The words spilling from the girl's lips caught on the invisible glass shards in her throat, tearing their way out of her mouth piece by piece like the final, thrashing spasms of a wounded bird. In the darkest vault of her mind, the phantom of her brother lying blood-soaked across the shattered glass flickered like a broken projector; every single time this image violently materialized, it thrashed to bend and shatter the steel-like will forged inside Serevia. Yet she had sworn a silent oath absolutely to refuse offering this weakness, this fracturing, to the man—the statue of solid ice—towering across from her.

  Tearing her eyes away was no act of cowardice; rather, it served as a desperate thrashing to conceal the deep fracture in her soul, the bleeding wound, from her enemy. The exact second she severed eye contact, she escaped the Leader's piercing dissection for a fleeting moment, retreating into her own pitch-black sanctuary.

  Confronted with the girl's silent and broken surrender, the Leader slowly dismantled his dominant, predatory stance over the table. As he straightened his spine and drew himself to his full height, his shadow—stretching as if it would scrape the ceiling of the room—dropped over Serevia like a death warrant. They no longer stood face-to-face; the man had ascended back to where he truly belonged, to a godlike altitude, staring down at the girl from an untouchable peak.

  He reached his hand, sheathed in a black tactical glove, toward the weapon holster at his waist with a heavy, rhythmic motion. The heavy, grating rasp of leather grinding against polymer sliced through the lethal silence of the room like a physical blade.

  When Serevia jerked her head toward the sound with feral, reflexive speed, her pupils blew wide with a violent tremor at the sight before her.

  The metallic gleam the man gripped in his hand...

  This was the Sarcos weapon she had stolen in pure desperation dead center of the chaos last night in that blood-drenched street, the very gun she had thrashed to fire with violently trembling fingers. She remembered the custom engraving on its grip and the matte, menacing blackness of its barrel like the back of her own hand.

  The man had found the death machine the girl had stolen and tucked into her waistband, but the other one... A tiny crumb of hope flashed like lightning through Serevia's mind. The other weapon she had concealed with the feral agility of a squirrel, buried purely on reflex in the ruins right before they captured her... Could they have actually failed to find it? Could it have slipped completely unnoticed amidst the chaos and the rubble? This thought melted the block of ice in her stomach for a fleeting second, but the crushing reality that instantly followed violently strangled the frail hope. To be executed with the very weapon she had stolen, the weapon she had believed would be her salvation... This was the most merciless, ironic joke fate had ever played on her.

  Defying the jagged knot in her throat, the young girl pressed her lips tightly together; not a single word, not a single objection spilled from her mouth. Her absolute silence was no mere acceptance; it stood as a dignified farewell.

  After the Leader weighed the weapon in his hand with glacial, professional composure, he slowly pressed the dark, bottomless muzzle of the barrel against the girl's temple.

  The metal... It felt so freezing that the exact second it grazed Serevia's fever-scorched skin, it burned like a physical shard of dry ice. That lethal contact made every hair on her skin stand on end, sending a violently shuddering electric shockwave straight down her spine. This was the absolute touch of death; freezing, rigid, and devoid of all mercy.

  She slowly closed her eyes, desperate to entirely sever her tether to the world.

  Beneath her ribcage, her heart hammered against her ribs with a feral, violently erratic rhythm.

  Thud!

  Thud!

  Thud!

  Every single beat echoed in her ears like a deafening war drum. Her breath... her most loyal friend, now violently betrayed her, scraping through her throat in jagged, inadequate gasps. She dragged the artificial air of the room into the deepest, darkest corners of her lungs with a profound, trembling inhale—as if this were the absolute last breath she would ever take, as if she frantically wanted to imprison the very particles of air inside her. Even the air here felt entirely different; violently defying the rusted, death-reeking atmosphere outside, it remained perfectly pure, yet equally scorching.

