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He wouldn’t stop flicking the lighter on and off. I guessed it was supposed to be an intimidation tactic… and it was working. Every time the flame lit, my heart lurched. Between that and the knife, my chances of getting out of here felt slimmer by the minute. I fully believed he could hurt me. That he would hurt me. It was only a matter of time before my value decreased to nothing, and his need for me ended.

But what if there’s another way? Maybe I could persuade him that I’d find a way to help if he just let me go. It seemed unlikely, but I didn’t have any other options. And my stomach had begun to churn, a prickly heat crawling up my spine and tingling at the back of my neck. A sensation I knew all too well.

“Silence ain’t goin’ te help ye,” he said gruffly, now sitting on the floor in a strangely boyish way. Legs crossed neatly, his knee jiggling impatiently.

I took a deep gulp of rank, fish-gut-flavored air and spoke. “I won’t help you. Not because I don’t want to”—a blatant lie—“but because I can’t. I’m not a magical. I don’t have any abilities, so I don’t have the power to undo this curse.”

He jumped to his feet and stalked toward me, getting right up in my face. “Veritas thought the same thing at first, even though ye’ve got that fancy ancient bloodline. But then ye started throwin’ up them beasties, so say what ye like—I know what ye are. Magic as anythin’ and powerful enough te break a curse like this.”

My blood ran cold. The jig was definitely up. He absolutely knew who he’d kidnapped. More than that, he understood a lot more about magical society than he’d previously let on.

“Wait… what is Veritas?” I pulled my head back, away from his fury. Judging by the sudden widening of his eyes, he’d let something slip that he really shouldn’t have.

He shrugged and turned his back, trying to cover his mistake. “Just a nickname for me and me mates.”

You need to learn to lie better. I didn’t believe a word. Whoever the Veritas were, they were important. I could see it from the beads of sweat that bloomed on his forehead, one trickling down his temple where it soaked into his bandana. He started pacing, his whole demeanor agitated. I had a feeling they were the very people who’d sent him to watch me. The people he was defying by bringing me here, so he could prove something. An instinct I knew all too well, but I wasn’t a fan of being the catalyst to his self-discovery.

I decided to try to wiggle open a path of enquiry. “Are you working for magicals? Why did they ask you to watch me specifically? You already said this wasn’t part of their plan, so I’m guessing you’d be in trouble if they found out.”

He stiffened, pausing in his pacing. “As if I’d ever work for the likes of ye! Yer exactly like the rest of them, thinking yer smart, tryin’ te get intel out of me, but it’ll not work. These lips are sealed.”

The rest of them? A horrifying thought splintered my skull. What if this group, the Veritas, were the same people who were taking magicals—the ones who’d likely snatched Charles Burniston and who knew how many others? The venom in his voice after I’d suggested he was working for magicals spoke volumes. This had to be a non-magical organization, and it was obvious they had decent intelligence filtering in. Yes, he’d gotten some details mixed up, like not knowing the term “magicals” and thinking that someone like me could fix his problem—details he wouldn’t know unless he was a magical himself—but someone was certainly giving information to the Veritas.

“Did you get your intel from magicals? Do you have allies from my world, or do you just torture it out of them?” I couldn’t hide the anger and fear in my voice. I’d heard about the returnees that came to the SDC for treatment. They’d been so badly tortured that they were terrified of their own shadows, and that was only when they weren’t staring blankly ahead like the living dead. Is that what he had planned for me? My stomach roiled violently, a sheen of cold sweat bristling across my skin. The muscle spasms and the shakes would come next, followed by a blinding headache, and then he would wish he’d never brought me here.

Unless the Cuffs push the Purge back down… Another horrifying thought. I had no idea what would happen to me if I couldn’t physically get the Purge out. If it got trapped inside me, maybe it would poison me? Make me ill? Transform me? Break me? The thought scared me more than Purging in front of this bastard who only gave a flip about himself.

