Page 8 of Sin

“I’m well aware you didn’t steal the weapon, Mr. Gonzalez,” President Osborne interrupted. Her expression tightened. “I know, because it wasn’t stolen. It escaped.”

The beeping of the monitors was the only sound for several long moments while I let her words process.

Before my dad had attacked the city, the government had announced they were close to finalizing a mind-control weapon. A tool, they’d said, to keep all Villains in line. A way to keep the citizens safe.

It would have been a genocide.

It was why the Scourge, a group of Villains determined to end the UAS’s reign of terror, had agreed to aid me in stealing my father’s talisman from the Citadel, the government’s headquarters nestled in the nation’s capitol, Mercy Heights. We all thought if my dad could amass enough of his power, it would finally give the Scourge a chance to overthrow the tyrannous government.

Oh, how wrong we’d been. So fucking wrong.

My father’s abilities allowed him to mute or amplify someone’s powers when he touched them. It was the reason the world referred to him as Amp. He’d abused his powers after my mom had died, and he’d ended up in prison for his crimes. But when the news came out that the UAS were close to finishing a weapon which could control anyone they deemed a threat? The Scourge had been scared enough, desperate enough, to help me steal back my father’s talisman from the Citadel.

The Citadel was a fortress, with so many countermeasures to keep unauthorized people out that no one had managed it before.

Not until Bennett.

“President Osborne,” I started cautiously, “what exactly is the weapon?”

“Not what. Who.”

Sickness roiled in my gut, and I couldn’t stop myself then. I leaned over the side of the cot and vomited.

President Osborne didn’t even look disgusted as I swiped at my mouth with some tissues from the table beside me. Because that meant they’d had someone in there for years. Had likely done all sorts of horrific things to them…

My stomach gave another lurch.

She nodded gravely. “The previous government officials, it seems, resorted to less than savory measures to achieve their agendas. Including illegal testing on Supers.” Reaching into her suit jacket, she retrieved a tablet. She tossed it onto my lap and waited for me to turn it on. It opened to a file, and at Osborne’s encouragement, I clicked on it.

An image of a man in his late thirties with a head full of thick, dark hair, hazel eyes, and bronzed skin maybe a couple shades darker than my own stared back at me. White teeth flashed in a hesitant but kind smile.

“His name is Lucas Delacruz,” President Osborne said as I moved to the next page to read through his information. “Believed to be somewhere between thirty and forty years old. According to his file, he’s a Super with mind-controlling abilities. No known criminal record. From what we gleaned, the UAS took an interest in him when he enlisted in a paid drug trial.”

I scanned over the rest of the information on the page, describing his appearance, a little bit about how he responded to the drug, but really, there was so little here. Honestly, the most interesting thing in the small file about the guy was the fact he’d gotten a parking ticket about ten years ago, which he’d paid on time. Swiping to the next page, I found another image. This one of a surveillance camera inside what appeared to be a lab room. It was time stamped from two years ago. The day my father and his followers attempted to take over Mercy Heights and strip the world of powers.

Despite the blurriness of the image, it clearly displayed Lucas climbing out of a pile of rubble. Emergency lights highlighted the room in a red glow. Unlike the first picture of Lucas, his long, dark hair now flowed unbound and stuck wildly about his face, covering most of it. Heavy dampening cuffs adorned his wrists and ankles, and a thick, metal band curled around his throat like a collar. His mouth hung open in a scream.

This must have been when he’d escaped.

I glanced up at President Osborne, and she nodded as if reading my thoughts. “This is when he escaped the labs. He became a ghost after this. Not a whisper reached us of his whereabouts. If he was even still alive. That is, not until a few months ago.”

When she nodded down at the tablet, I moved on to the next page and nearly dropped the damn thing. If there’d been anything left in my stomach, it would have forced its way out of me.

It was a picture of a dead body. Empty sockets sat bloody in a face screaming even in death. The naked body showed dozens of stab wounds in their abdomen. The man’s hands looked as if they'd been dipped in blood. Dried blood left splatters and drips up and down his arms. The most disturbing part was the man’s neck, though. Charred and blackened skin ringed his neck, the flesh around the wound peeled and frayed looking.

“That’s Dr. Phillip Kelley. He headed the UAS labs when Lucas was detained there. Dr. Kelley was found deceased in his home three months ago. After his autopsy, it was discovered that the wounds on his body were all self-inflicted.”

“Self-inflicted?” I asked incredulously, daring to peek at the image once more and see if I was misremembering just how many stab wounds there were. And the eyes…

Her gaze shifted to the image as well. “It didn’t take long for the police to access his home security footage of that night.” She waved her hand at the tablet again. “Continue please, Mr. Gonzalez.”

“Is it another dead body?”

She smiled mirthlessly. “Not the next page, no.”

Which meant there were more images of dead bodies in this file. What the fuck?

Still, I continued on. Multiple pixelated squares from a security camera pointing at a front porch filled the picture this time. The first square remained blank. In the next, Lucas stepped into the frame. The next couple of squares displayed him coming up to the front door, ringing the bell, and then him facing away and waiting to turn back around until after the front door opened. But it was the next square that caught my attention. Lucas’s mouth was smiling, his eyes alight with feral delight. But the image was rippled and filled with static. The last image square on the screen showed Lucas casually entering the house.

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