Page 237 of Nemesync
Brian emerged from the doorway, with red eyes and worry all over her face, breathless, and trembling.
She took a deep breath and stopped in front of us. “I monitored everything through the earpiece. The person who shot Zanae, the one who tried to end her life, it’s... it’s her mother.”
A stunned silence settled over the room.
My eyes, once filled with darkness and anxiety, now held rage and surprise.
This bitch, it was her?
Her own fucking mother shot her.
Now, I could feel the monster emerge from the abyss of my soul. Driven by a relentless thirst for revenge and blood, I felt it.
The only ounce of humanity I had reclaimed through Zanae faded away. The stupid morality I found through her amber eyes, now closed, was gone, leaving in me only this goddamn hole so deep that nothing could satisfy or soothe it.
“The woman spoke to Zanae,” Brian continued. “She said, ‘Sorry, my beautiful daughter. It wasn’t your time to provoke the man I love, you understand that.’ ”
My fists clenched, the veins on my forehead pulsating and threatening to explode. “Isn’t she dead?”
Brian shook her head, “I don’t know. But we have a lead now. We know who she is, it’s her since the beginning, the gifts, the one who told Alonzo to kidnap her, June’s letter, it was always her.”
Now that I have a face and the name of this woman, nothing would stop me. She’s going to pay dearly for hurting my Zanae.
Time passed, Brian was on her laptop, Niko lost in thought, and I was burning inside. The waiting room had become a collective purgatory. I was a volcano, my blood boiling, ready to erupt and ravage everything.
I needed to do something; I was going insane.
The revelation of the connection between the woman who shot Zanae and the organization was brutal.
How? Why? So many questions.
I felt drowning in emotions I didn’t even know I could feel.
Pain, anger, sadness, frustration, love, hate, everything at once.
Brian stepped forward, her laptop in hand. “I retraced their steps after they jumped from the window. I found surveillance footage, pictures, and then by connecting them, I found the road they took and where they went.”
She showed me the images on a screen, revealing the city streets where the woman and Lukas were certainly hiding.
My eyes flickered over the scenes, my mind full of Zanae’s pale face.
“Lukas,” Brian continued, her voice weighted with information that added fuel to my seething anger. “He’s the one who abused her years ago, during her kidnapping. He touchedher, and she froze; that’s when he almost got her. She had him at first; he wasn’t stronger, he was just using the power he held over her to make her weak. She almost got him; that’s when I heard the gunshot.”
Brian’s face turned blurry, shadowy almost.
All I could feel was this primal anger, this insatiable need for retribution.
It wasn’t anger; it was fury. And so much pain.
The darkest part of my mind was stimulated by this information.
Shehadhim. She faced the man that she wanted to kill for so long, and then her own mother shot her.
But my baby had him; she was stronger than anyone for doing that.
I got up, knowing exactly what I was going to do now.
Nikolai spoke with the coldest voice I’ve heard him use in our lifetime. “Annihilate them all, Elijah.”
