Enemies(40)

“I don’t know,” I said and it came out choked. I realized in that moment that I truly had no idea why I’d done what I’d done, other than the fact that Rick had seriously pissed me off in his attempt to assert verbal control over me.

I got on my train, watching the area around me with care. I didn’t know what Omega’s next move would be. Part of me couldn’t believe that I’d killed their leader. The other part felt disgusted at the realization that he’d been just a man, not even the one who’d sent all of their clowns after me. Somehow his speech had twisted me up inside, listening to him go on and on about power, about how he and Winter had it and how I didn’t. Something snapped with just the slightest provocation by Wolfe. It hadn’t taken much, I knew that. I wouldn’t have been asking Wolfe about what he was if I hadn’t already been thinking about attacking the man, after all.

The walls of the underground blurred together outside the windows, and the clack of the tracks beneath us grew to a maddening pitch as I heard the screech of the train, jarring me out of my thoughts. I didn’t know where to go, didn’t know what to do. Janus had seemed surprisingly pragmatic about Rick’s death when I left, but I didn’t know if that was mere show or if he really meant it. For all I knew, they were absolutely fine with me slaughtering everyone in the building. On the flip side, they might have been placating me just long enough to throw me into a storage tank like they had with Andromeda. It was hard to say without a mind reader at my disposal.

I thumped my head against the window behind me. How was I supposed to know who to trust? I was surrounded by people who—according to them—had nothing but the purest motives, but every time I looked at them, their acts didn’t quite seem to match their rhetoric. Omega had done incredibly underhanded and nasty things to me in the past; I had a real problem believing that they were any kind of a force for good.

Then again, had you asked me a month ago if the Directorate was a force for good, my answer would have been yes.

The train screeched to a stop in Russell Square and I disembarked, taking the stairs five at a time on the spiral up and scaring the hell out of several people as I passed them, bouncing off the wall in a few places and leaping over them like I was some sort of expert in parkour—which I was, though not through practice.

I hit the hotel lobby and found it packed, students from every corner of Europe filling the place to the gills. They all had laptops and wireless devices out, and a smell of slightly unwashed humanity filled the space. When I made it to the elevator, I pushed the button for my floor and waited with a dozen other people. I forced myself against the back of the elevator as others crowded on. An overweight man who spoke in a brogue pushed himself against me, unintentionally pinning me into a corner next to a thin woman who spoke with an Eastern European accent.

I felt trapped, and for a moment, it was hard to breathe. I resisted the temptation to reach out and grasp the two people closest to me by their bare necks and wait until my power started to work. A trickle of sweat ran down my temple and my mouth felt dry. My hand shook, and I kept it firmly against my side, though the urge to just do it was screaming in every synapse of my brain, as if I hadn’t had a drink of water in forever and there was a full glass in front of me, waiting for me to reach out and take it. After all, why not? I had just murdered one man in cold blood, why not a couple more, but this time in a way I could truly feel and enjoy it.

The elevator dinged, the door opened, and fortunately three people got off. The fat man stepped away with the newfound space that the sudden reduction in passengers had given us, and the skinny woman worked her way out the door at the next floor.

When we arrived at my floor, there were only a couple people left on the elevator, and I dodged past them and went up the hall quickly to my room. I thrust the key card into the lock and waited for the familiar beep that acknowledged it before I pushed down on the handle and threw it open. I scooped up everything I owned and tossed it into my bag before going out the door again less than sixty seconds later.

Sienna, Zack’s voice came to me, we need to talk about this.

“We will,” I said, almost breathless as I pressed the button to summon the elevator, over and over, “but first I have to get somewhere else. Somewhere safe.”

The elevator dinged and opened and I thrust myself inside to find the box empty, thankfully. I put my back against the wall and took a deep breath. As the doors started to close I heard a ding and the elevator across the hall opened. I caught a glimpse of Karthik, Bast and Janus just as the doors clinked shut. The last thing I saw was Bast’s eyes widening in surprise as she saw me.