No Broken Beast

by Snow, Nicole

  Maybe she was lucky.

  Maybe even now she’s staggering out of that cellar door with her sister in tow, getting safely away.

  But I need to hear it from Nash’s mouth.

  After a few empty seconds, he speaks mechanically. “Four-oh-seven-alpha-six-zeta-niner-four-eagle,” he says, pronouncing the words carefully.

  Okay, 407A6Z94E. That’s our code.

  That’ll kill the bomb, if I can find it first.

  But he smiles in his slow, eerie way, struggling past the blankness. It’s like I can see him fighting through his conditioning, just like I did, trying to find the willpower to defy me.

  “Not much ti-iiime, my cowardly Lion-boy,” he sings.

  “How much?” I roar, clasping his face in my hands, digging my fingers into his temples. “How much time left? Where the fuck is it?”

  His creepy-ass smile widens. His eyes roll back like he sees something else, something far away.

  His own sick version of heaven, maybe, waiting for him.

  “Sixteen minutes now,” he whispers happily. “And you just wasted so much precious time chasing me. Following me away from her. Can you get to the museum in sixteen minutes, Leo-Leo-Lion-boy? Can you find her deep in its bowels? Are you ready to go home?”

  Home.

  That room, with its steel bunks and thin mattresses and terrible metal table with the bands I can still feel biting my wrists.

  Shit.

  Clarissa’s there.

  And so are the bombs.

  White-hot rage rushes through me so fast I feel like I’ve gone nuclear. My fingers gouge in, threatening to crush Nash’s skull, lines of strain over his temples and his face going red.

  “What did you do to her?” I spit, shouting, my damaged vocal cords struggling to lift my voice, turning it into an animal’s hateful cry. “If you hurt her, I swear to fuck I’ll—”

  “You won’t do anything,” Nash answers with a strange serenity. “Because you won’t get to her in time.”

  It happens in a flash.

  His hand snaps up.

  I go to block it just as I catch the glinting edge of silvery steel, razor-sharp.

  A military utility knife, heading for my face.

  I’m roaring as I grab his wrist, swing it around, and plunge the damn thing straight into his throat. Nash’s body jerks on impact.

  In a single swift slash, his skin opens up. Seething, cherry-dark blood pools on the tile. I finish him with a vicious relief surging through my veins.

  The psycho goes limp a second later, the life draining from his eyes.

  I realize too late that he wasn’t really going for me.

  It was too reckless. Too soon. He wanted this to happen.

  The worst part is, he’s still fucking smiling.

  Like he’s won something in the end.

  Ice runs up my spine, wondering if it’s true. He made me kill him before he could give up the answer I truly needed—the exact location of the bomb in a sprawling house with a bunker under it and endless rooms and hallways and closets.

  There’s no time to triangulate the most efficient location.

  I just have to get the hell in, get Clarissa out, and run before total disaster happens.

  Jumping to my feet, I leave Nash’s body behind. I’ll deal with Ross later.

  I know what that fucker did. He gave Nash the wrong trigger, the command that would let him mimic compliance till he found a chance to die, rather than compromise the mission.

  It makes sense because I’ve got the same trigger buried in me.

  But he’ll never get the chance to pull it.

  Gray starts to rise. “Leo, we can—”

  “Stay here,” I snarl, pointing at Ross. “Make sure he doesn’t get away. He’s evidence now, and he’s gonna pay for this. Everything!”

  Gray stares at me with sharp, worried eyes. “Damn it, man, you can’t do this alone.”

  “I have to.” I shake my head. “Sorry, Gray. I can’t wait for anyone else. There’s no time. I have to do this next part alone.”

  Then I’m stepping out into the night, leaving one of the last hellish fragments of my past in the grip of one of the only men in this world I trust. One of the only people who truly knows who and what I am.

  All of this, it’s on me.

  I set these wheels in motion years ago.

  It’s high past time to grind them to a halt, before they plow anyone else under them.

  * * *

  The streets are almost eerily empty.

  I take off at a ground-eating sprint toward the town center. It’s desolate, forlorn, decorations torn down and trampled in tatters on the streets, lights knocked loose and coiling in dead strings along the sidewalks, trash and bits of paper blowing everywhere, a few of the volunteer firefighters still herding along the last stragglers.

  Heart’s Edge looks like a ghost town.

  I have to hope everyone’s safe for now at Charming Inn, over a mile away.

  At least empty streets means no one to see me.

  No one to slow me down, either, as I let myself off my leash and fly.

  I’ve never fully tested my limits like this.

  Nighthawks made me faster, stronger, better than a normal man. But I learn to push everything to breaking point now, pouring every bit of strength in my body into running.

  Sixteen minutes, he said.

  Fifteen, now.

  I’ll get there in time.

  I will.

  Hell, I don’t even remember tearing through the city streets.

  It’s like the time passes in a rush of adrenaline, and deep down, this crazy sense of hope.

  I know I can save her. There’s no other choice.

  I won’t leave our son to grow up without a mother.

  Just like I won’t live a day longer without the woman I love.

  Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

  That’s how long it takes me to cover over a mile between the shop and the museum.

