Page 61 of Fragile Facade
The thrill intensifies, and just like that, my mind goes delightfully dark and the job becomes a challenge to win. Riot has always been my best competitor. He notices my shift in mood, commenting on it with the glint in his eyes and the tilt of his lips.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s fuck over Reaper Corp.”
* * *
It all starts here.
It was surprisingly easy to enter the city with a group of tourists. We were on a bus, snapping photos of a place people come to visit for its architecture and history. Once an old sacred city, Reaper Corp overtook it twenty years ago, and since then, they’ve brainwashed the country into believing they did it for the preservation of history, claiming the government and tourism industry would ruin it. Which means people respect Reaper Corp and what they’ve done to protect a sacred city.
Bullshit.
They aren’t protecting it. They’re utilizing it, mind-controlling the citizens, and bringing in tourists to spread their gospel far and wide. Facts said that statistically, a hundred thousand people a year put in a request to move to Reaper City because they believe it to be a safe and wonderful place to raise children. The school system is its own, renowned, and the proof is in the pudding of how many geniuses Reaper City produces. Little do they know, those geniuses are bred in a lab with genetic modifiers for those exact traits, skewing the statistics to further brainwash the continent.
Whatever. None of my business, and seriously, I couldn’t care less about this place. If Reaper Corp wasn’t actively trying to do the same thing in Moros, I’d even respect them for it. But since they are, they’re my enemy, and the only thing I care about is stopping them because Moros is mine. Ours. And no one, not even this corporation that wields power like we wield darkness, is going to take it from us unless they kill us all first.
We got the tour, and towards the end, we slipped away from the crowd near the centre of town. Ransom is in my ear, directing us where to go, and Glitch is remotely bypassing doors for us as we sneak through the lower levels of their research facility. The late evening tour ends a few blocks from here at a cathedral-style building that used to be a church; now, it’s still a place of devotion, but to Reaper Corp. Our plan is to get in, get the keycode, and join up with the tour in no less than forty-five minutes so we can take the same bus back out of the city walls.
You know what they say about well-crafted plans…
“This is it,” Riot says, closing a door behind us.
“Ten minutes before guard shift rotation,” Ransom says through the earpiece. “Get ready.”
Ten minutes. My nerves come back because ten minutes isn’t enough time to… I don’t know, think things I’ll never say aloud. What happens if we don’t make it out of this mission? What will I do if Remi has to live without me? If Selena has to deal with Mom all on her own? If my family loses another brother…
Maybe it’d be a good thing. It wouldn’t be suicide, so it’d break the family curse. I’m too selfish to willingly die to save my family, but if it’s forced upon me, I’ll go down as the hero who ended the infamous Sauder curse, right?
“Get your shit together,” Riot snaps at me, pulling on my wrist until I sink down beneath the glass windows of the room we’re in. It’s an empty meeting room, and right outside the door is the elevator bank that’ll lead to the lab we need. “Stop thinking.”
“I’m not.” I pull my pack off my back.
“You are. Remi and Selena will be fine. Wanna know why?” He kneels in front of me, pulling shit from his own bag. “Because we’re getting out of this fucking place, got it? I don’t give a shit what it takes, Reaper Corp won’t beat us.”
They might…
“I’ll make ya a deal,” Riot says as he pulls on a pair of black gloves, reminding me to do the same. “If we both make it out of here alive, I’ll give you something you want.”
“The fuck do you know about what I want?” I snap, watching him slip a vial of something into his pants pocket. “I have everything I want.”
“Almost,” he grins, pocketing devices. “You want me to hold your hand like I held that little girl’s hand.”
My whole face flushes and I shove against his chest, needing him out of my space while insecurity eats me alive. “You’re fucked.” But he’s not wrong, and I hate that he’s not wrong. I hate that he caught me looking, watching, baffled by the simplicity of hand-holding that comes with no danger and no deception. No one has ever held my hand, and I don’t understand why I want it. It’s a pointless gesture that does nothing but confuse, and I refuse to accept that it means something to me. “I thought our deal was about curses and death chasing?”
He simply grins, and I resent him for masking it in something innocently challenging. “It was.”
“It still is.”
“Okay,” he says like he’s coddling me. “But plans can change. Hurry up and put the contacts in.”
I set my gloves on my lap and use the small mirror he’s holding to place a pair of blue contacts in my eyes. They burn, making my eyes water until I blink enough that they settle in. They’re only a back-up plan if Glitch can’t get me through doors with retinal scanners. I’m going to be a ghost tonight, but there are cameras that will register my body, so I need to look like I fit in. I throw on a blazer to go with my black pants, appearing more business casual than I ever have before.
“Mmm,” Riot hums, eye-fucking me in his utility outfit that looks so damn good on him it only makes me begrudge him more. Since when does he appeal to me so intensely? He’s always been… but now he’s…
“Two minutes,” I remind him, putting the gloves on and making sure all my weapons are in place. “We ride up to the seventeenth floor, and as soon as those doors open, you gotta put on a show so I can walk down the hall unseen.”
“Figures you’d need me to put on a show to make your job easier,” he mocks, smirking. “You got it.”
Call me sweetheart.
