I stop in front of him, holding Emma’s photo in front of his face. “Look.”
He avoids it; instead, he glares at me.
With a sudden movement, I snatch his chin, forcing his gaze to the photo. “Good boy.”
The first electric shock rips through him the moment he sees it. His raw scream ricochets off the basement walls. His body jerks hard against the chains, muscles seizing.
Just like mine did.
Emma stands silently behind me, one arm wrapped tightly around herself while she watches. But now her face is less scared and more…ready. Shewantshim to die just as much as I do. I electrocute him again. And again. Each scream sounds different than the last. Less…human.
Is that how I sounded?
The smell of burned skin begins to taint the air while blood drips steadily from Alexei’s mouth onto the concrete beneath him.
“You know what the funny part is?” I ask softly, crouching in front of him while he gasps for breath. “You spent months trying to turn me into your perfect weapon.” I grab his jaw and to force him to look at me. “And now look at you.”
His eyes blaze with hatred. “You arenothingwithout me.”
I laugh, a loud hysterical burst of sound. “What?” I tilt my head slightly. “I can’t hear you through the blood, motherfucker.”
Then I hit him again.
My fist collides with his jaw hard enough to split my knuckles. Blood sprays across the floor as his head snaps sideways before I grab him again and slam him back into the wall.
Rage surges upward too fast after that. For a second, I lose myself again. I’m barely even aware of the sounds coming out of me anymore as I keep hitting him, years of pain and humiliation and conditioning collapsing into the brutal and uncontrollable fuckingthingon attack mode.
“Jude.” Emma’s voice cuts through it softly.
My bloody fist freezes midair.
I inhale sharply, chest heaving as reality slams back into place around me. The basement comes back into focus. I close my eyes briefly, dragging in one hard breath before looking back at Alexei.
He’s barely recognizable now. Blood pours from his mouth and nose, streaking down the front of his shirt while the chains hanging from the wall keep him upright more than his own body does. One of his eyes is already swelling shut, and every breath coming out of him sounds wet and broken.
But he’s still looking at me. Stilltryingto hold onto whatever power he thinks he has left. “You’ll never escape me,” he rasps, words barely audible through his partially broken jaw. “Even if I’m long dead. You will never enjoy a life where I don’t haunt your fucking dreams.”
The words would have destroyed me once. Now, they barely fucking touch me. I step closer slowly, my boots scraping against the concrete floor.
Emma stays near, watching me with exhausted eyes that still somehow manage to calm me. I thought, perhaps a thousand goddamn times in this basement, that I’d lost her forever. That I’d lost any chance for a real life again. But looking at her now, I see everything I could ever want. She’s…my home. The only thing that can calm whatever demon Alexei dragged out from the depths of me.
I stop directly in front of him. “You know what your problem was?” I ask quietly.
Alexei laughs weakly through blood, but he doesn’t offer an answer.
A faint smile pulls at my mouth, but there’s nothing warm in it. “Your problem is that you spent so much time turning people into weapons that you forgot weapons eventually stop giving a fuck who they’re pointed at.”
Something flickers across his face then, and I’m satisfied to see that there’srealfear in it.Because he finally understands that he won’t walk out of here alive.
I grab him by the front of his shirt and yank him forward hard enough to rattle the chains bolted into the wall behind him. His breath catches painfully as I lean closer, my voice dropping lower. “You took everything from me,” I say. “You almost killed Micah. You put your hands on Emma.”
Every word comes out sharper and more unhinged.
“And now you get to die knowing youfailed.”
He tries to pull against the restraints, but there’s nowhere left for him to go. His breathing is picking up like they all do when they realize that their lives are about to fucking end. He spits blood at my feet. “You think killing me changes what you are, boy? What I fuckingmadeyou?”
I stare at him for a long moment. “No,” I admit softly. “But it means the last thing you ever created is the one that ends you. The demon is finally choosing who to sink its teeth into. Poetic, isn’t it? The creation killing its creator?”