  It feels like forever and like nothing at all, the seconds counted out in the pounding of my boots against the pavement and the drumming of my heart.

  I burst against the museum door like a battering ram.

  It doesn’t budge. Heavy oak, locked.

  Not gonna stop me.

  I gather my strength, bunching every muscle in my body. Then I throw myself at it again like a human cannonball.

  The wood splinters, the hinges squealing, and the door bursts inward, ripping clean off its frame.

  I tumble inside, surrounded by shadowy halls and bad memories, half truths under the faint light gleaming off the glass of the display cases.

  “Clarissa!” I roar, then fall silent except for my heaving breaths, listening.

  I don’t hear anything.

  Nothing but my own voice echoing from the high rafters.

  Ten minutes now.

  Counting down faster to the frantic drumming of my pulse.

  I head deeper into the museum, pausing to call out again.

  “Clarissa!” Nothing. “Rissa, baby girl, if you can hear me—it’s Leo, I’ve got to get you out of here—”

  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Damn.

  Fuck, fuck, double fuck.

  I have to hope Nash wouldn’t be twisted enough to hide her on the upper floors when he knows exactly where I’m going to look.

  In the chambers down below.

  I find the stairs leading down to the subterranean levels on the second floor, barred off by an Employees Only sign with a safety sticker plastered underneath it.

  It’s unlocked.

  Pushing the door open on a gate to my nightmares, I descend.

  There’s no time to be delicate on the rotting steps.

  I race down, crunching boards in half, nearly getting my damn ankle stuck but moving so fast nothing can collapse beneath me before I’m moving on. Feeling my way around in the dark, I go by sound and memory. My hearing making the echoes of my
own movements bounce back like sonar to tell me how far away the walls are.

  And the whole time I’m calling her name.

  Clarissa. Clarissa. Clarissa!

  And she’s not answering.

  First comes the level with old servants’ quarters, then down—and the stairs nearly drop me this time, crashing under my weight as I hit the fourth step. Suddenly it’s just me and tumbling wood falling everywhere, splinters and boards jabbing me, the stabbing feeling of sharp wood in my skin.

  It’s got nothing on the dagger in my heart that says I won’t find her in time to do anything but die with her.

  Eight minutes.

  I hit the floor from a dozen feet up, pain slamming into me as I crash against the stone.

  For a moment, I lie there groaning. “Fucking hell.”

  Feels like I’ve got a fractured rib, a red-hot sensation so livid against my side it’s practically glowing in the dark with pain.

  Shit.

  No.

  I can’t let pain slow me down.

  Seven minutes, two seconds.

  Hissing in pain, I drag myself up to my feet. I don’t need to feel my way in the dark to find that one corridor, that one damn door.

  Six inches of thick, impassable wood.

  Seemingly locked.

  It leads down to the storm cellar they converted into a torture chamber, into my worst nightmare, and whose only other entrance is a cellar door buried deep in the woods near a creek where I used to play with my friends.

  It hurts to breathe, and not just thanks to my ribs.

  I haven’t been down here since I was officially “graduated” from the Nighthawks program, after I pretended they’d tamed me long enough to make them believe they’d shaped me into everything they wanted.

  Six minutes, thirty seconds.

  I don’t have time to waste on trauma. On memories. On pain.

  I feel along the wall till I find the hidden catch, a single stone that moves where the others don’t, and punch it.

  It grinds into a depression under my palm. Then I hear the click as it hits the disguised locking mechanism.

  There’s a loud creaking and groaning as the door comes loose in its frame, the latch coming undone.

  In the dark I grasp at the handle, pull it wide, and finally see light.

  It’s coming from deep down the stone steps.

  “Clarissa?” I call, listening as my voice bounces down the walls to sink into the cellar.

  Nothing.

  Then a split second later, it floats back.

  “Leo?” It’s faint, worn, and I can hear the hurt in her voice. If Nash wasn’t already dead, I’d fucking kill him. “Is...is that you?”

  Six damn minutes.

  I don’t even think. Just bolt down the stairs at breakneck speed, nearly tripping over myself, my heart leaping. “Hold on, Rissa! Hold on, I’m coming, we’ll—”

  The tremor cuts me off.

  A warning like a building earthquake, right before the colossal crash hits.

  It’s like being at the heart of a nuclear blast, raw vibrating force and shockwaves everywhere, stone raining down, the heat practically searing my skin off a second time as the explosion slams into me from behind and hurls me down the stairs.

  Shit!

  The explosives must’ve been set one floor above. The servants’ quarters—all wood and old stucco, highly flammable.

  The perfect floor to start a blaze that’ll spread fast, spread easy, and collapse the entire building. Ground fucking zero if you wanted to start an inferno that’d jump to the rest of the town.

  Meaning Nash lied to me, deliberately set me up to die down here with my girl so he could go to his happy place flipping me the bird one last time.

  Even as I crash down into the cellar and hit the bottom of the stairs like a fist smashing my body into the earth, even as the flames rush down through the passageway of the stairwell, I don’t care.

  I won’t let it happen.

  I won’t let that killing fire burn us down again.

  * * *

  Eight Years Ago

  The lab is a hollowed-out torch, and I’ve never felt pain like this in my life.

