Page 4 of The Darkest Half

And she’s the only person I’d ever give my brother up for…

2

Niklas

I start toward my mother, a single train of thought blurring my vision: get to her first and kill everybody else in this building. But I don’t make it five feet across the room before a white-hot pain strikes me in the back of my head, back, and ribs. My legs collapse, and I see the tile rushing up to meet me; the rock-hard floor first feels painful and then cool against my face as my cheek strikes and then settles against it. I cough and spit up blood; I try to focus my vision, but it takes too long for the room to stop spinning, so I just lay there, gasping, watching hazily through the shutter of my eyelids as they blink off and on.

When I can finally see straight, I count four pairs of rubber-soled shoes all standing around me, one pair of shiny black stilettos, and one pair of bare feet, which are my mother’s, I know.

“As I said,” I hear Lysandra’s voice somewhere above me, “Jackie was the example—your mother is the threat. You cooperate with me to help bring Victor in, or she’ll meet the same end as the whore.”

I cough again and spit more blood onto the floor—my hands are being zip-tied behind me; I feel the tightness and the sharp edge of the plastic cutting into my wrists.

Someone pulls me into a stand, and my first instinct is to headbutt the guy in the face with the back of my skull, but I don’t. I can’t. I can’t do anything stupid.

“Tell me something,” I say. “Is my mother also your mother? I get the feeling you’d kill her just the same if she were.”

“Yes. I would,” Lysandra says. “But no, this woman is no relation to me.” She steps around in front of me. “So, surely you see how much danger she’s in.”

I look at my mother; she’s so frail and looks older than she is as if she’s aged twenty years more than she was supposed to. But her eyes…those are still my mother’s eyes, the ones I remember when I was just a boy. Goddammit!

“Nik,” she says weakly, and just hearing her speak my name after so many years fills me with unwanted emotion. I try to look away from her, but I can’t. “You don’t have to…tell them anything for me. You hear me, son? I’m ready to die. I have been…for a long time.”

I choke back the fucking tears and force my gaze to the floor. Blood sprinkles the tile beside my boots; there’s a faint reflection of my face there, within the tile, distorted, exactly how I feel at this moment.

I raise my head and look right at Lysandra.

“How long can you last?” I ask her.

She steps right up to me.

“Depends on the nature of the game we’re playing,” she says and then moves in so close I feel her hair tickling the side of my face. She whispers near my ear with her soft, warm breath, “But in any game, I can last longer than you can.” She pulls away.

I’m shoved back into the chair; the legs scrape across the floor. With a heavy heart, I watch as two orderlies carry Jackie’s body from the room, a trail of blood behind them. She never even had a chance. From the moment I met her, she was doomed to die just as she did—and I was doomed to have to watch. And to think, I started to feel something for her. A tear escapes down my face—not because of my feelings for her, but because I’m the reason she’s dead—and I wipe it away with my shoulder when it falls far enough to reach.

The orderly holding my mother sets her down roughly in the chair across from me. I glare at him, and he smirks.

“I’ll leave you two alone to get reacquainted,” Lysandra says. “And when I come back in thirty minutes, I hope you’ll have something for me.”

I never take my eyes off my mother—I refuse to give that bitch my attention.

Lysandra and the orderlies leave the room; two go through the door I entered from; two more follow Lysandra out the door near the plexiglass window. Both doors are locked, and both are guarded from the outside. Every move I make is being watched from four cameras mounted in the corners against the ceilings. And surely, everything I say is being heard by recording devices hidden throughout the room. I’m no stranger to all this, and Lysandra knows that. It’s also how she knows I’m not going anywhere. She has me by the balls, crushing them in her man-hating fist, and there’s not a damn thing in the world I can do about it.

“Nik,” my mother says, “what are you doing, son? You know, even if you give them what they want, they’ll kill you and me, and nothing will change that.”

“I know.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Buying time.” I really don’t know what I’m doing—there’s nothing that can be done! They have us, and unless by some miracle someone swoops into this place and rescues us like they do in the movies, we’re going to die in here. The movies are stupid—nobody’s gonna save us from this. Not this time.

“Have you been kept here all these years?” I ask my mother.

“Yes. The years have flown by, really. They’ve…kept me drugged for most of it. But not today…” Her voice trails. “Today, they wanted me lucid.” She straightens up, pushing down thoughts that threaten to weaken her, and she looks at me with determination in her tired eyes. “Niklas, everybody in The Order loves somebody. They never wanted it that way—they wanted operatives who were emotionless, with no attachments. That’s why they started breeding them in the sixties instead of recruiting them.”

“Like the Shadow Sect,” I say, thinking of Nora Kessler.

She nods.

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