Page 85 of Captured Immune

“Okay, okay. It sounds like I’m gonna need to start from when my parents died.”

After a deep breath, he tells me all about the night he witnessed his parents’ murder. Everything from when the Royals burst through the front door and attacked him, to seeing his mother get beat up by a man twice her size, to when his dad threw him on the couch and kinetically tossed him out the window just before the house exploded into a mushroom of fire.

“I didn’t have any other relatives, so I was forced to live with Victor. After he became the CEO of ZIRDA California, he moved to Shadow Ridge, so that’s where I grew up. You already know that Victor was abusive to me. He liked to beat me up and call me things likeworthless kidandpiece of shit. He hid the fact that my parents left me money until the day I turned eighteen, when he finally told me about my inheritance, then told me to get lost.

“After I left, I didn’t hear from Victor until he called me in early May, out of the blue. He said there was an Ordinary in the LA area who was immune to Zordi powers and if we could find out the source of her immunity, we could work to replicate it and have the upper hand against the Royals. He explained that he needed someone to get her to tell them everything about herself and the best way to do that was to pretend to date her. I’ve wanted the Royals gone since I was seven, so I didn’t hesitate to say yes.”

I think back to all those times Trey asked me about my grandparents and my parents. Yes, I found his questions odd, but not odd enough to come to the conclusion that he was on a secret mission to learn everything about me to relay back to his devil of an uncle.

Trey drags a hand through his matted hair as he sighs. “Tonight, I found out from Katie that Victor’s actually a Royal. His real plan was to get us to fall for each other so he could torture me in front of you until you learned to control your immunity.

“Once you did, his plan was to get rid of me, then who knows what he wanted to do from there. If I had to guess, he probably would have kept you locked up in the Ridge for as long as it took to find a way to replicate your immunity. If not that, he’d probably torture you into projecting onto his Royal buddies while they carried out their missions of destruction.”

The idea of spending my entire life locked up in that underground hideout scares me. What scares me more is knowing that my grandparents and Javina would have spent the rest of their lives wondering what happened to me. I doubtkidnapped by her ex-boyfriend’s unclewould have been at the top of their list.

Trey continues, “Since I thought Victor was operating under ZIRDA, I never thought he’d go as far as kidnapping you. I was under the impression that this was just about getting information. No one was supposed to get hurt, Arella, especially not you.

“ZIRDA is an organization of good people who do good things. They started as a research and development agency that ended up also being the people who fought to protect Ordinaries from the Royals. Because, ya know, the fucking zovernment wasn’t doing anything about the Royals’ bioweapons, nor were they stopping the Royals from going around murdering innocent people for no goddamn reason.

“After Victor told me he planted those spiders and caused your car accident, I should have known he wasn’t with ZIRDA. ArealZIRDA leader would never purposely risk an Ordinary’s life. It doesn’t make any sense why he’d work for the very people who murdered his little brother, so the possibility that he switched sides never even occurred to me. Even now, knowing what I know, itstilldoesn’t make any sense. What reason does he have to work for the Royals? What did they say to him to get him to turn?”

I gather all my loose hairs to one shoulder again. “You’ve said that Victor used to be like a second father to you, then, like flipping a switch, he treated you like trash. What if he’s under someone’s mind control? Is that a thing in the Zordi world?”

Trey gives me anI dunnoshrug. “It’s a gift that’s on the Extinction List, but I just found out today that some people still slip through the cracks, so who knows? Victor being under mind control makes a hell of a lot more sense than him willingly joining the criminals who believe that Zordi humans deserve more than Ordi humans just because we were born with powers.”

He lets out a long sigh. “Fuck, Arella. If I had known about Victor earlier, I woulda kidnapped you myself—in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t have wasted all that time trying to convince you to move to Paris. Within minutes, I woulda had you duct-taped to a seat on a private jet on the way to Europe.”

I was wrong when I thought Trey had done nothing to prevent my abduction. Turns out, he had tried, although his plan was stupid.Move to Paris? Seriously?Couldn’t he have come up with something better? Something with a higher chance of my cooperation? I don’t know what that would be, but anything would have been better thanlet’s move to another country forever.

I shake my head at him, but mostly, I shake my head at myself. I fell in love with a man from a world of people with powers who live in secret among those without powers. And the only reason we met was because his manipulative uncle sent him on a mission to find out if I had a gene defect or if I had ever been bitten by a radioactive spider. Nothing Trey and I had was real.

Now here we are on a floating tire after I was kidnapped and he was brutally tortured and we almost died trying to get away. And for what? Even after dodging all those fireballs, westilldon’t know what makes me immune. What did anyone gain from all that?

“Arella.” Trey says my name like a plea. “Please tell me what’s going through your head because that look on your face is scaring me.”

“What look?” I snap.

“Um, you look sorta mad.”

“Because Iam. Wouldn’t you be if the one and only man you decided to let into your heart after being in an abusive relationship turned out to be a fake? What was your plan after you got the information you wanted? Were you just going to break up with me and move on like the moments we shared never happened? Like it didn’t mean anything?”

He lets out a pained breath. “At first, yes. But once I fell in?—”

“You pretended to like me and got me to fall for you knowing what my history was like with Nathan. You knew that I felt like I’d never find someone who could treat me right, yet you kept going on with your deceitful mission anyway.”

He softens his tone as if it’ll calm me. “The goal was to casually date you for a few weeks. Things between us weren’t supposed to go as far as they did. Real feelings were never supposed to get in the way.”

“How do you think I would have felt when you suddenly ended things between us once you finally got the information you wanted?”

He gestures toward the forest below us. “Should I land so we can talk this through?”

“No,” I shout with my hands in fists. “I want answers, and I want them now.”

He lets out a long sigh. “My plan wasn’t to break up with you. It was to get you to break up with me.”

I force back the tears threatening to stream from my eyes. “Right, like that makes it any better? Either way, you would have conned me into falling for you, only to disappear from my life. Do you really think I wouldn’t have been hurt by that? How am I ever supposed to trust another man ever again?”

“You’re right, Arella. You’re one hundred percent right. That’s one of the reasons why I couldn’t leave you. The idea of hurting you hurt me.”

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