Page 191 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Balthazar has his hand resting on it with a proprietary air. But I’ve never seen the symbol before, not in or around any of the facilities.

Every photo is painstakingly fixed to the pages with stickers and decorative tape chosen to match the theme. Running my fingers over the textured surface, I can almost taste how much love and care the curator put into her creation.

There are a couple of photos in which the son looks about the same age as Nadia and Booker—late teens. I turn the page and freeze with a hitch of my pulse.

The next pages are blank… of photos and stickers, anyway. Instead, shaky words scrawl across their beige surface in stark permanent marker.

IN A BETTER WORLD, THEY’D LIVE. TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD, I’LL DESTROY THEM ALL. TO DESTROY THEM ALL, I HAVE TO CONTROL ALL.

That’s it. The several pages afterward offer nothing at all.

I flip back to the urgent scrawl and suppress the shiver that crawls down my spine.

Somehow I don’t think it was the wife who wrote that. Who is it Balthazar thinks he needs to destroy?

Totally unnerved, I shove the scrapbook into the box. Nothing else inside offers up any message.

I close the box up and prowl through the rest of the room, scanning for other signs of activity. All the remaining boxes look undisturbed under their sheen of dust.

I can’t pry into them without giving away my presence here.

As I crane my neck to peer between the stacks, a glint off near the far wall catches my eye. I slip over to it, dislodging as little of the dust as possible.

A thin glass tube lies on the floor near the baseboard. One end of it looks vaguely singed.

I have no idea what to make of that. I guess it’s just a stray bit of garbage that got left behind.

The urge to get back to my room, to get away from the questions now crowding my head, rises inside me. I scramble onto the dust-free box that’s closest to my access point, swing my feet to kick off the light, and scramble back into the passage in the ceiling.

The image of the brief but emphatic manifesto lingers in the back of my mind long after I’ve crawled into my bed.

I’m heading to breakfast when the hum of the drawbridge brings me to a window instead. By the time I reach the pane, a sedan has parked beyond the rising bridge with Toni stepping out from the driver’s seat.

My feet move of my own accord. Hunger vanishing, I hurry to the nearest doorway.

Toni has already marched most of the way to the villa when I reach the door. She slows and peers at me. “Do you need something?”

I have to swallow a wrenching laugh at the thought of all the things I need that she’d never offer me. But there may be one thing she can give me.

I raise my chin, looking her straight in the eyes. “Was he always this insane, or only after his wife and son died?”

Toni stiffens—briefly, but visibly enough that I know I’ve hit my mark. She pushes forward again with a motion for me to get out of her way. “I don’t have time for conversations like this.”

“You should,” I insist. “You’re working for him. Carrying out his crazy jobs. You don’t seem insane, so you’ve got to be able to realize how horribly he’s treating us.”

“Balthazar has bigger dreams. A higher purpose.” Toni cuts her gaze toward me again as she brushes past me. “You should remember that. Justice doesn’t come pain-free.”

This time I do let out a snort. I stride after her, keeping pace. “Oh, yeah? If it’s his justice, shouldn’t it be his pain?”

When Toni ignores me, I let my voice rise a little. “He can’t bring back the dead. You know that. And he’s adding to the death toll instead. He’s killing people who don’t deserve it, who never did anything wrong.”

“Then I suppose you’d better follow his orders well enough that you don’t need to be reminded of your mortality, don’t you think?”

My jaw clenches. “You know where that logic leads, don’t you? If it’s okay for him to torment and kill us for his justice, then obviously we’d be justified torturing and murdering people to get back at him for what he’s taken from us. Why does his justice matter more than anyone else’s?”

Toni spins with a flash of her eyes. “It’s not your business to question what he does here,” she snaps.

Then she sweeps through a doorway. The click of a lock sliding into place sounds in her wake.

My shoulders slump as the rush of my show of defiance ebbs. Did she listen to me at all?

Maybe it was stupid to even try. But I know Matteo doesn’t give a shit what happens to us as long as he can run his experiments and gather his data.

Toni at least has shown glimmers of normal emotional reactions. She doesn’t like having her conscience nudged.

I summon as much of yesterday’s determination as I can and trudge toward the kitchen. Griffin emerges when I’m only a few feet away.

He aims a gentle smile at me with a tip of his head. “I have some good news—and it looks like you could use it.”

His words and the smile wrap warmth around me. “Yeah, I’d say so. What’s up?”

“I managed to get Balthazar to have a chat with me this morning—through the screen.” Griffin motions toward the drawing room. “I pointed out some things about emotional endurance and all that… The point is, in the end he agreed that you need a break before he lays any more responsibilities on you.”

I blink at Griffin. “What kind of a break?” And how much of his emotion-warping talent did he manage to impose on Balthazar to get him to agree?

Griffin’s smile stretches into a grin. “You’re allowed to go into town on a date. With just one of us, your choice, but that’s better than nothing. A few hours where you can recover and enjoy a little freedom to do what you want.”