1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Marshall

E verything ached. The world came in flashes—a young man named Clay, trapped in the body of a boy named Seth. The knowledge that what we were doing was wrong , what was happening was wrong . What was about to happen was wrong , and I needed to fix it.

Deke, staring at me with wide eyes… and…

A needle.

A sharp hit.

My head aching, my thoughts flooding away… and then…

Nothing. Nothing but a voice pooling somewhere in the depths of my chest that called out a name.

Axel.

Axel?

I didn't know anyone named Axel.

And then I didn't know anything.

Marshall Xavier

There was fire when I woke up. So choking and hot, and my body was screaming in pain. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where I was… I just knew I had to move .

To a door.

Down a hall. Through flames that were slowly engulfing the entire building around me, I finally found a door. The hit of cool air on my lungs was like a balm, stinging against scorched skin and sending pain zinging along a wound on my head.

In the distance, I could see two men standing… one small with curly blond hair, and one tall with tattoos and a leather jacket. It was the smaller one that looked at me with eyes that went wide. His companion was staring at the building that was slowly erupting into flames behind me like it had personally offended him.

It was the smaller one that grabbed the other man's hand and said a name. "Kade, come on. Let's go."

"Don't you want to watch it burn?"

"No, I just… want to leave." He tugged him away before he noticed me, but he threw one more glance over his shoulder as darkness engulfed me again and my head hit the ground.

I was aware, but things were… strange.

There was beeping—I knew sometimes that I was up, that I was moving… but everything was drifting in and out in edges of white and bursts of color, like a kaleidoscope that left me incapable of processing what I was seeing.

Sometimes, the people around me spoke like I wasn't in the room, and sometimes they whispered in hushed tones like mourners over a dead body… and I wondered if that was what I was.

Was I dead?

Was this some bastardized version of limbo where a god I'd never believed in tried to weigh the measure of my sins against the good I'd done?

If that was the case, I wasn't sure why the jackass was taking so long—we both knew Heaven wouldn't have me. The blood on my hands had stained straight through my skin and painted my soul in slashes of crimson and streaks of black.

I let myself drift, and I didn't try to fight to the surface. I was content to ride beneath the waves that left everything hazy and unclear. It was less painful that way, less…

Difficult.

It took me a while to realize that I couldn't think of why it was hard, though, why it might be painful.

When I finally remembered that I couldn't remember how I'd gotten here, I tried to sit up. My body ached, my muscles felt loose… and when I tried to speak, my voice came out as nothing more than a whisper.

It was the spiking beep of the machine beside me that actually got the attention of someone—it looked strange.

Everything looked strange. It was an odd version of uncanny valley where all the objects in the room were a little too polished, a little too shiny.

"Sir, are you—"

"What the fuck is going on?" My voice was raspy… and it wasn't my voice.

It was softer.

Lighter.

When my fingers came up to rake through my hair, I was met with curls instead of the wavy locks I usually kept pulled back.

This wasn't…

"Mr. Lister, I know you're probably confused, but—"

"Who?" I interrupted her again and forced myself into a sitting position. I felt weak, but it probably had something to do with the IV attached to my arm and the fact that I could only vaguely remember moving around. I'd spent every day of my life—at least, as much of it as I could remember—training and honing my body… but when my eyes flicked down to my arms, the muscle wasn't there.

I was lean and paler than I should have been. My eyes roamed over my fingers.

So slender.

Without scars.

They weren't my hands.

"I understand that you're probably confused. Your name is Marshall Lister." I wanted to interrupt her again, but I couldn't jerk my attention from my fingers as they flexed open and closed. "We found you outside of a burning building with a head injury." I did manage to look up then, and my eyes narrowed. I didn't get head injuries.

I didn't get hurt like that. I was careful.

"What building?"

What was the last thing I could remember? It wasn't going to a building…

It was…

Soft blue eyes staring at me and a smile pulling reluctantly across a scowl, like every inch he gave was a painful concession.

"Axel…" I murmured the name under my breath and sat with how it felt on my tongue.

"Excuse me?" The nurse stepped forward, her eyes scanning the black device she held. "I don't see anyone on your chart by that name."

A chart for someone named Marshall Lister.

I had no idea who the fuck Marshall Lister was. I didn't know why they thought that was my name. It wasn't any alias I'd ever gone by that I could remember, though I'd had more than enough that it was possible I'd gotten confused.

"It's… nothing." I looked her up and down. She seemed to be a normal nurse. As far as I could tell, I was actually in a hospital and not some fucked up experiment, or someone's really weird idea of torture.

But I still couldn't remember how I'd gotten here.

"You said I was hurt?" I asked the question as I tested my range of motion. I felt weak, but my body could still move. I wasn't completely helpless.

"You've been with us for nearly three months, Mr. Lister." I twitched at hearing the name again. It was wrong . "You've been in and out. Do you remember any of that?"

Brief flickering moments of motion, of bright lights and pain in my head. Moving my body, people moving my body for me. My mind scrambling and trying to remember…

To remember what?

"Vaguely." I pulled the sheets down so I could run my hands along my chest. Aside from the wires hooked to me, I was slender. Far more slender than I'd ever been.

My arms were completely devoid of tattoos, but there were splotches of red scattered along my torso—birthmarks.

Not mine.

Maybe I was sick. Maybe I was hallucinating.

Maybe…

"You came in with a few personal items. They're on the bedside table there." I followed her gesture—the black bag was zipped up, but there was enough bulge to it that it obviously held something. "Your wallet, your phone, car keys, and a flash drive." She paused. "Do you have any recollection of how you were injured?"

