Page 105 of Pride
Because you’ve been too busy trying to do everything yourself.
Just like Alice had warned him. But… letting people help got his arm hacked. If Parker had taken the time to assess the bionic arm himself, surely he would have found the security leak. Surely.
A stream of torchlight hit them from behind. Alice and Axel. That simple light leading to his mate reminded him of how he’d lost his arm in the first place. Pride.
Shit happened when he accepted help, but it was worse when he tried to do it on his own.
Julius’s face contorted into something ugly, and he cursed at their intrusion. He lifted a gun. Aimed. Parker snapped out of his shock and dropped to the water, searching for his arm. If he could get it reattached… His fingers brushed metal—
“Look out!” Alice shouted.
Gunfire.Concrete crumbled. Water splashed. Something snarled. Was Alice okay?
He searched behind him—glimpsed her pointing her sword at a figure near him, and then a dark shape hit Parker, knocking him to his side. His head submerged, and all he could think of was Alice. He rolled to his feet. Instinct saved him. His good arm whipped out, the heel of his palm hit the body—a replicate—recoiling him. One after another, more figures arrived and Parker hit them, sending them flying backward. Four… five… six. They weren’t right. Half were naked, the other half had clothing hanging from them in tatters. His hits would have stopped a normal man, but these replicates picked themselves up like zombies. Scratched faces and bloody stumps for fingers. But it was their eyes that horrified Parker. Life and acknowledgment existed there. Trapped. They knew what was happening to them. These people had been remade and reborn from Faithful donated DNA. They’d thought their new lives would be glorious, but they were puppets on Julius’s strings.
The man himself was already disappearing down a tunnel, the glow from his device glancing off the curved walls as he ran to a safe distance. When he turned back, the glow lit up his sinister face from beneath.
“Like I said to your sister,” Julius shouted, his voice echoing. “Your hope is futile. You can’t win. I’ve planned for all variables.”
Parker pushed a replicate underwater until he ran out of breath. His resistance was strong, but not enough for the strength pumping through Parker’s arm.
“You didn’t plan for us tracking you around the world,” Parker shot back, unable to stop himself from returning a taunt. Maybe if he could keep Julius here, he could finish these replicates and deal with him once and for all. He kicked out as a second replicate came for him and connected.
In his periphery, Axel jammed a knife into a replicate’s eye, and Alice sliced through a third replicate. He smiled at her form.Magnificent. His tattoo itched, pride shooting higher. Maybe that’s what he needed, to turn into a mindless pride monster and just obliterate Julius.
“Didn’t I?” Julius shouted, a manic grin on his face as he tapped away on that cursed iPad. “I knew exactly what would happen when I dragged her around, all tortured and full of despair.”
A replicate’s punch to Parker’s face sent him reeling, just as Julius’s words had done. He knew?
And then from his memory, Julius’s words at the party came back. “It was never about them.”At the time Parker had thought Julius meant his family—the wife and daughter he was trying to raise from the dead. They were his sole purpose for doing all of this. But those words hadn’t quite made sense in the context, and now he realized why. Just before Julius had spoken those words, Parker had mentioned every Syndicate base location.
It was never about them.
Meaning, never about the Syndicate. By dragging Daisy around to the sites, suspecting she had a tracking device on her, Julius ensured the doom and destruction of the greater Syndicate operation. He’d planned for their demise.
“You wanted them destroyed,” Parker revealed. “Why?”
“They thought they could control me,” he shouted. “Me! The man who started all this. They wanted me to give up my—” Julius cut himself off, closed his eyes and tapped his collarbone.“Not long, my loves.”Julius took a deep breath, rallied, and met Parker’s eyes. “I don’t need them anymore to get what I want. You see, your sister did me a favor when she destroyed the last piece of DNA from my wife and child. I realize that now. She showed me what truly mattered, and it wasn’t a world without sin, it was simply them. I just wantthem. And now, with these uncontrolled replicates, through a miracle, I can find them again. I don’t need to bring them to me when it’s far easier for me to go to them!”
He was talking about what Alice had claimed, what the Sinners had warned about. Parker gaped. But that was insane. Wasn’t it? “Hell isn’t real, Julius. You’ve gone mad.”
“It’s not Hell.” He jerked, affronted. “It’s just another dimension where souls go after here.”
“And you have proof of that?”
“The only proof I need is in my heart.” He tapped his chest. “I know they’re waiting for me. I heard her.”
Alarmed, Parker met Alice’s eyes across the intersection. Hearing his dead wife? Even if there was another dimension, there was no proof there were souls on the other side. There was no proof it was Hell. Damn it, there was no proof ofanything. For all they knew, it was a glitch in the replicate programming.
Parker didn’t give a fuck what it was. That wasn’t his job. His job was to stop Julius, to stop sin inthisworld. Here and now. And for that, he needed his arm. Alice jumped into the water to help him search, but the moment they dropped their guard, more replicates surged down the tunnel, barreling past Julius, almost bowling him over.
And then he felt it. A tingle in the air. An electrical current. One of these replicates was powered—the same as Evan.Electricity.
“Got it!” Alice lifted his bionic arm.
“Get out of the water!” he shouted at her. “They’re powered.”
With the grace of a dancer, Alice jumped backward and clung to a ridge on the wall. Parker dove into the smaller tunnel leading to Daisy. He would survive a jolt of electricity, but if he wanted to reinstall his arm, he couldn’t afford to fry the wires at his stump.
