D E L P H I N I U M

I didn't leave my room the entire next day. I was afraid to leave the safety of the four walls, the now-familiar space. If I went out, I'd have to face too much. My grandmother. Benton. My friends. The horrors I'd seen in this house—and I couldn't relive those things. I wondered if I'd ever have the courage to. Once, I did.

But now...

For hours, all I did was stare at the window, cross legged and leaning against the headboard with a blade grasped in each hand. The same window Imperium agents had broken through when I was fourteen. I could still feel the way their fingers dig into the soft skin of my arms, how I'd thrashed and fought even then—despite not knowing how to properly fight. Yet. The overwhelming fear, my lungs filled with it. And one question: why me?

Almost every day, I wondered what would have happened if those agents hadn't burst through my window. If I had never known enslavement, if I would never be subjected to abuse and a dark cell for a room. What would it be like if I never had to learn to fight for my life, to be forced into becoming something horrible and unearthly and monstrous?

Before Benny dragged me back, I'd truly been turning to the person I'd always wanted to be. I had started to learn how to put the past behind me. Occasionally, I'd realize I hadn't thought about my past life in weeks. And I was proud of myself for it. I was finally undoing the damage my master had caused in me.

Then this. I didn't just have a fall from grace, I was thrown. And I didn't know how to get back up.

So I sat on my bed the entire day, staring out the window and expecting to see an Imperium soldier climbing through. Outside, the sun began to set. I watched the cloud-peppered sky turn from cerulean to a deep golden pink when the sun sent out its last rays before dipping below the horizon. Ever since I could remember, I'd always loved finding beauty around me. It gave me hope that although creatures like myself terrorized the earth, not everything was touched by evil.

I leaned my head back against the headboard of my bed, still not taking my eyes away from the window. In my head, I conjured up the images of the forty one people I'd murdered. Policemen. ONNT soldiers. Civilians. Rebels. I didn't even know their names. But they'd known mine.

When I did die, I wondered what would be waiting for me. If I didn't pay for my crimes in this world, I certainly would in the next.

Some dark part of me wanted it. I wanted retribution for what I'd done. My dead pressed down on me wherever I went, begging to not be forgotten, wishing for their names to be remembered. No one could touch my old master, not really. So it was better for me to suffer than no one at all. I'd take all their blows. Someone had to pay. Blood demanded blood.

I looked down at the knives in my hands and remembered the day I'd wanted to drag them across my throat. It would be easy. But I wouldn't. There would be retribution if I took the easy way out rather than live out the rest my life. It was punishment enough. And if I didn't live, who would carry the dead? Who would remember the faces of those victims?

I didn't want my eyes to droop. I didn't want to sleep, didn't want to hear the screams. To fight my seemingly permanent exhaustion off, I conjured up images of each of my victims and remembered what they'd looked like, how my knives had felt against their necks. There were too many to count.

But sleep still found me in the end. I ended up wishing it hadn't.

I was in my bed, still holding my knives. The feeling of the cool handles between my fingers was a small comfort. I'd been watching the window diligently for hours. It felt like it had been days. But I couldn't tear my eyes away. It was all I could do now to protect myself.

Spires of fear shot through all the veins in my body when a gloved hand slapped onto the bottom of my window frame. The dark figure pulled itself through the window. How was it open? I thought I'd made sure to lock it. Hadn't I?

The second the masked face lifted, I screamed. It was him. In my room. He was back for me.

Every part of me was frozen in fear, almost sucked toward his sheer power. I needed to fight, needed to run, needed to end him before he ended me. But when I found the ability to move, I looked down and saw that my knives were gone. My power gone. Defenseless. I was defenseless.

Somehow, I found it in myself to run. Whipping open my bedroom door, I sprinted down the hallway, desperately looking for somewhere to hide. But there was no hiding from him. I knew he'd find me anywhere.

Every door handle I tried was locked. I screamed and pleaded when the looming figure advanced after me in the entrance of the hallway. But he didn't listen.

Finally, a door opened for me and I let out a shaky breath of relief. At least it would put space between him and me. But when I saw what lay before me, I almost wished for my old master.

My mother and father stood before me, my brother in front of them and grandfather off to the side. And they were alive. They were alive.

"You're supposed to be... What are you doing here?" I asked, voice shaking either from fear or something much deeper.

My gaze went to my mother first. She was beautiful in the way I was—delicate bone structure, the sharp jaw and pert nose. Her hair was a dark blonde opposed to my white, but I now understood why it was painful for my grandmother to see my face.

She spoke first. "The question is: what are you doing here?"

"After all the things you've done," my grandfather said, "You still have the audacity to stand before us."

"But...I'm your daughter," I said, trying to make them understand. They were angry with me, so furious...

My father shook his head and regarded me under a steel blue gaze—my same gaze. "We don't have a daughter anymore. We don't know you."

A sob escaped my lips. They were alive and this was what they were saying?

"You could have been good, Delphinium," my brother Tobiah—Toby—said. "You could have made us proud." He had a mix of my mother's bright beauty and my father's rough, masculine looks. And he should have been twenty one, but he appeared now as the nineteen-year-old he was when he died.

"I tried—I thought I did..."

"If you truly tried then you would have saved us," my brother spat. "And you wouldn't have done that." He pointed to the left and my eyes followed towards where he was pointing.

