Chapter 6

SIX

XERO

The laptop crashes against the wall along with the foul video, the pieces rebounding on Tyler’s shoulder. I throw off my oxygen mask just as Jynxson rises from his seat.

“What are you doing?” He places a hand on my shoulder, trying to push me back on my bed, but I knock him into the wall.

Before I know it, the IV has slipped out of my arm, and I’m barreling toward the exit.

The man in that video wasn’t me.I would never allow any man to touch Amethyst, let alone four.I would never release footage of the woman I love onto the internet.

Jynxson lands on my back, sending me sprawling onto the hallway floor. I roll us to the side, driving an elbow into his midsection before scrambling to my feet. Jynxson grabs my ankles like an asshole, yanking hard to stop me from leaving the infirmary. I kick back, aiming for his face. My foot connects, and he grunts, loosening his grip just enough for me to pull away and race down the corridor.

“What the hell happened?” Tyler catches up with me and grabs my arm.

“Isabel!” Jynxson roars.

My sister emerges from a door on the left, her eyes widening as she spots me trying to escape. Jynxson springs to his feet and wraps both arms around my torso.

Pivoting, I run the other way, dragging Tyler and Jynxson, not wanting to hurl Isabel into the wall.

“Dixon!” she yells.

Shit.

A door on the right opens. Dr. Dixon steps out with a tranq gun. He’s one of the few men in our group taller and bulkier than me, and the only Moirai-trained doctor who defected. And he isn’t afraid to overmedicate. If he hits me with that tranquilizer, there’s no telling how long I’ll spend here sedated and unable to explain myself to Amethyst.

I raise both hands in surrender. “Alright.”

The doctor flicks his head back toward the hallway. “Return to your room, operative.”

My jaw clenches. Dr. Dixon is our Chief Medical Officer. He outranks me across all our infirmaries, but being ordered around by him in my own organization is still irksome.

A needle slips into my arm. I turn around and lock gazes with Isabel, who scowls.

“I told you to stay in bed,” she says, her voice laced with disapproval.

“What did you…”

My knees buckle, and the hallway spins as the sedative takes hold. I want to explain, but my tongue thickens and settles to the back of my throat.

Jynxson catches me around the waist before I fall, and he drags me back to my room. As darkness closes in, I try to make sense of who the hell would make a deep fake of Amethyst being violated in that graveyard.

The next time I wake up, I’m strapped to the cot in a mockery of my last day in prison, with thick bands around my shoulders, chest and waist. Moonlight streams through the vertical blinds, illuminating the infirmary room.

Instead of a hated half-brother in the bed next to me, Jynxson’s head rests on my mattress. I knew he’d be here, watching over me. He’s the brother I always wanted. The only man I’d trust with my life… Maybe even with my little sister.

“Hey,” I rasp.

He raises his head and gazes up at me through bleary gray eyes. “What the hell is going on, Xero? And don’t bullshit me this time.”

My throat tightens, and I swallow. “Sometime this morning, Amethyst attacked me with a bottle of chloroform. By the time I woke up, she was gone, and the entire crawl space was on fire.”

“So, she tried to kill you,” he says.

“She had her reasons,” I reply.

“You know what you sound like?”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

“A battered boyfriend.”

I scoff.

He shakes his head. “And I know what triggered your rampage.”

My nostrils flare. “Did you watch it?”

“I wouldn’t invade your privacy like that. Camila told me. She thinks Amethyst is working with X-Cite Media.”

Even though I still cling to the idea of a deep fake, betrayal still sinks its claws into my chest, filling my veins with cold venom. I can’t stomach the possibility of Amethyst being connected with the likes of Father and his deadly pornographers.

“And what do you think?” I rasp.

Jynxson falls silent the way he always does when the answer is obvious. From his point of view, it looks like Amethyst’s connection to Father goes deeper than the mere coincidence of her mother being his wife. Without that sprinkler system—the one neither I nor Amethyst knew existed—I would have been dispatched to hell in flames.

