Behind us, the nurse is flailing, trying to herd me back toward the bed like I’m some fragile thing she can still fix.
“You’ll get an infection, Mr. Reed,” she pleads. “You’ve been in surgery. You need rest. We need to get you an eye patch fitted. You can’t just walk out hours after—”
“Hours?” I cut in, my voice low and sharp.
She hesitates with a subtle nod.
That’s all I need to hear.
Hours.
I’ve been unconscious for hours.
Which means Manticore has had all that time to vanish with Nell. To move her across the country. Or worse, off the grid entirely. Another continent. Another name. Another cage.
I shove my arm into my jacket, ignoring the pull of stitches and the fire in my ribs, and swipe the eye medication from the bedside table.
We walk out fast, but not fast enough to stop the nurse from slamming her hand on the panic alarm. The shrill wail echoes down the corridor behind us.
Too late.
By the time the doctor and security reach my room, it’s already empty. We’re in the lift, the doors sliding shut with a soft hiss that seals us off from the chaos above. The alarm fades as we descend, replaced by the low hum of the elevator and the weight of my failure that led us here in the first place.
Talia breaks the silence.
“I’ve got a couple of the guys working leads. We tracked one of the vans to an industrial unit on the outskirts of the city. The place was cleared by the time we got there, but there were signs—restraints, food wrappers, blood. They’d been holding girls there for a while.” She exhales, jaw tight. “We think we’re onto another location now, but they’re fast. The second we get close, they vanish.”
For the first time, her voice wavers. Not much, but enough to prickle the hairs on the back of my neck.
She’s worried.
For Nell? For me? I don’t know. Maybe both.
“Well, I’m here now,” I say, my voice low but steady. “I can help.”
Talia glances at me, but I don’t give her time to argue.
“She’s not going to survive in there, Talia. Not like this. And I can’t—” I stop, swallowing hard. “I can’t lose her the wayI lost Kyla. If I don’t get her back…” I trail off. I can’t even finish the sentence. The thought alone guts me.
In the space of a week, Nell turned my world upside down. She cracked something open in me I thought was long dead. She made me feel again, filled me with hope, and she made me want something more than revenge and survival.
And I’m not ready to let that go.
37
Nell
“Where do you think they’re taking us?” the girl beside me whispers, her voice barely audible beneath the suffocating fabric of the hood.
I don’t know if she’s speaking to me or the girl on her other side, but just hearing another woman’s voice—something human, something real—is a strange kind of comfort in this nightmare.
“Nowhere good,” I murmur, my throat raw and dry. Every word scrapes like sandpaper. I’m so dehydrated, I swear, I could smell water if it were anywhere near. My tongue feels like it’s been coated in dust.
“Are they going to kill us?” she asks, and there’s something in her voice that guts me—something broken and childlike, the kind of fear that doesn’t have room for denial anymore.
“I don’t know.”
It’s the only honest answer I can give.
