Vengeful (Villains #2)(129)

“And what will killing me do?” snapped Stell. “It won’t stop the rise of EON. The initiative is bigger than me, and growing every day.”

“I know,” said Victor, guiding Stell’s finger to the trigger.

“God dammit, listen. If you kill me, you will make yourself EON’s number-one enemy, their primary target. They will never stop hunting you.”

Victor smiled grimly.

“I know.”

He closed his hand into a fist.

The gunshot split the room, and Victor’s hand fell back to his side as Stell’s body toppled to the floor.

Victor took a deep breath, steadying himself.

And then he pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. A page from the battered paperback, the lines blacked out except for five words.

Catch me if you can.

Victor left the door open behind him.

As he stepped out into the dark, he drew his phone from his pocket.

It was buzzing again, Sydney’s name a streak of white against the black backdrop. Victor switched the phone off, and let it slip from his fingers into the nearest trash can.

And then he turned his collar up, and walked away.





II





AFTER


OUTSIDE MERIT


SYDNEY pressed the phone to her ear, listened as the ringing gave way to silence, the automated voicemail, the long beep.

It was fifteen minutes after midnight, and there was no sign of Victor. The car idled in the darkness just beyond the sign—Merit—23 miles—Mitch tense in the driver’s seat, and Dol leaning out the back window.

Sydney paced the grassy shoulder and tried to call Victor one last time.

It went straight to voicemail.

Sydney hung up, and found herself about to text June—before she remembered that she no longer had her own phone. Which meant that Sydney didn’t have June’s number anymore. And even if she did . . .

Syd shoved the burner phone back in her pocket. She heard the car door open, Mitch’s heavy steps in the grass as he approached.

“Hey, kid,” he said. His voice was so gentle, as if afraid of telling her the truth. But Syd already knew—Victor was gone. She stared at the distant skyline of Merit, shoved her hands in her coat, felt her sister’s bones in one pocket, the gun in the other.

“It’s time to go,” she said, returning to the car.

Mitch turned on the engine, pulled back onto the highway. The road stretched ahead, flat and even and endless, almost like the surface of a frozen lake at night.

Sydney resisted the urge to look back again.

Victor might be gone, but there was still that thread, tangling their lives. It had led Sydney to him once before, and it would lead her there again.

No matter how long or far she had to look.

Sooner or later, she would find him.

If Sydney had anything, it was time.





III





AFTER


EON


HOLTZ shivered, not at the sight of the corpse on the steel table, but from the cold.

The storage room was fucking freezing.

“Not so tough now,” muttered Briggs, her breath a cloud of fog.

And it was true.

Lying there, under the cold white light, Eliot Cardale looked . . . young. All his age had been contained in those eyes, flat as a shark’s. But now they were closed, and Cardale looked less like a serial-killing EO and more like Holtz’s kid brother.

Holtz had always wondered at the gap between body and corpse, the place where a person stopped being a he or a she or a they, and instead became an it. Eliot Cardale still looked like a person, despite the shockingly pale skin, the still-glistening bullet wounds—small, dark circles with serrated edges.

Nobody knew how Haverty had been able to render Eli human—or at least mortal. Just like they didn’t know who had shot the EO, or who had killed the ex-EON scientist—though everyone seemed to assume it was Victor Vale.

“Holtz,” snapped Briggs. “I’m freezing my ass off, and you’re making moony eyes at a corpse.”

“Sorry,” said Holtz, his breath pluming. “Just thinking.”

“Well, stop thinking,” she said, “and help me load this thing.”

Together, they maneuvered Cardale’s corpse into cold storage, which was basically just a permanent stretch of deep drawers in the basement of the EON complex, dedicated to indefinitely housing the remains of deceased EOs.

“One down,” she said, scribbling notes on her clipboard, “one to go.”

Holtz’s eyes flicked to the other body that waited, patiently, on its own steel plank.

Rusher.

Holtz had avoided looking at his old friend as long as possible. Not just because of the gunshot wounds that stood out in livid marks against the old scars, but because he couldn’t believe his eyes—Dominic had survived so much. They’d served together for four years, and worked here, side by side, for another three.

And all that time, Holtz had never known what Rusher was.

Rios was always telling them not to make assumptions, that EOs weren’t ducks—they didn’t have to walk like one and talk like one and smell like one to be one.

But still.

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” he murmured. “Makes you wonder how many are out there. And here. If I was an EO, you better believe this is the last place I’d be.”