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Revik found the cell’s occupant in that first, cursory sweep with his eyes. He didn’t bother to focus on her until he’d ascertained every other detail of the layout, however. The woman in front of him could access both the table and the bed, despite the long chains she wore that locked her to the furthest wall.

But only just, Revik noted.

He made a note of her range, but really, it didn’t concern him.

He knew if it hadn’t been for his wife, this room would be significantly less comfortable than it was. Some of the infiltrators on the team still had to be warned against coming in here. Revik heard from Jon and Wreg that Allie issued specific threats to a few of them.

The threats were neither idle nor unnecessary, from what Revik heard via the infiltrator grapevine onboard the ship. Turns out, a number of their team still held grudges from what occurred over the past year. There had been threats of all kinds, including rape, which wasn’t an idle one for most seers, if only because they didn’t generally threaten it unless they were pretty damned pissed off.

Revik hadn’t threatened her, though.

He knew Allie stepped lightly around him when it came to this particular prisoner, but he’d never said a word. He’d never done anything. He’d never interfered in any way.

He’d never even asked to interrogate her.

He let Allie decide every aspect of this prisoner’s treatment.

He stayed out of every discussion around whether they should kill her or keep her alive. He’d already decided he wouldn’t weigh in on that issue even if Allie asked him outright––which she never did.

He handed all discretion to his wife, without protest.

Until now.

The prisoner looked up at him when he entered her cell.

Revik saw her coffee-colored eyes widen when she saw him standing there.

Her now-flawless face went slack in surprise, absent the scar he’d known since he shared a prison cell with her in the Caucasus. He just stood there, letting her look him over, watching her eyes gradually reflect a blank incredulity.

He saw other things, including the disjointed currents flickering through heraleimi.

He noted how they seemed almost entirely out of synch with her body, with her light structures, with the refracted glimpses he could get of her mind. Cut off from the Dreng, whose frequencies had been woven into the very fabric of her newly-activated seer’s light, Cassandra Jainkul, or War, looked strangely out of time.

She looked as if the different versions of her didn’t quite fit together anymore.

Revik knew Allie broke a few things, too.

When his wife smashed through the door of that upscale apartment in New York, where Cass had been keeping their daughter, she destroyed every single higheraleimicstructure Cass possessed. In particular, Allie targeted and annihilated those structures Cass used to perform her nascent telekinesis.

Allie obliterated them. She crushed them ruthlessly to powder.

The thought gave Revik more satisfaction than perhaps it should have.

Cass continued to stare at him, as if not sure he was real.

Then a slow smile spread over her full lips.

Revik watched the spark in those brown eyes ignite––eyes that looked unfocused, even lost, just a few seconds before.

He raised the gun he held, pointing it at her head.

He was fine with her smiling at him.

It made what he’d come here to do easier, seeing that smirk on her mouth.

“Hey, big guy,” she said.

Unfolding her body from where she’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, she pulled herself languorously to her feet, chains and all. Revik watched as she shook out her long black hair, the chains making a series of dullthunksas they hit the floor from where they’d been coiled around her legs.