Page 47

EON

T he cell holding us was too dark, too quiet.

The kind of quiet that didn’t mean safety, but danger—like something was lurking just past the edges of perception, waiting to pounce.

My pulse was a drumbeat in my ears, my hands bound in my lap.

The magnetic cuffs were tight. Too tight.

I squeezed my fingers to move the blood around, to stop them from shaking. It had all gone wrong. Again.

I flicked a glance at Cy, crouched near the doorway, his posture loose but ready, even with his hands bound. Always ready. He hadn’t looked at me since we got holed up in this room, but I knew—knew—he was aware of every move I made.

A deep breath. Slow. I could handle this.

I’d been in worse situations. I’d survived worse men.

But the truth, the one I couldn’t push away no matter how hard I tried, was that this was different.

The Kitsune weren’t just sleazy club patrons.

They were an organized pack of criminals, and if we didn’t play this exactly right, we weren’t getting out.

I looked at Cy again and saw what he really was. A weapon, coiled tight and always ready to release. I hated to admit it, but he scared me. And this was the place that had created him.

Fear clawed its way up my throat. I swallowed it down, forcing myself to focus. There had to be a way out. I just needed to think.

Movement. Cy shifted, and I tensed on instinct, but he just sat back, kicking the remnants of our Vysors into the cell’s corner.

Our jailers must’ve smashed them when they threw us in here.

He stretched out his legs like we weren’t locked in a death trap.

Like this was just another job, another night.

Like I wasn’t fucking terrified.

I hated him for that. Hated that he could sit there like none of this fazed him. Hated that I was looking at him and feeling something other than anger, something creeping too close to camaraderie.

Because the truth was, for all the shit he gave me—for all the ways he pushed and pulled—Cy had protected me. When things broke down, he’d pulled me behind him without thinking, like it was instinct. Like keeping me alive mattered.

It shouldn’t matter. Not to him.

But it did.

I exhaled slowly, my nerves steadying just a little. I wasn’t safe—not really—but…I wasn’t alone either.

He let out a long sigh and leaned against the concrete wall, eyes closed. “Settle in. We might be here for a while.”

I tried to ignore the lingering cold in my limbs. “Great,” I muttered. “Love being stuck in a death trap with you.”

Cy didn’t even open his eyes. “Yeah? You wanna try waltzing back out there, be my guest.”

I scowled but said nothing.

Silence settled between us, but it wasn’t comfortable.

It was heavy, thick with everything neither of us wanted to say.

My fingers twitched against my sleeves. I should’ve been focusing on getting us out, running through every possible angle in my head.

But instead, my thoughts kept circling back to Cy. To him, telling me to run.

I needed to get my head on straight.

I looked at his hand. It had been wrapped poorly with a dirty cloth now soaked in blood, but it didn’t look like it was still bleeding. Still, he was injured—injured by a knife that had been meant for me.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” A dumb question. Of course it did.

“Always in pain, doll. What’s a little more?”

I looked at the scar on his face, picturing the glowing circuits I’d seen all over his body. The pain I’d felt in his shoulder when our Flux had merged. His twitching shoulder. The one he refused to have fixed.

He frowned at me. He knew exactly what I was thinking about.

“You asked why I didn’t get chipped. It didn’t matter that the chips were out—we couldn’t afford it. Could barely afford this.” He gestured to his whole body.

The old tech was massive. Brutal. It had to be screwed directly to the bone in some cases to keep it from shifting. When he used his Flux, a glyph larger than my hand showed up under his left collarbone and faded as it went under his pectoral. I’d seen two more on his back, even larger.

I thought back to my own Flux modding. Twelve—always younger for girls—and terrified. I’d heard all the stories. Kids coming back with massive scars. Kids not coming back at all. The modding going wrong and them burning up to ash right on the table.

I’d been shaking, but Mom had held my hand tight and even sang a lullaby in my ear.

I’d cringed, said I was too old for that, but it had made me feel better.

She’d barely eaten for two weeks and taken double shifts for two months just so she could take me to a reputable Modder in Blue.

I came out of the operating room with nothing more than a small scar on the back of my neck.

I rubbed it absentmindedly and thought of a young, possibly more innocent Cy going under some slum Modder’s knife.

