Page 66 of Violence and Vice

I blink, and the world shifts.

The street is empty. The hospital is gone. I’m standing in a part of the city I don’t recognize.

I spin once, twice. My heart pounding. My breath shaky.

I don’t remember her face. I don’t know where I just was.

I dig into my brain. She’s there. She has to be there. She was blonde, right? No, brunette. Actually, I have no idea if she had hair at all. If she had eyes. If she was two feet tall or twenty. Fuck. How? How can a person do something like this?

A gifted person can do this.

They can turn someone against everything they normally would do.

They can make an uncle slaughter dozens of his family members in one night.

They can help an inexperienced woman turn Ares against his own kind, make it so he can’t even remember what he was doing.

Fuck.

I turn, orienting myself. One more damn thing. It’s one more damn thing to go tell the others.

I thought I could face Ophelia. To try and mend things. But this… Her association with this woman, Ophelia turning to someone like this for help… Things are too broken. We’re too far past the point of no return.

I won’t be going to visit Ophelia in the hospital.

The clock is ticking.

I head down into the nearest subway station and wonder just how much we can all take before we break.

When I get to Ares’building, I feel… sick. Nervous. Scared. A sense of dread is coating my insides. I feel like I’m always weighingwho do I tell? How much do I tell?It’s fucking exhausting.

So, by the time I reach the thirty-eighth floor, I’m too wiped out to even think about measuring it all.

Roman is seated at the helm, scanning over tons of footage. Ares stands over his shoulder, watching it as well. They really are so damn similar. To my surprise, Sysco is standing right next to Ares, watching with that wild intensity that is signature to him.

Juliet is at the back of the room, talking on the phone. She sounds stressed, but professional.

“We order the machine. It isn’t really an option at this point,” she says. “The money is there. I’d planned to use it to remodel the lab, but it’s just going to have to wait. Okay, thanks.”

Juliet said she is an ER doctor, but from that conversation? She’s a lot more than that.

I make a mental note to Google her name later.

She hangs up and slides her phone into her pocket at the same time Ares turns and scrapes those dangerous eyes of his down my body.

“How did it go?” he asks, his tone a little wary.

I draw in a deep breath, resolve settling into my bones. I’m done holding information back. I trust everyone in this room. Yes, I’ve only known Juliet and Roman for a few days, but I’m just going to take a leap of faith on them.

“I didn’t make it to the hospital,” I say. “I was… intercepted. And given a warning.”

And so, I relay everything that’s just happened. The world fracturing, the cerebral state the woman put me in. Her warning about the Barons’ hold on the city, that she’s planning to use one of us to take out the rest of the Barons. I tell them that she told me we have two weeks to intercept the resurrection of the Blood Father before she goes after us.

“Who is she?” Ares snarls. “Name. Description.”

I shake my head. “That’s just the thing. I couldn’t even figure out what she looked like when she was standing in front of me. It was like she was erasing herself from my brain in real time.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sysco says, his eyes narrowing.