Page 303 of Shadowblood Souls
My mind flails, and for a second I almost do lose myself.
Then I yank up a memory of Riva. Riva smiling at me. Riva stroking the tentacles and telling me I’m not a monster.
With her, I’m not. Right now, I don’t need to be either.
I cut off the flow of energy that was flooding me. The man’s shoulders slump, a shudder passing through his body.
But he’s alive. He’s breathing properly, if rapidly. His skin hasn’t lost his color.
I didn’t take too much.
Only enough for him to know what it feels like. For him to get a sense of how far I could go.
My stomach lists queasily, but at the same time his now-watery eyes dart to mine.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t supposed to say. It’s very simple. We give him the money, he clears out the house and leaves it for us.”
I knit my brow, not letting up my hold on the man’s wrist. “What do you want the house for? What’s in there that’s so special?”
My guide gestures vaguely with his free hand. “Not so much the house. Records, equipment, connections. They had a good business going. We move in and take over. Everyone wins.”
I stare at him. “You’re going to take over their business?”
The man starts squirming against my hold again. “Notme. My boss wants to expand. That’s all it is. Just business.”
Acid burns the base of my throat. For a second, I think I might actually vomit.
It’s not business to the kids who’ve been getting snatched and sold.
We aren’t really protecting them. If I’m understanding this guy right, there’ll be a brief respite, and then a new syndicate is going to take over where the group we’re slaughtering left off.
And they paid Clancy for the opportunity. They paid him to send us in and do their dirty work.
How much does he even know about what they’re planning?
What else that he’s told us has been a total fucking lie?
Eleven
Riva
Iexpected to feel relieved the moment we all clambered back onto the private plane that’s going to take us back to the island. One look at Dominic’s face turns any joy inside me to dust.
He isn’t like Jacob—he doesn’t carry his discontent like a storm cloud wrapped around him. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t know him well would even notice.
But I see the way the corners of his mouth stay tight when he aims his smile of welcome at me. I notice the slight hunching of his shoulders, like he’s reverting back to his old uncertain self.
Back in the old facility, he always withdrew into himself like that right before he had to say something hard. The memory rises up, as if Andreas is telling it to me, of the complex strategy game the guardians had us play maybe a year before we tried to escape, with the promise that we’d get a full day to train and relax outside if we beat it.
Dom looked like he does right now in the moment before he told us in a rough voice that he’d just realized we’d made a fatal mistake several steps back… one there was no longer any way of recovering from. Any chance of claiming the reward we’d all longed for was gone.
Those were the kind of stakes we usually dealt with back then. These days, it could be so much worse.
My gaze jerks to the other figures on the plane. Did one of the younger shadowbloods get hurt? That could have been awful to see—what if he couldn’t even save them?
That can’t be true, though, because all four of them are tucked into their seats in a cluster, chattering quietly but with an easygoing air.
“Everything went okay on your end?” I call over to them, leaning my arm on the back of a seat.