“I know Amethyst,” I mutter. “She wouldn’t sign up for anything so Machiavellian.”

“But her alternate personality might,” Jynxson replies.

“She doesn’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder. I would have met her alters by now.”

“Then she’s a sleeper agent, programmed to act when triggered.”

Something her uncle told me before we released him hits me like a truck. Shortly after he was imprisoned, Amethyst’s mother visited him at the penitentiary, wanting information on her missing daughter. She thought Clive would know because he had a working relationship with Father through his failing membership site.

Meaning, she believed Father had Amethyst. Could Father have programmed Amethyst to kill me?

No. I refuse to accept that.

I huff a laugh, wanting to blow off the suggestion, but the sound is hollow. “This isn’t science fiction.”

“Your father performed experiments on us all. What’s to say he didn’t go deeper with the Lolitas? There’s a reason the girls were taken away from us, and it wasn’t because we found their crying off-putting.”

My jaw clenches. Jynxson makes some excellent points, but the markers in Amethyst’s history indicate that she grew up with her mother—at least after the age of ten. By eleven, she enrolled in Tourgis Academy with Myra Mancini. By thirteen, she pushed her music teacher off the roof garden, after which she went through the court system, where she was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity.

I have records of her time at the Greenbridge Academy for Behaviorally Challenged Girls, followed by her enrollment at Alderney State University. Tyler and his team found articles about the disappearance of Sparrow and Wilder Reed, who were last photographed gyrating against Amethyst at a party.

“Admit it,” Jynxson says.

“Someone might have gotten to her while she was at the Greenbridge Academy. Something could have happened then. But if Father wanted me dead, he would have sent an assassin to Death Row.”

“What if he wanted your secrets?” Jynxson asks. “You have a firm that rivals the Moirai. Connections among its existing support staff. The means for him to claw back everything that was taken when you made him fall from grace.”

He makes several excellent points. Excellent, but wrong. I shake my head, not wanting to believe Amethyst would work with Father, even against her will.

“Come on. It’s not that much of a stretch,” he says. “Out of the hundreds of women sending you letters, how many of them came from your father or his agents? They could have split test over time, and refined their approaches until they honed the perfect candidate to slip past your defenses.”

Heat courses through my veins, fanning the flames of my denial. I turn to him and scowl. If I wasn’t strapped down like Hannibal Lecter, I would slam my fist into his face.

“Do you think I’d be so easily manipulated?”

“No, not easily. But how many years of data did he have on you? Field reports, observation, psych evaluations, medical records, surveillance footage. Amethyst’s persona would have been irresistible. A civilian who made her first kill at the age of thirteen, imprisoned by heavy-handed parents, crying out for a hero to set her free.”

“Did you read our letters?” I snap.

“It’s my job to watch your back.”

“I’m not on death row anymore,” I snarl. “If you’re so concerned about my welfare, then help me out of this bed.”

He frowns. “What for?”

“Because your theory has more holes than a practice target at a firing range. You forgot the part where I saw Amethyst stabbing a man in self-defense, and the part where four assholes broke into her house and tried to rape her over the kitchen table.”

He flinches, his face paling, but he shakes off the image. “Then how do you explain that video or the clip of her boarding a private jet?”

“I can’t. But I know a man who might.”

He frowns. “Who?”

“Reverend Thomas Dinsdale. Let me out and come with me to Simon’s Memorial Hospital. We’ll be gone for two hours.”

Jynxson’s eyes dart to the door. He rubs his jaw with the pad of his thumb. He’s wondering if he really can sneak me out without alerting the medics. It’s the same expression he used to make whenever I suggested sneaking out of bed to rob the pantry. He’s tempted but doesn’t want to anger Isabel or Camila.

“Amethyst doesn’t want to be there,” I say. “No matter what you think of her, she doesn’t deserve to end up in the clutches of a man like my father.”

His expression melts, and he sighs. “Fine, but if you don’t return, I’ll shoot your kneecaps and drag you back to face your sisters.”