That was an easy question to answer. "No."

She tsked softly. "While you were somewhat lucid and moving, you were asking for someone named Axel, and you said his name again a few minutes ago. Are you sure you don't need us to call someone? Or…" Her lips pressed together, and I saw the look of concern crossing her features a moment before I realized why it was there. "Did he have something to do with your injuries?"

The instinct to stand up and strangle her with one of the wires strapped to my chest was so instant and visceral I nearly followed through with it. Instead, I forced those emotions from my face and looked at her with a helpless shrug.

"No? I don't think so. I can't really remember anything. Can you tell me more about what happened?"

At least it was easy to say convincingly. It wasn't a lie. I had the briefest flashes of memories, but everything was hazy, a cloud tinged with the faintest recollections of a man's eyes.

Axel .

Why was that name the only thing I could think of?

The nurse was talking to me again. There was a fire at a pharmaceutical facility, and apparently I was the only person they'd found alive?

I tried to recollect the scorch of flames on my skin, because I could feel it now—the taut sensation of burned flesh healed over. It rippled along my shoulder, down my back. It was a distant ache that told me time had passed since it happened and now, but I couldn't dredge up the memories.

I couldn't remember a fire.

I couldn't remember anything burning.

But I could remember him .

Axel, who looked at me with his half grin and told me that I needed to be careful when I went out, because the last thing he wanted was to show up at a scene and find me scattered across the floor.

Axel, who had once told me his least favorite scenes to clean were fires. There was too much to try to erase, and most of the time he left the place to burn after he'd gotten rid of any evidence because there wasn't a damn thing he could do about smoke damage.

Axel…

"Has anyone come to see me?" I asked. I hated the way my voice sounded just a little small, just a little hurt, like it mattered if someone had stopped by. But it was all part of the act, right?

If some part of my mind flared again with the thought of blue eyes full of concern, full of anger, full of passion…

I'll always come for you, even if it's for the last time.

I shivered as the words ghosted across my mind.

"When can I get out of here?" I had more questions than I'd gotten answers, but instinct told me I wasn't going to get them here.

"Mr. Lister, you're awake and coherent for the first time in months. I'm sure the doctor would agree that it would be better for you to stay for a while."

Mr. Lister.

I wasn't Marshall Lister.

My name was Xavier Benham, though I hadn't used my last name in so long I was surprised I hadn't forgotten it. Even that didn't sound right, though. Benham. No…

Fetterman.

I shook my head again and forced a smile across my features. "You're probably right."

She wasn't right, but I didn't know the layout of the location, and I wasn't going to test my limits when I wasn't sure what was going on. There was no reason for me to get hurt.

No reason for me to get…

Hm.

Something about the thought didn't sit right in my mind, but I pushed it to the side and made a show of laying back in the hospital bed again like I was more than willing to listen to her.

"I'm sure all of this is a shock to you, Mr. Lister. Let me go get the doctor, okay?"

I waited until she'd left the room to push myself back into a seated position. I could unhook myself and leave, but I still wasn't sure where I was.

I wasn't sure who they thought I was.

My fingers twitched, and I grabbed the bag of personal belongings that she'd pointed out earlier. The contents dumped across my lap in a jumble.

I didn't recognize any of it.

A dark wallet, cheap. A plastic rectangle… flash drive, she'd said, and my mind tried to tug at the information of what it was.

Something about… a computer.

Information storage.

I'd never seen the damn thing in my life, so it made no sense. I pushed it to the side and flipped open the wallet. It was what I'd been looking for to begin with, because if I'd got myself entangled in some kind of infiltration where I'd cooked up a new identity, I would have an ID.

And there was an ID in the wallet. A smiling face with dark brown eyes and unruly hair. I could even admit that he looked a little like me, but neither the driver's license nor the badge that read Northman Technology across the top seemed familiar. My lids fluttered shut as something tugged at the edge of my mind.

Northman Technology.

Fire, and pain. And…

It felt like there were memories just below a dark surface, barely visible under the water… but something about the vastness beneath, the black that seemed to span for miles, told me I was better off not reaching for it.

With a small shiver, I lifted the license and looked at it again.

Marshall Lister was five feet, eight inches. I was eight inches taller than him, and I knew I had at least thirty pounds of muscle that simply wasn't around anymore.

Something strange was going on.

Unsettling.

My eyes flicked to the phone again—it looked strange, too. Just like the monitors, just like the television and everything else in the room.

The movement of my hands felt almost mechanical, swiping across the screen and pressing down out of muscle memory more than the knowledge of what I was doing.

Two faces sprang onto the screen. Marshall Lister and a taller man with eyes as empty as a winter sky. But Marshall was looking up at him with a sweet smile, and it was obvious that he didn't mind the expression that was slightly unhinged.

It took me a second to pull my gaze from the faces on the screen to the little icons littered around them.

I didn't recognize most of them.

It didn't stop me from prodding at it with a strange level of familiarity that I couldn't quite place, but I wasn't going to ignore. Somehow, I knew what to do, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

It was enough to give me a headache.

It was enough to bring me to a white window where I could carefully type in an address.

The only thing I could remember with crystal clarity was a name.

"Axel Fetterman…"

According to the little white screen, he was a few hours away. I only had his name on my tongue and some strange pull in my chest, but it was enough.

I knew where I needed to go.

I just had to get out of this hospital first, and I didn't care who I had to go through to do it.