“Not me. Us.”
“No,” I say, my voice turning hard. “I don’t want any part of this. Anarchy was never my thing. Hurting people was never my thing.”
He rises slowly, with complete grace. His eyes shine eerily in the light. “You wanted to set the world free once. Now we can. You and I, together. It’s what I’ve spent the last decade of my life working toward. It’s what we were born for, Tabitha. It’s our destiny.”
Fighting the onset of panic, I back up a step. S?ren follows.
“You know me better than that.”
“I know that within the last few years you developed an encryption cipher that lets you break into any protected system you want. I’ve been watching you do it too, dabbling in power. Flirting with it. You wouldn’t do that if some part of you didn’t crave it. The only difference between us is your denial.”
“You forgot murder.”
S?ren takes another step toward me. I take another step back.
“And yet if I put a loaded gun in your hand right now, you wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger, would you?”
“That’s different. That’s justice.”
“No, that’s revenge. And it would be wrong. You know it. Deep down, you know it. But you’re justifying your desire to spill my blood by calling it by a prettier name. You can put lipstick on a pig, Tabitha, but it’s still a pig. Murder is murder, no matter how well you try to dress it up.”
He takes another step forward. “So if you kill me, in effect you become me.”
There’s a gnawing in my stomach like I’ve swallowed rats. “Stop trying to mess with my head!”
“I’m not trying, I just am. Because you won’t accept the reality of who and what you really are. You put your entire life on pause because of your stubborn refusal to allow all that darkness inside you to come into the light. You knew what I was the second you met me. I never had you fooled like everyone else. And yet you allowed yourself to be drawn in.”
“I was seventeen! I had no one! You were my brother!”
He makes a soft tsk of disapproval. “I was your mirror. And still am. You should’ve seen the expression on your face when you looked at those servers. Shall I tell you what it looked like?” He prowls closer, growls, “Lust.”
“No.”
“Greed. Desire,” he adds, ignoring my interruption. “You want what I can give you. What no one else can give you but me. Our minds are the same. Our desires are the same. Our needs are exactly the same.”
He takes another step closer, and now he’s within reach. My fingers itch to poke out his eyeballs.
Juanita. Juanita. Juanita, I think, and then, my heart skipping a beat, But what if she’s already dead?
I have no control over what S?ren does, or who he hurts, or how this will end. And in all honestly, I really don’t know that he’ll keep his promise not to hurt anyone if I go along with whatever he wants. After all, the man is a psychopath. They’re not exactly known to be reliable.
The only thing I have control over is myself.
So I inhale a slow, grounding breath. I look S?ren in the eye and calmly say, “I disagree with everything you just said. But I do have another question.”
His brows lift.
“How are you going to call your guards if you can’t speak?”
His brows pull together into a frown, which deepens when he sees my grim smile.
In a whip-crack move, I cock my arm back and then punch him in the throat.
Thirty-Seven
Connor
We’re lying on our stomachs at the top of a rocky slope, a line of six silent men scanning the dark terrain below with night vision goggles.
The narrow valley resting between two low hills is much less rugged and densely forested than what we came through. It was a deliberate choice to hump it through the rough stuff, for purposes of both concealment and the probability that the more direct route in through the mouth of the valley would be heavily defended. So far we haven’t encountered anything unusual except shitty weather and the discovery that Reid’s flatulence could qualify as a lethal weapon.
I’ve been careful since then to stay upwind.
The rain that made our trek in so unpleasant has tapered off, leaving the sky above us crystal clear. Stars wink and glitter on the black canvas of the heavens. An ethereal, wavering green aurora of light on the horizon is the famous Northern Lights, which none of us take the time to appreciate.
“Two o’clock,” whispers Ryan, to my left, his breath a frost of white in the air. I swing around a few degrees and spot what he’s already looking at.
“Huey 212,” I murmur, eying the bird. “Mounted with twin M240s.”