  If this is hell, I’ve earned it.

  Letting myself be consumed by the fire I caused, trapped and crushed to death under the beam that came crashing down as the entire facility went up in smoke.

  I can still hear the screams of the others.

  Scientists, guards, anyone unlucky enough to be down here when I broke into the lab and went berserk.

  Gray, he tried to talk me down, but I wasn’t in my right mind. I wasn’t thinking.

  This shit is on me.

  The broken vial. The containment system activating.

  Then malfunction, the blast, the panic, the fire.

  The shrieking rush of the people who couldn’t get out in time.

  Maybe some of them deserve it, if they knowingly aided and abetted and profited off Galentron’s plan to use Heart’s Edge as a testing ground for bringing agent SP-73 into the wild.

  If they were willing to let this entire town die for their cushy corporate bonus, fuck ’em.

  But some of those people are just like me.

  Trapped by something powerful, unsure how to fight it, afraid.

  And it’s for those people that I deserve this punishment.

  I’ll die here, burned by the flames. Just as long as that virus and Galentron’s plans for Heart’s Edge die with me.

  It’s what I deserve.

  If I were a better man, I’d have found a way to save all of them.

  But I guess in the end, I failed after all.

  Those thoughts move sluggishly through my mind as I stare hazy-eyed through the smoke, through the flames, through the darkness. Past the debris crashed down on me, I sense moving feet. Voices.

  Good.

  That means people are getting out.

  I’m ready to let go, I think.

  The darkness is closing in. My eyes are too heavy to keep open.

  I’m sorry, Clarissa. I know I said I’d come back, but now I can’t.

  “You asshole,” an acerbic voice bites off over my head, sardonic and dry even in the crackling flame, everything crashing down around us. “Of course you’d leave yourself buried under a metric ton of rubble. Of course.”

  Gray.

  My only friend.

  The one who tried to stop me from creating this mess.

  The only person I don’t blame for his hand in creating it, when he was lied to, fooled the same way I was.

  Fuck.

  I can’t let him die down here with me.

  So when I open my eyes and find him setting his broad shoulders to the thick crossbeam crushing down on me, I find the strength.

  This body is cursed. Burned. Scorched and twisted by Galentron into a beast.

  My friend gives me strength. I know he’s brave enough and cares enough underneath that icy façade. He’d kill himself trying to save me. To help me keep my damn promises.

  I can’t let him down.

  So I brace my raw, aching hands against the floor, flex my shoulders, and heave, putting all my strength into fighting the rubble on top of me till it slides away. Gray rips the heap of debris off me piece by piece.

  Maybe I don’t deserve to live.

  But he does.

  And one way or another, I swear to everything holy I’ll keep my promise to Rissa.

  Even if it means living this cursed life so far away from her.

  * * *

  Present

  The memory whacks me so hard that for a minute I’m back there, caught in the hellfire branded on my skin forever. But it’s not eight years ago.

  That flickering urge I had then to just give up and die after murdering her old man and being torched to a crisp, it’s not in me anymore.

  If anything, these new flames wash it away.

  A baptism by fire that leaves nothing but resolve.

  I haul
myself up. The first thing I see is her.

  Not the shadow of my past, burning all around us, the steel bunk rails and the lab tables with the empty vials and beakers that once held horrific things that made my body burn like acid was devouring me from the inside out.

  Just her. Just Rissa. Just us.

  She’s huddled in front of a tent that was set up in the middle of the room. It’s halfway collapsed, the nylon on fire in little patches.

  And Deanna’s next to her, unconscious but breathing. Rissa looks at her wide-eyed, conscious, grimy, sobbing.

  Then she stares at me with those beautiful green eyes like I’m her only hope.

  “Leo,” she gasps, and I start toward her—only for a sudden rush of flame to warn me an instant before a beam in the ceiling gives way.

  I thrust myself back. A fireball of decaying wood smashes down where I’d stood, spraying sparks at me in stinging bites of heat.

  I’d say the heat seems unbearable, but fuck.

  I was made for this.

  She wasn’t.

  “Fuck,” I gasp, holding a hand up over my eyes to shield against the heatwave, peering through the flames at her. “This place is too old. It’s gonna come down on us any second.”

  “I know,” she gulps. I can barely hear her over the crackling flames. “He was gloating. Saying the whole building was going to collapse into the storm cellar and we’d probably be crushed to death before we burned, and it’s a far kinder end than we deserved.”

  Goddamn. Again, I’d fucking kill Nash a second time if I could.

  “He’s dead, babe,” I say, even as I search for a way past the wall of flame in front of me—the damn beam ran the length of the room, and now it’s a barrier screaming you shall not pass. “He’s not gonna hurt you again. Give me a second. Stay low, breathe shallow. Smoke’s far more dangerous than the fire.”

  She lets out a shaky laugh, and I love her for that, for her bravery in the middle of this. “Oh, sure. Say that when it’s your hair on the verge of catching fire.”

  “Been there. Not fun.”

  That gets another giggle out of her, but it’s more like a sob.

  Shit.

  We don’t have time for me to figure out some safe way around the blaze.