Because it was fucking incomprehensible. How was he supposed to feel this impossible truth in his gut, where it counted? Death had to remain distant, a nebulous thing that Would Happen Someday but didn’t bear closer scrutiny. Anything else was paralyzing. If he faced it, he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, because every breath he drew was one fewer left in his life.
He wasn’t just going to die; he was dying, hour by hour, bit by bit. It was happening to him every day, this slow slide that he still couldn’t manage to comprehend.
And, despite his determination not to add to Maya’s collection of perfect, incandescently terrible memories, she was going to watch it happen.
So he did what any cornered animal would do—he fought. “I feel fine most of the time.”
“Yes.”
The sheer lack of argument drained some of his anger, his frustration. His panic. “I feel fine most of the time,” he said again, then went on. “But I’m still dying.”
“But you’re still dying.” Mace smiled, commiseration in the truest sense of the word. “It’s the great irony of the human condition. We all die, but none of us know how to do it.”
“So … what do I do?”
Mace arched an eyebrow. “Didn’t I just say no one fucking knows?”
“Jesus Christ, Mace.”
“All right, all right.” He eased his chair closer and laid his hand on Gray’s shoulder. “You take the time you have left, and you live it. I’ll get Conall to go in hard on the Protectorate medical archives, see if we can find anything that might help. Even if we can’t save you, we can probably give you more time.”
There was that panic again. “I don’t want to be helpless. I don’t want to be lying in a bed, hooked up to a bunch of shit, not knowing what the hell is going on. I don’t want to be gone but still breathing.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen to you,” Mace soothed. “To any of you.”
No false hope. No maybes. Perversely, it helped. “Okay. I guess I just have to…” He trailed off.
“Gray?”
He couldn’t hold back his slightly morbid grin. “I was gonna say learn to live with it, but shit. I guess not.”
“That’s it.” Mace rose. “Get out. Get out of my clinic.”
Gray had been through things that would have broken most people—being orphaned, growing up alone and terrified—and he’d faced it head-on. He’d never turned away from a hard truth in his life, and he wasn’t going to start with his death.
He just hoped he didn’t bring Maya down with him when he finally fell.
AVA
There was a man brooding on the roof of her sister’s building.
No, best to be precise.
There was a dead man brooding on the roof of her sister’s building.
Ava perched in the shadows, balanced effortlessly on the edge of the building in spite of the three-inch heels on her boots and the heavy bag slung across her body. Her favorite point of entry into the warehouse was on the opposite side of the roof, and she’d expected a clean shot at it.
Instead, it was being guarded by a ghost.
Several months ago, Ava had made a tactically questionable decision. After undergoing years of torture and captivity, she’d escaped only to discover that her beloved sister, far from being dead, was alive and well and living a comfortable life with a new family in Atlanta.
She had not taken Nina’s apparent abandonment well. In retrospect, she could acknowledge her emotional response to this discovery had been … less than ideal. Ava did not like admitting to having acted irrationally, but the string of increasingly reckless decisions she’d made while in the grip of rage and grief had been unfortunately extreme.
A rational person might have approached Nina. Ava had decided to have her retrieved. Of course, most of the people you could hire to kidnap someone with Nina’s unique capabilities were hardly the sort of people she’d have wanted manhandling her sister, no matter their current degree of estrangement. But Captain Garrett Knox had presented such an intriguing prospect. So irrationally noble. So nauseatingly idealistic. So conveniently on the run from the TechCorps.
So emotionally compromised.
Security on the TechCorps intranet wasn’t the hardest she’d ever cracked, though she gave Tobias Richter full credit for being the nastiest. The traps he’d laid were elegant, devious, and vicious. She’d learned a thing or two by narrowly avoiding them.
During her deep dive into exploring Captain Knox’s pressure points, she’d learned of his ultimate weakness. Being forced to witness the slow and brutal death of his team’s medic had left Knox with an almost compulsive need to protect the remaining members of his squad. Ava had leveraged that against him.
Which made the fact that said medic was standing ten meters away problematic.
It also made him a threat to Nina.
Moving silently, she eased the strap over her head and set her bag and its precious cargo down on the roof. The shadows were deep this late at night, with the moon’s silvery glow falling at a sharp angle, but it shone on the medic.
Whatever the TechCorps had done to him had been brutal—and recent. Time would ease some of the deep lines of pain carved into his face and the way he stood as if everything hurt. She’d been an emaciated wraith with dead eyes for those first six months after escaping, too.
The outside would heal. The inside? Well, some things not even time could fix.
A piece of gravel scraped under the heel of her boot, only a whisper of sound, but he stiffened, his head turning.
His gaze locked on her, pale and flashing in the scant moonlight. Ava drew her gun in one smooth movement and aimed for his head, her finger already caressing the trigger. It was a struggle not to shoot. Her instincts screamed for it. Every muscle trembled, her body eager to eliminate the danger before his presumed risk could become a tactical certainty.
It was the logical thing to do. But Nina would be disappointed if Ava shot Knox’s unarmed friend in cold blood just because he was clearly here to hurt them.
Trying to avoid disappointing Nina was exhausting.
The medic was still watching her. Ava eased her finger off the trigger enough that she wouldn’t shoot him by mistake and tilted her head. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Likewise.” His voice hovered somewhere between interest and boredom. The one thing it lacked completely was concern—for his own welfare, or for her sudden appearance.
Ava knew that numbness well. Worse, she knew how lethal it could be. “So, James Mason. I know why I’m still alive. Why are you?”
The corner of his mouth ticked up, and he turned back toward the distant lights of the Hill. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”
“And I thought you were supposed to be a decent man. And yet, here you are. Clearly a danger to your friends. And my sister.” Anger flattened her voice. “I assume you at least dealt with active trackers. Do you know how to scan for passive ones?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he turned his entire, surprisingly big body toward hers. He was slender but quite tall, and those attributes combined gave him an air of slim, wiry strength. Of course, his center of balance was too high. If she had to take him down, she’d go in low, knock him off his feet and over her shoulder.