Page 234 of Fractured Loyalties

I stay.

Because the truth is worse than the cage: I don’t want out. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Chapter 40 – Elias – Betrayals

Her lips are swollen where I bit them. The faint smear of my blood—someone else’s blood—marks her jaw like I branded her without thinking. She hasn’t wiped it away, though she could. That small omission is a victory, one she doesn’t realize she’s given me.

Lydia has the good sense to step back toward the couch, giving us the appearance of privacy while keeping herself within earshot. She’s never out of reach, not truly, and that suits me. For all her cynicism, she knows the kind of night I’ve come from.

She can read it on me the way surgeons read a chest opened on a table: the tremor in my hands, the iron in the air, the rhythm of someone who has just broken another man’s last minute of life.

Mara looks at me like she’s trying to decide whether I’m salvation or the trap itself. Her chest rises, uneven.

Her hair is twisted back in a rough knot now, Lydia’s handiwork no doubt, and there’s something about that practical change that unsettles me more than her trembling. She’s been touched by someone else’s instruction. Not possession, but influence. And I can taste my own anger at it.

“You’ve been busy,” Lydia says, voice dry as sandpaper. She doesn’t even pretend it’s a question.

I don’t look at her. Mara is all I see. “Two men,” I answer again. “Both were stationed in that Civic. Both waiting for me. Neither alive anymore.”

Mara flinches at the words, but not like she should. Not with revulsion. It’s something uglier, something she’ll try to bury but I catch anyway: relief.

“They were waiting foryou?” she asks, voice cracking.

“Yes.” I step closer, slow enough to watch her pupils expand.

Lydia makes a sound under her breath, half laugh, half scoff. “Told her she’s bait.”

The word tastes like poison. My jaw locks. “Careful,” I tell her.

She shrugs, unbothered, scrolling her feed. “Not saying anything you don’t know.”

But Mara—Mara doesn’t look away. “So they knew how to get you because of me.”

“No,” I correct. My voice sharpens, meant for her ears alone. “They thought they coulduseyou. That is not the same thing as you being responsible.”

Her shoulders twitch. “But it works,” she whispers.

The word digs into me.

I close the space until she’s nearly pressed against the counter. I can smell the clean wetness of her hair, the ghost of sugar, the metallic stain still clinging to my hands. I want to smear all of it across her until there’s nothing left but me.

“They think they’re clever for spotting my pattern,” I tell her, low and certain. “But they’re children at war. They have no idea what they’ve stepped into. I don’t hunt because I’m provoked, Mara. I hunt because I decide someone’s time is done. And theirs is.”

Her throat works around a swallow. Her hand trembles. She doesn’t move away. She doesn’t tell me to stop. Instead—softly, dangerously—she asks, “And if they keep coming?”

“Then I keep burying them.”

Lydia clears her throat from the couch. “That’s a sustainable plan,” she mutters. “Stack corpses until the street runs out of shovels.”

“Stay out of this,” I snap without looking at her.

But Mara hears it, feels the edges in my tone, and she doesn’t blink. She just watches me like she’s standing on a ledge, deciding whether to jump or let me push her.

I lean in, voice meant only for her. “You are not bait. You are mine. And anyone who mistakes the two will not live long enough to repeat it.”

Lydia shifts her weight on the couch, tablet balanced in her palm. She isn’t fidgeting—Lydia never fidgets—but there’s a tightness in her mouth I don’t often see. She swipes through one feed, then another, as if searching for a screen that can hold her steady.

I watch her. Long enough that she feels it. Long enough that the air thickens between us.