“If you’re lying, I’ll fucking kill you,” I croaked, my mouth and throat so dry my tongue felt like it had corners.

“I’m not—” Milligan glanced down a hallway I couldn’t see as a set of firm, even footsteps echoed toward us. “Here he comes.”

I swallowed a sob. I’d expected to die alone in this false dark. In these dead shadows.

Milligan stepped back, and Jake Tower replaced him in the doorway, a steel-spined symbol of power and authority in his white button-up shirt and suit jacket, sans tie. I hated myself for how relieved I was to see him, when he was the one who’d locked me up. I hated his clean clothes, and combed hair, and tanned skin. I hated the apple wood smoke clinging to his clothes from the grill, making my stomach rumble and cramp. I hated the slight flush in his cheeks that told me he’d had two glasses of red wine with his steak—never more, never less, because Tower was in control. Of everything. Always.

Jake Tower was the heart of the Tower syndicate. We—the initiates—were the lifeblood of the organization, but Tower was the pump that kept us flowing through the veins and arteries of this living machine. He pushed the buttons and pulled the strings, and we belonged to him, all of us, bound into service, sealed in flesh, by blood and by name. We lived and died according to his will. And we obeyed because obedience was a physical mandate. Even when our minds resisted, our bodies complied, helpless in the face of a direct order.

But I’d found a loophole. I’d disobeyed the spirit of an order, if not the order itself, and as punishment, Tower had thrown open the gates of hell and shoved me inside. He’d locked me up and given Jonah free rein, and for all I knew, Jake had forgotten I even existed until…

Until what?

Until he needed me. Why else would he be here? Why else had he let me live, if my current state could even be called living?

Tower’s nose wrinkled—I didn’t smell good—then he closed the door at his back and sat on the edge of the bare foam mattress covering the raised concrete slab that was my bed. He grabbed my chin and tilted my face toward the light, studying me. I knew what he saw, though there was no mirror in my cell. Bruises. Dark circles and sharp cheek bones. Split lips. And the damage didn’t end with my face. I looked like hell and I felt worse.

Tower looked…satisfied. “Does it hurt?”

“You fucking know it hurts.” Everywhere. That was the whole point. With my existence reduced to fear, and pain, and dead shadows, surely I would never even consider another betrayal. “The lights?” I didn’t want to ask, but I had to know. “Your idea?” Jonah wasn’t smart enough to think of something like that.

Tower’s lips curled up in a small smile, like he’d just remembered some distant childhood pleasure. “An irony I hope you fully appreciate. Absolute, inescapable darkness for the shadow-walker. Imprisoned by the source of your own abilities. How did that feel?”

I am a Traveler. A shadow-walker. I can step into a shadow in one room, then out of a shadow anywhere else I want to go, within my range. I can see better in the dark than most people. Sometimes I can look into one shadow and see through another one, somewhere else, like looking through a periscope, or one of those paper-towel-roll telescopes we used to play with as kids.

But the basement darkness was anemic, thanks to a grid of infrared lights, too high up for me to reach. So while my cell looked absolutely, claustrophobically dark to the naked eye, that darkness was too shallow for me to travel through. The shadows were dead. I was trapped in the element that had always been my ally. My escape.

How did that make me feel?

Like I’d been betrayed by my own body. Like I was lost to the rest of the world. Like I no longer existed at all, which would have been easy to believe, if not for the pain anchoring me to the reality of my own miserable existence. But I wasn’t going to tell Tower that.

“It sucked, on ice. Happy?”

He said nothing. Whatever he wanted to tell me would come on his terms, and making me wait for it was just another way of making me suffer.

“Why?” I demanded, pissed off that my voice was as weak as the rest of me. “Why didn’t you just kill me?” He’d killed others for far less than what I’d done.

“You needed to pay for your crimes, and others needed to know you were paying.” He said it like he might explain that grass is green, as if it should have been obvious, and the emptiness in his voice was the scariest thing I’d ever heard.

“You told them?”

“You were an object lesson, Korinne. I showed them.” He glanced at the slab of one-way glass in the top half of the interior wall, and my blood froze in my veins. I started to shake, and I couldn’t stop.

“You let them watch?” He’d invited an audience to see me beaten, and broken, and humiliated, and… I closed my eyes against this new layer of humiliation.

“Only those who needed to see.”

“Kenley?” No. Please no. I didn’t want her touched by this. I didn’t want her to know. If Tower was void of human emotion, Kenley was made of it, and she couldn’t defend herself. That was my job.

Tower shook his head. “Your sister only knows that you’re alive. She’s anxious to see you.”

I exhaled slowly and blinked back tears that would never fall, using them as fuel for the rage burning deep in my gut. Fury that would have no outlet for four more years. Anger that would fester and burn as I planned for the day when I’d be the one throwing punches and spilling blood. Jake Tower would pay. Jonah would pay. Milligan and the other guards would pay. Everyone who’d watched would fucking pay.