  In the suffocating, pitch-black silence of the dark, death breathed its freezing air across the nape of her neck. The man loomed over her like a crushing shadow, keeping the cold steel of the barrel firmly pressed against her temple. A whisper, radiating an authority cold enough to put gravestones to shame, echoed right against her ear.

  "Goodbye."

  These two words were no farewell; they were an absolute sentence. Serevia sacrificed the final shred of breath left in her lungs to the shattered word violently trembling past her lips.

  "It's over..."

  The man's finger, sheathed in black leather, settled into the curve of the trigger. Time froze in that exact second. Serevia felt her muscles draw violently taut, sensing the blood completely drain from her veins. With merciless, agonizing slowness and lethal resolve, his finger squeezed backward.

  Click.

  That dry, metallic, and hollow sound violently severed the apocalypse Serevia had orchestrated in her mind like a physical blade.

  The deafening roar she expected, the crushing pressure meant to shatter her brain, never came. The room lacked the throat-burning, sulfurous reek of gunpowder, and no wet splatter of hot blood painted the walls. Only the echo of that sickening, degrading click hung suspended in the air.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Serevia tore her tightly squeezed eyelids wide open in pure shock the exact second she realized the sound she heard wasn't "death."

  The gun was empty.

  Not a single bullet remained in its chamber, its barrel, or its magazine. The muzzle pressed against her temple now amounted to nothing more than a cold, harmless chunk of iron.

  The massive surge of adrenaline detonating in her veins surrendered to a senseless, hollow void. As her knees threatened to buckle, her lungs dragged the air inward with greedy, feral panic, as if she hadn't drawn breath for years. She remained in one piece, still bolted to that damned chair in that damp-reeking room.

  She hadn't died.

  Her heart hammered against her ribs with a feral, erratic rhythm, desperate to tear through her chest and escape—but it kept beating. This was a sick joke, perhaps some degrading form of torture, yet the absolute result remained unchanged; air flooded her lungs. She gripped the edges of her chair with violently trembling hands. A dizzying, hysterical reality of "I am still here" rapidly usurped her terror.

  When she anchored her gaze to the ice-blue eyes of the man towering across from her, the words spilling from her lips amounted to no more than a whisper—a trembling, volatile cocktail of shock, fury, and absolute disbelief.

  "You didn't shoot..."

  Her voice sounded completely foreign even to her own ears. She had felt so absolutely certain moments ago that everything had ended, that she had stepped into the pitch-black tunnel, that the air currently flooding her lungs felt less like a reward and more like an agonizing joke. She felt as though an invisible hand had swept up the shattered glass shards of her reality and violently glued them back together, however crooked the result. She was alive.

  The Leader seemed to genuinely revel in watching Serevia's sheer shock as he holstered the empty death, that cold chunk of metal, back at his waist with a heavy, dismissive ease.

  He raised his gloved hand with casual fluidity, looking not like a man who had just played Russian roulette with someone's life, but simply like someone wrapping up a tedious chore. He lightly combed his fingers back through the thick, raven-black hair falling across his forehead. Fueled by the bizarre, hyper-aware clarity the moment provided, Serevia focused on this detail—on this violently hypnotic contrast—for the very first time.

  His hair... Under the raw, white light, it shone as pitch-black as a raven's wing, as deep and dense as the night itself. Beneath that absolute darkness, his skin remained as flawless and pale as polished marble. His eyes burned with that merciless ice-blue she already knew. Even with the black oxygen mask suffocating the lower half of his face, concealing his strong jawline and nose, the man's dark, menacing aesthetic stood before her as an undeniable reality. He was a killer, a butcher... Yet he possessed a form so flawless it defied denial.

  After adjusting his hair, the man squared his broad shoulders and spoke with the muffled, authoritative voice bleeding from behind his mask. "I cannot allow you to die just yet." He ruthlessly locked his gaze back onto the girl's violently trembling body.

  "To think you would just drop dead that easily, that you would slip away from all this... would be absolute stupidity."

