Page 129

I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry, but the grip on my throat was just too much. A few tears escaped, slowly dripping down the curve of my cheeks.

“Yes,” he whispered, nuzzling his face into mine. “Cry for me.”

Oh my god, this man was disgusting. How did no one realize how awful Charles really was? How did Marissa tolerate it? Unless…did she even have a choice?

“We’re going to take this one step at a time, shall we? Tomorrow you’ll be implanted. And then you’re going to do exactly what I order you to when the time comes. And if you try to run away, if you try to tell Sasha or anyone about this…” He brought his lips right up to my ear, whispering so menacingly that I felt myself freeze. “I’llkillthem. I’ll brand them all as traitors, and I will have them all destroyed. Everyone you care about, everyone you love…they’ll all be executed. So be careful, Mara. Think carefully about what you do next, because this time, you’re going to be gambling with the lives of those you care about most. And I’m not a gambling man, Mara. I always win.Always.” He threw me to the ground. I landed on my side, coughing and gripping my sore throat. I looked up and watched as Charles turned away from me and left my room.

I sat on the floor for what felt like hours, doing nothing but staring in disbelief as the tears streamed down my face. Because somehow, things had just gotten worse. Charles had me cornered, threatening the lives of those I loved most. It wasn’t just about Wes anymore. It was Matias and Edith. It was Jacob. Hell, it could even be poor Chelsea and Edith’s family, for all I knew. It was all of them, all their lives. It wasn’t just about freedom anymore, but life and death. And I…I was trapped.

72: Finish It

“Do you understand your orders?” Bynes asked as the nurse injected the back of my neck with my tracker.

“Yes,” I muttered. After sitting in the debriefing that morning, hearing the plan of how we were going to infiltrate the REG while hundreds of Northern and Dissenter soldiers attacked the wall as a decoy, Bynes called Jacob and me to follow her. And now here we were, being implanted with the tracker Charles had mentioned the night before.

“Come again?” Bynes asked, clearly relishing her power and control in this moment.

“I saidyes,” I repeated through gritted teeth. Jacob sat next to me, quiet as the nurse moved on to inject him. I glared at Bynes. “What’s it like to be Charles’s puppet? Do you like it? Or does it do something else for you?”

SMACK!

Bynes backhanded me, splitting open my lip. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. Keep talking, girl. I’d be happy to do it again.”

I opened my mouth, but Jacob nudged my shoulder, giving me a warning. I snapped my mouth closed, biting my tongue.

“Who’s on the team?” he asked.

Bynes snickered. “All the favorites, of course. It seems President De’vor is doing everything in her power to control this mission as much as possible, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll have a soldier with you to make sure you get the job doneright. You have one objective, and that’s installing the virus. We’ll take care of the rest.”

“Yeah, I bet you will,” I muttered under my breath.

“Careful, Telvian, or I’ll slap the other side to make it match.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek, my blood boiling. “Now, remember the plan. The team will assemble at 1200 hours. And if you mention any of this to anyone—”

“We got it,” Jacob interjected. “Hell to pay, people suffer, so on and so forth. You’ve made it clear, General.” She sneered at him before turning and leaving the room. The nurse lingered for just a minute, and then she left too, leaving us alone for the moment.

“This is bad, Mara.”

I ran my finger over the sore spot on the back of my neck. “I know, I know.”

Jacob stood up and started pacing in front of me while I remained seated on the exam table. “This tech can’t exist. It’s got to be destroyed, and I don’t trust this Calvernon guy one bit.”

I snorted. “If only you knew the half of it.”

“I’m serious, Mara.No onecan have this tech.”

I furrowed my brows. He was right. This kind of technology couldn’t exist, and especially not in the hands of someone like Charles Calvernon. Because that’s what Charles wanted. He wanted NIT-V2 for himself—that’s what he expected Jacob andme to do. We were going to betray everyone—the East, the Dissenters, our team—betray them all by installing a virus into Telvia’s mainframe when we were supposed to be destroying it. The virus would corrupt the system and change the coding, so when the tech went live, Charles would be the one in control, not Raúl. And that was going to be just as bad.

Jacob shook his head, still pacing. “This is bad. This is really, really bad.” He stopped pacing, running his hands through his hair before turning to face me. “We’ve got to destroy it, Mara. The North can’t have control of the tech. Not them, not the Dissenters…nobody. It’s got to stop here. No matter what happens tomorrow, we have to get to the lab, and we have to destroy all of it!”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we bomb it.”

“What?”

He walked up to me, taking my hands in his. “Hear me out. Everything that has to do with the nanochips is at the lab. I can access the mainframe from there, destroy the files, and then we can bomb the entire thing. We need to destroy everything. Every prototype, all the models—all of it!”

“What about the team? They’re gonna figure out that we’re up to something. And even if they don’t, there’s no way they’re going to let us bomb the lab. Not when the point of the mission is to take over control of the tech,” I reasoned.