Page 13 of Red Dreams

The monitors lining one wall after she revealed them by opening a hidden panel paint us in electronic twilight. Security feeds, thermal imaging, enough screens to build a digital maze of the Siren's Call's secrets. I focus on them instead of the way my nerves keep misfiring, phantom echoes of what she's done.

I knew there was a reason I never wanted to go to this nightclub. And I’m relieved she hasn’t moved me out of Greycliff. Maybe I still have a chance.

Easier than thinking about what comes next. About whether I can stay silent this time.

An alert chimes. Soft, almost musical.

Cassie goes still.

“Well.” She sets the lighter aside with ceremonial care. “Right on schedule.”

The main screen comes alive, and my heart stops. Not because of the security feed's grainy footage of Siren's Call's rain-slick courtyard. Not because of the armed figures moving into position, their weapons catching moonlight.

Because of the way Kaden moves through them. Like every step is a promise written in blood.

My heart stutters back to life, an aching, desperate rhythm that matches Kaden's relentless stride. He's here. He's alive. The relief is so sharp it steals my breath, a searing, bittersweet ache that lodges behind my breastbone and all the fresh cuts.

I drink in every detail of him like a woman dying of thirst. The way his broad shoulders fill out his black tactical gear, the coiled grace of his movements, lethal and precise. His raven hair is slick with rain, plastered to his forehead in jagged points that only emphasize the stark planes of his mask.

But it's his eyes that undo me. Those piercing neon eyes of his mask that seem to stare straight through the camera and into my battered soul.

“Look how handsome he is.” Cassie's fingers hover over the image, not quite touching. “The way he flows between the shadows. I used to dream about it. How he'd move when he finally came for me.” Her laughter holds glass edges. “Watched every security feed I could hack, studying him. Learning him. The way his shoulders set before violence. How that mask of his would hide every micro-expression most people miss when he’s not wearing it.”

On the screen, Kaden passes the first group of guards placed strategically around the courtyard and hidden by concrete and greenery. Their guns come up.

Cassie’s voice drops to a whisper. “I could give the kill order. Right here. Right now. Unless you have something to give me.”

The lighter's flame returns, close enough that my skin prickles with remembered pain. “What? What is it that you want from me?”

“Tell me how it felt,” Cassie says in an almost childlike lilt. “The first time you saw what he really is. When the mask cracked and the monster showed through.”

The memory floods back. Not of the killing spree inside my home, but of after. Of watching him wash brain matter from his sleeve and how his voice stayed perfectly level, even when describing exactly how he'd unmade the men who threatened me as I washed their blood from my living room floor. What he did to Dawson down in Pulse’s server rooms…

“He didn't break character.” The truth tastes like copper as I voice it. “That's what unnerved me. There was no mask. No monster. Just ... him.”

Cassie picks up her phone from the side table, taps it a few times, then murmurs into it. The guards' weapons waver. Lower.

“Him,” Cassie repeats after she finishes with the person on the other end of the phone. Something vulnerable flashes across her face. “Yes. That's ... yes.”

Kaden stands in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by her men. Their weapons gleam in the rain-scattered light from the club's high-end fixtures. I track his movement across the screen without her having to force me because I can’t look away. I’m both relieved that he’s here and terrified that he’s come.

“Here's how this is going to work.”

I don’t realize Cassie’s slithered closer until she traces one of the fresher burns on my shoulder, and I bite down on a cry. “You tell me which guard gets to go home. Or they all empty their magazines into the Father of the Year in the center there.”

“Playing God doesn't suit you.”

My voice comes out drawn but steady. The AI prototype I discovered weeks ago could play God with thousands of lives. This is just one more impossible choice.

She ignores me.

“Do you see the one on the left?” Cassie asks. She leans close. “That’s Carlos. He has a daughter. She's bright. Creative. Wants to study engineering, but Daddy's salary is the only thing keeping her in school. Imagine her learning how her father died. Imagine that weight.”

The guards raise their weapons while they stay hidden behind the manicured bushes and trees lining the walkway to the nightclub. Kaden's maybe twenty feet away.

“Choose,” Cassie whispers. “His daughter's pain or yours?”

My throat closes. These men aren't innocent. They chose this life, chose to work for someone like Morelli, like Cassie. But their children didn't choose this.

---