn’t.
LaRoux draws in a shuddering breath, reaching for Lilac’s hand and cradling it between his own, drawing it up to press it to his lips. “Hang on, darling girl.”
Sofia stirs in my arms, voice shaky with pain as she mumbles. “She wasn’t supposed to…Why, why did she do that? I never meant to—”
“Because he’s her father,” Flynn says softly. “Because she loves him, and you were trying to kill him.”
“He’s a monster,” whispers Sofia, struggling to sit up on her own power, some of the shock from her injury starting to ebb.
“And he’s her father,” Flynn replies.
Sofia’s face crumples, tears spilling out to mingle with the blood on her chin. I’ve read her background now. I know what happened to her own father. And I know how many voices were calling him a monster in the wake of his death. What it must be like to love someone, despite whatever they might have done. I tighten my arms around her.
“I’m here,” I whisper.
Lilac stirs, and it’s enough to jerk both men’s attention back to her, as Tarver finishes binding off her shoulder with the silk lining of his jacket. “Tarver…” she mumbles, and I see the way her father’s face tightens, the look of loathing on his face as his eyes dart up toward his future son-in-law.
“There’s my girl,” Tarver replies, oblivious to—or ignoring—the look he gets from LaRoux. He smiles, bending his head to brush his lips against her forehead. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Are you lying to me again?” Her voice is so quiet I can barely hear it.
A sound, like a laugh but without much humor, escapes Tarver’s lips. “Not this time,” he answers. “I promise. Lee, call for a medic, we can’t move her.”