There, piled on the floor, lay my teammates' bodies. Finn's face bled into his gaping mouth, covering his teeth with a thick red film. Arlo's spine twisted in a way it shouldn't have been. I swallowed. There was a bullet hole in the center of Gigi's forehead, marring her delicate looks. My breath caught when I saw how Riley's head spilled blood—cracked open from some gruesome force. Kane and Jaxon slumped against each other, both bleeding from a thousand cuts—too many to hold all the blood in. I had to tear my eyes away from their large, broken bodies. And Jake lay closest to my feet, his throat slit from ear to ear, blood caking his cruel face.

Horrified tears ran down my face. Had I done this, or had I simply not been enough to protect them? And a much deeper question: did it even matter which it was?

I took a step back. "No—no, I didn't..."

"This is your fault," my father said, not a single ounce of emotion in his familiar, once-beloved face. "This demands retribution."

"No," I pleaded when I realized what they would do to me. "No, please don't. Please."

"Your victims begged too, didn't they?" My grandfather asked, his usually kind, elegant features now twisted with rage. "And you didn't stop."

"So neither will he." Toby pointed over my shoulder and I turned to see my master towering over me. All I could do was scream, frozen, as he reached out for me...

I awoke and had to hold back a real scream. Scrambling for my knives in the swirled blankets, I whirled to the window, expecting to see the figure from my dream. But it was as I'd left it: closed and locked.

When the reality of what I'd just seen sunk in, so did the nausea. Deep seated, disgusting nausea. I went through my new routine of panicking and vomiting until I'd calmed down again. And as I leaned against the toilet, I just wished for it to stop. All of it.

I walked on wobbly legs to my room again, my gaze immediately finding the window again. He could be out there, a soldier or assassin could be aiming a gun at my head right now and I wouldn't know until I was already dead. My heart raced. I was going to die.

But I looked to the darkness outside and thought of that reality, something deep inside me shifted. There was a spike of fury in my chest. None of this would have happened if I didn't hold this strange power. They'd abused it, abused me. And they'd do it again. It was only for a second, but it was there.

And it was that small swelling of rage that made me go to Jake's room to ask a single question. I wasn't sure whether it was because I needed to make sure I could still feel something or if it was because I simply couldn't be alone. Or if I wanted to check that his throat was not slit as it was in my dream.

Wherever it was, it forced me to push open his door and demand, "Why did you pull me out of the ocean that day?" The words just slipped out. A few days ago, Jaxon had told me the story of how Jake had carried my destroyed body from the ocean floor back up to the beach. I'd barely believed him.

Jake, who was sitting at the desk and going through paperwork, as usual, gave me a look of distain. "You look like you're on the verge of passing out. If you fall and hit your head, you're cleaning the blood off my floor, Tesla."

Hearing his voice was the safest thing in that moment. I nearly lashed out at his cold comment but knew he was probably right. So I reluctantly sat down in the chair in the corner of the room and demanded again, "Why did you pull me out of the ocean that day?"

He raised an eyebrow. "You really don't know?" Then he said to me scathingly, as if I should have already known, "I owed you a favor. Now we're even."

"That's it?"

He looked at me for a moment with eyes like ice. "Did you think there would be another reason?"

I let out a sigh. "I can't believe I went willingly with Benton for this."

"And look at us, still alive in the end," he said snidely, going back to his paperwork.

"It's not the end yet."

"I know. There's still a lot of work to be done."

I swallowed. How could I tell him I couldn't do it? There was so much to be done and I wasn't sure I could handle going through with it.

So I changed the subject. "Are you working on your next step to take Hundsen down?"

"I'm always working on my next step to take Hundsen down."

Knowing I couldn't go back to my room and be alone, I decided to pry. "And what is that next step? What are you doing next?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

"I'll remember this when you want my help with one of your plans."

"If you think I need you, you're sadly mistaken."

Scoffing, I answered without thinking. "Yeah, right. You need me."

And then I realized what I'd said. Had he meant to make me admit it: that my abilities were necessary—that they couldn't fight this war without me? Or had I simply done it on my own?

Either way, Jake said nothing more. My mind began to drift back to the dream I had. For the sake of my own mentality, I chose to focus on the first half—and my most pressing problem. My old master.

I then said it aloud—my newest fear. "He'll come for me again. He will keep searching for me. And by then, he will have perfected the issue that kept allowing me to come back in times of physical trauma. I won't be able to snap out of it." I didn't have to say his name.

"Orion won't take you again." He said it so matter-of-factly that I wondered if he was doing what he often did—looking ahead and gauging what our enemies' plans would be. Whatever he meant by it, it quieted me.

He pushed off the chair and made a move to leave, grabbing his black coat. My heart plummeted. "Stay," I said, suddenly desperate. "Stay. I can owe you a favor, I don't care. Just please stay."

Jake turned his gaze on me and I held it, wondering what was running through his mind. Probably a battle between wanting to leave and whether he should take my owing him a favor. A battle between leaving or staying.

Slowly, he threw the coat on the desk and sat back down. With his back turned to me once again, he said, "I'll tell you when I want to cash in that favor."

For a while, I just watched him. The sound of pen scribbling on paper was the only noise in the room. He had a cup of the blackest coffee I'd ever seen, so he clearly wasn't meaning to sleep tonight. I glanced at the window—closed and locked—and back at him.

There was a gun lying near his left hand and I knew he'd use it if anything happened. He hadn't let me die once and I suspected he wouldn't let it happen again.

Ever since my return, all I'd wanted was to feel something, really feel something. Something to fill the crushing emptiness. And as I looked to him, positioned between myself and the window, I finally did.