  Serevia drove a deep crease between her brows as she thrashed to digest what she just heard. The terror from moments ago slowly began surrendering its ground to her old, familiar suspicion and deeply ingrained defense mechanisms. She swept her eyes across the man's visible features. She couldn't see the expression he hid behind the mask, nor how his lips curled, but she could easily pick out the sinister, calculated gleam burning in his blue eyes.

  "What the hell are you talking about?" Serevia spat, her voice raspy yet razor-sharp. "What are you going to do to me?"

  The girl's sheer defiance, her desperate thrashing to bare her claws the exact second she stepped away from the end of a barrel, birthed a faint, mocking smile on the Leader's lips behind his mask—a smirk Serevia completely failed to see. It was amusing. This girl was a feral weed grown in the rotting trash heaps of Caduta; even when ruthlessly stomped on, she still fought to raise her head. She was different, yes. And for that exact reason, she had seated herself dead center of the pitch-black plan taking shape in the man's mind.

  The man leaned slightly over the table, violently reigniting the tension between them.

  "You ask far too many questions, rat."

  The sheer terror frozen like a mask across Serevia's face slowly surrendered its ground to the jagged lines of a murky, restless curiosity.

  The freezing phantom of the metal she had just felt against her temple continued to scorch her skin; her heart thrashed against her ribs in erratic, agonizing stutters. Her logic screamed at her to shut her mouth, to shrink into her corner and turn entirely invisible; after all, her absolute fate hung entirely on a single syllable slipping from the masked man's lips, on the slightest twitch of his fingertip. Yet the pitch-black uncertainty gnawing at her mind violently outweighed her terror, crawling all the way to the tip of her tongue. This man weaponized his words like poisoned bait; he continually left the fragmented pictures he laid out before her unfinished, burying the rest in absolute darkness. And Serevia found she couldn't even draw breath without knowing exactly what lurked in that dark.

  Serevia strained her wrists against the knots binding her behind the chair and violently dug her nails into her palms. She desperately hunted for an anchor to ground her fragile courage. The brutal dryness in her throat forced her voice out far weaker and infinitely more jagged than she expected; as she dragged the words from her mouth, she fought a separate, agonizing war for every single syllable.

  "Why... why do you keep dancing around the truth?"

  Her voice violently fractured and faded mid-sentence. She bowed her head slightly, desperately thrashing to escape the crushing weight of those ice-blue eyes, but her feral curiosity forced her to stare straight back into that bottomless well.

  "If you weren't going to kill me... If this isn't over... then what? What the hell do you want from me?"

  As the question violently echoed through the dead silence of the room, Serevia shocked even herself with her own sheer audacity. For someone who had literally just stood nose-to-nose with her executioner and felt the freezing breath of death against the nape of her neck, hurling these questions felt no different than playing with raw fire. But she absolutely had to know; was she merely a victim, a lab rat, or a pawn in something infinitely worse?

  Confronted by the girl's relentless, line-crossing defiance, the Leader exhaled a deep, heavy breath of pure displeasure through his mask. He let his shoulders drop a fraction and slowly shook his head, as if he could no longer physically stomach the sheer stupidity of the creature sitting across from him. The ice-blue eyes burning above the mask narrowed to lethal slits; his gaze radiated a crushing, absolute contempt that pulverized the girl's misplaced courage into dust.

  "You just dragged yourself back from the absolute brink of death... Terror should have wired your jaw shut. Your breath should have failed you entirely."

  The man's voice bled out with a metallic, razor-sharp edge that violently thickened the air in the room, dripping with lethal warning. He leaned further across the table, looming toward her like a pitch-black shadow bracing to collapse and bury her.

  "Yet you still demand answers. You are far too curious."

  A brief, nerve-shredding silence strangled the room. The Leader slowly, rhythmically tapped his gloved fingers against the edge of the wood. "Or perhaps, by refusing to pull that trigger..." he murmured, dropping his voice to a lethal, pitch-black whisper. "Did I make a mistake... Serevia?"