Page 99 of Villains Series

FIVE YEARS AGO

LOCATION UNCERTAIN

AFTER Eli killed Victor, it was all a blur.

First, the chaos. The red and blue lights, the sirens, the officers storming through the Falcon Price, and the horrible realization they weren’t on his side.

Then came the cuffs, so tight they cut into Eli’s wrists, and the black hood, swallowing the sight of Victor’s corpse and the blood-slicked concrete, muffling the voices and the orders and the slammed doors, erasing everything but Eli’s own breath, his pounding heart, his desperate words.

Burn the body. Burn the body. Burn the body.

Then came the cell—more like a concrete box than a room—and Eli slamming his fists against the door over and over until his fingers broke, and healed, broke, and healed, the only evidence the blood left smeared across the steel.

And then, in the end, there was the lab.

Hands forcing Eli down, cold steel on his back and straps cinched so tight they cut into skin, pale sterile walls and too-bright lights and the chemical smell of disinfectant.

In the center of it all, a man in white, his face swimming above Eli’s. Dark eyes set deep behind black glasses. Hands drawing on plastic gloves.

“My name,”

said the man.

“is Dr. Haverty.”

He selected a scalpel as he spoke.

“Welcome to my lab.”

Leaned in close.

“We are going to understand each other.”

And then he began to cut. Dissect—that was the word for it when the subject was dead. Vivisect—that was the word when they were still alive. But when they couldn’t die?

What was the word for that?

Eli’s faith had faltered in that room.

He had found Hell in that room.

And the only sign of God was that, no matter what Haverty did, Eli continued to survive.

Whether he wanted to or not.

* * *

TIME unraveled in Haverty’s lab.

Eli thought he knew pain, but pain for him had become a bright and fleeting thing, an instant’s discomfort. In the doctor’s hands, it became a solid state.

“Your regeneration truly is remarkable,”

said the doctor, retrieving the scalpel with bloodstained gloves.

“Shall we find its limit?”

You’re not blessed, Victor had said. You’re a science experiment.

Those words came back to Eli now.

And so did Victor.

Eli saw him in the lab, watched him circle the table at Haverty’s back, slip in and out of Eli’s line of sight as he studied the doctor’s incisions.

“Maybe you’re in Hell.”

You don’t believe in Hell, thought Eli.

The corner of Victor’s mouth twitched.

“But you do.”

Every night, Eli would collapse onto his cot, shivering and sick from the hours pinned to the steel table.

And every morning, it would start again.

Eli’s power had a single flaw—and ten years after Victor first discovered it, so did Haverty. Eli’s body, for all its regeneration, couldn’t reject foreign objects; if they were small enough, he healed around them. If they were large enough—a knife, a saw, a clamp, his body wouldn’t heal at all.

The first time Dr. Haverty cut out Eli’s heart, he thought he might finally die. The doctor held it up for him to see before cutting it free, and for a fraction of a second Eli’s pulse faltered, failed, the equipment screamed. But by the time Haverty set the heart in its sterile tray, there was a new one already beating in Eli’s open chest.

The doctor breathed a single word.

“Extraordinary.”

* * *

THE worst part, thought Eli, was that Dr. Haverty liked to talk.

He kept up a casual stream of conversation as he sawed and sliced, drilled and broke. In particular, he was fascinated by Eli’s scars, the brutal crosshatching on Eli’s back. The only marks that would never fade.

“Tell me about them,”

he’d say, plunging a needle into Eli’s spine.

“There are thirty-two,”

he’d say, drilling into Eli’s bones.

“I counted,”

he’d say, cracking open Eli’s chest.

“You can talk to me, Eli. I’m happy to listen.”

But Eli couldn’t talk, even if he wanted to.

It took all his effort not to scream.