Not a well-lit, clean environment, but dirty and wet, with skeletal mods hanging from the rafters like bodies at a butcher.

Cy, strapped to a metal table as they pulled out the bone saw and opened him up. My heart stuttered. He noticed.

“Don’t look like that, doll. At fourteen, I was already a piece of shit. This wasn’t the worst thing I’d lived through at that point.” That didn’t make me feel better.

“You were already a Kitsune? At fourteen?”

“Surprised you didn’t know that already, with how obsessed you are with me.”

I scoffed. “Took me six months to find basically nothing on you. They really wiped you from existence.”

“Perk of being one of POM’s alpha-level assets,” he said, without humor. He didn’t elaborate. His face went blank.

But the walls of this place were pressing in, and I just couldn’t stop talking. “I’d never met someone like you.”

“You have a strange definition of met.”

“I…had to know more about you, but you were a ghost. Everyone has a digital fingerprint these days—ad algorithms, search histories, buy preferences. But you? There was nothing. It was…fascinating. It only made me want to know more.”

“Liked what you didn’t see, huh?” He raised an eyebrow, a faint smile tugging at his lips.

I didn’t take his bait. “Wasn’t that hard, erasing your entire past?”

He surprised me again as his brow furrowed. “Nothing to wipe out, doll. Nothing worthwhile anyway.”

Something about the wrinkles in his forehead made me want to run my fingers over them, smooth them out.

“Obviously not. That kid, Akira, knew you.”

Cy frowned at that. “Well, POM hasn’t figured out a way to erase me from other people’s minds yet.”

I watched him carefully, noting the way his jaw tightened, the flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. His guard was always up, but this felt different.

“Must be nice,” I said, leaning my head back against the wall. “Getting to decide what parts of yourself exist. What people get to see.”

Cy let out a short breath, almost a laugh. “Doll, nobody sees me. I don’t exist, remember?”

“I see you.”

Something flickered in his gaze, but he surprised me by turning his head away.

I let out a sigh. “Better than people looking right at you and only seeing what they can take.”

I shouldn’t have said anything. Now I turned my head away, the vulnerability aching in my chest. The silence stretched again, and then—

“How did you end up at Hellfire?”

I held my breath, the story rising to the edge of my mind. The pipes above us creaked, and the cold air of the cell wicked at the sweat on my neck, sending a shiver down my spine. The fear this conversation had been holding at bay crept back in, wrapping panic-inducing tendrils around my mind.

I’d never told anyone. Not even DITA.

“It’s not a unique story. Mom got sick in the outlands.

We moved here so she could get treatment.

I was about seven. We were poorer than dirt, so we landed in Magenta like everyone else.

Mom worked two jobs just to pay for her care, but I realized later it was also so I could go to decent school.

She left everyone and everything she knew behind to try and give me a future. ”

“You said she got sick. Cancer?” he asked.

I nodded. “From the AgriGrow contamination. Big settlement a few decades back, if you remember. Didn’t see a dime, of course.”

“You miss it out there?”

“The outlands? Can you miss something you don’t really remember?” Silence stretched for a few breaths. “Yes. I miss it. But I think I just miss her.”

“Mom didn’t get better?”

“No. She got shot.”

He blinked but didn’t say a word.

“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Walking past when a store got robbed. They came out, and she startled them. Next thing I knew, she was on the ground with a hole in her head.”

“You were there?”

I nodded. “You know EMS is a joke in Magenta. Took over thirty minutes to get help, and by then…”

His face stayed neutral, but I couldn’t stop now.

“I’d been on scholarship, but after that happened—well, I wasn’t ‘performing’ anymore.

Got kicked out of school. Had to find money somewhere.

Professor Takana did what she could for me, let me keep working in her lab, but it wasn’t enough.

Especially with Mom’s medical debt. There’s a reason it’s the oldest profession. ”

“Nah, that’s bullshit.” He finally spoke up. “A girl as smart as you? You could’ve worked anywhere.”

I raised an eyebrow, surprised by the compliment. “Maybe. If I’d cared. But I didn’t. I didn’t care about anything then. People only give a shit about you when you can give them something, provide a service. So I found one I could provide without having to think or care. One I could do high.”

He didn’t interrupt again.