Vengeful (Villains #2)(101)

Stell shook his head. What was he thinking? “We still don’t know if you can even defeat Marcella.”

Eli smiled grimly. “Haverty spent a year trying to find the limits of my regeneration. He never succeeded.”

“Her power isn’t the only problem,” said Stell. “After all, Marcella is not acting alone.”

“Neither am I,” pressed Eli, gesturing at the cell, at EON. “The hard part isn’t killing three EOs, Director. It’s collecting them in one place, and then separating them so they can’t work together. Do that, and your agents can take care of the other two EOs while I see to Marcella. I assure you, under the right conditions, defeating them is more than possible.”

Conditions.

Stell slid Marcella’s invitation through the fiberglass slot. “Will this work?”

Eli took the card, his eyes dancing across the words.

“Yes,” he said, “I think it will.”





IV





THE NIGHT BEFORE


MERIT


VICTOR needed a drink.

He spotted a bleak stretch of low buildings, bland, forgettable, a bar sandwiched between them, and started across the street, digging his cell from his pocket.

Mitch answered on the second ring.

“We were getting worried. What happened with Dumont?”

“It was a trap,” said Victor flatly. “He was only human.”

Mitch swore. “EON?”

“Indeed,” said Victor. “I got away, but I won’t risk leading them back to the Kingsley.”

“Is that him?” called Syd in the background. “What happened?”

“Should we leave?” asked Mitch.

Yes, thought Victor. But they couldn’t. Not now. The movement would only draw EON’s further attention. They’d set their trap at the hospital, lain in wait. They’d gotten Victor to come to them, which meant they hadn’t been able to find him. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t. Did they already know about Sydney? What would happen if they found her instead?

“Stay in the apartment,” he said. “Don’t answer the door. Don’t let anyone in. Call me if you notice anything or anyone outside.”

“What about you?” asked Mitch.

But Victor didn’t have an answer to that question yet, so instead he hung up and stepped into the bar. It was a dive, poorly lit and more than half-empty. He ordered a whiskey and settled into a booth along the back wall where he could keep an eye on the bar’s only door and the handful of patrons while he waited.

Victor had pocketed a battered paperback from the center console of the ambulance—now he dug it out, along with a black felt pen, and let the broken spine fall open under his hand.

Old habits. The pen cut a steady path, blacking out the first line, and then the second. He felt his pulse slow with each erasure, each measure of text reduced to a solid black streak. The first word was always the hardest to find. Now and then, he searched for a specific one, and then erased the text around it, but most of the time, though Victor was loath to admit it, even to himself, the practice felt less like a physical act than a metaphysical one.

He let the pen skate across the page, waiting for a word to stop its path. He cut through pride, fall, change, before finally coming to a stop at the word find. His pen skipped over a solo a two lines later, then continued down the page until it found way.

Victor was running out of time, and out of leads, but he wasn’t giving up.

Sydney, Mitch, Dominic—they all behaved as though surrender were a risk, an option. But it wasn’t. Some fractional part of Victor wished he could stop trying, stop fighting, but it simply wasn’t in him. That same stubborn will to survive, the very trait that first made him into an EO, now prevented him from acquiescing. From admitting defeat.

Whatever’s happened to you, however you’re hurt, you’ve done it to yourself.

That’s what Campbell had said. And the EO was right. Victor had always been the master of his fate. He had climbed onto that steel table. He had coerced Angie into flipping the switch. He had goaded Eli into killing him five years before, knowing Sydney would bring him back.

Every action had been his own design, every step his own making.

If there was a way out of this, he would find it.

If there wasn’t, he would make one himself.

The bar’s only door swung open, and a few moments later Victor heard a voice, the words lost in the crowd, but the accent unmistakable.

He looked up.

There was a small, brunette woman with fox-sharp features leaning across the bar. He’d never seen the person before, but Victor knew it was her—the woman from the strip club. The concerned Samaritan from the alley, too. And of course, most recently, the doctor who’d helped him escape EON. It wasn’t just the accent that Victor recognized. It was the look in the woman’s eyes—behind her eyes, really—as she glanced toward him, the mischievous smile that lit her face. If it was her face.

They were an EO—that much was obvious.

He watched as the shapeshifter took up their drink and headed toward him.

“Is this seat taken?” Again, that lilting voice.

“That depends,” said Victor. “The Glass Tower—was that the first time we met?”