“That’s it, ain’t it? Ye think we’re all brutes, no better than animals compared te ye in yer lofty towers.” He whirled around and flicked on the lighter again, so close to my face that I could feel the heat on my skin. The flame danced in his dark eyes, until I didn’t know if he was turning into a monster again. “I’m givin’ ye a chance te tell me everything ye know about this curse. I’m offerin’ ye a way to go free. All ye have te do is tell me who did this, and then get rid of it. I don’t have no quarrel with ye, aside from what ye are. I’ve got a quarrel with the person who made me like this.”

Join the club. He wouldn’t have cared, but he and I were in very similar boats. He had become a monster because of a curse someone had put on him, and I spewed monsters out of me. He didn’t want people he cared about getting hurt because of him, and neither did I. The parallels resonated in my clenched chest. Had he not already decided to hate magicals, I wondered if I might’ve been able to win him over. But I couldn’t change whatever brainwashing he’d endured, not if he loathed us this much.

“I’ve told you, I can’t do it.” I grimaced as a shooting pain ricocheted between my temples. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything.

“Then ye’ve left me no other option.” He reeled back and extinguished the lighter. Blending into the shadows, he walked a few yards into darkness and heaved something across the floor with a scrape that shivered up my vertebrae, setting off another blinding pain that heralded an incoming Purge. Rocking slowly back and forth, I remembered my breathing routine. In for ten, hold for ten, out for ten. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It might’ve worked if I hadn’t seen the object he’d dragged over: a bulky car battery connected to a pair of jumper cables. An instrument of torture, if ever I’d seen one. I thought of those listless returnees, covered in cuts and bruises. Had they suffered something like this? He brought the two metal ends close to one another, and a spark jumped across the gap. I had no idea how many volts, but I could only hope it wouldn’t prove a deadly measure.

It might even jump-start the Purge. I’d never actively looked forward to a Purge before, but I couldn’t deny the impeccable timing. If anything could give me an opportunity to escape, it was a wild monster. As long as it wasn’t so big and powerful that the Purge knocked me out or left me too weak to run away, and assuming the Atomic Cuffs didn’t prevent the Purge from coming. That was the never-ending roulette I played with every Purge—I could never guess the outcome.

“I hate te have te do this, but ye can’t say I didn’t ask nice first.” The man stalked forward, wielding the cables. He was a few paces away when his eyes suddenly turned red, flickering flames taking over his pupils. A ripple of red mist swelled across his body, making his hands spasm. Unfortunately for him, it drew the cables inward to his abdomen. He jolted violently, his arms shooting up in a comedic waggle. Well, it would’ve been funny if I wasn’t petrified for my life. The electrocution seemed to ward off the red mist, sending it back into his body, and the fire in his eyes died.

He paused, seeming to reconsider his decision to apply the cables to me. “It’s b-barbaric anyway,” he stammered, clearly still feeling the aftershocks. He switched the battery off and kicked the cables as far away as possible. They slithered across the floor like snakes, away from him, and he knelt back down. All the bravado seemed to have melted away, leaving desperation in place of anger. “Look, just tell me what I want te know. Who did this te me? People’s lives are at stake.”

“Then maybe you should’ve started with that and just asked me for help, instead of kidnapping me and scaring me with freaking jumper cables!” The Purge was taking control of my tongue, doing away with any niceties. I desperately wanted to wrap my arms around my stomach to alleviate the churning, but he’d made sure I couldn’t. This was its own kind of torture.

He looked surprised. “I… didn’t think ye’d listen.”

“I bet that’s what you said about all those other people you’ve hurt.” I lurched forward, feeling the familiar tug of something creeping up my throat. “And I’m guessing you didn’t stop with the car battery.”

“What?” He tilted his head in confusion. “I didn’t touch ye with the bat—” He didn’t get to finish. My mind flashed with images of the returnees, though I’d only seen the pictures and reports in my mom’s files when she’d had her back turned. Their faces beaten to a pulp, their bodies scarred and dappled with bruises. I remembered reading about a girl’s screams whenever a man came near her. I wondered if he’d looked like this guy, hiding his face so he might lessen his own guilt. The sheer horror that I could be used and dumped like that triggered the final stages of the Purge.

I glared at my abductor as my body convulsed. You really chose the wrong magical, asshole.