Page 123 of Savage Saint
But something stops me.
Kasia's eyes snap open. Her gaze finds mine across the room, her eyes are soft, and her mouth twitches with a barely there smile.
Yes, Butterfly. We got it. You're free.
"Kill him," Jerzy commands, gesturing toward me with the device like he's conducting a fucking orchestra. "Now, Kasia." His voice carries absolute certainty, the voice of a man who's never been disobeyed, never been denied, never had his power questioned.
The arrogant bastard doesn't even realise his toy is broken.
I hold my breath, muscles coiled tight as a spring. We removed the chip, I know we did. I can still feel the weight of it in my palm, slick with her blood. But what if we missed something? What if there's another failsafe buried deeper, some secondary system we didn't detect? What if—
Kasia moves slowly, deliberately, her hand reaching behind her back. For a moment—one horrible, suspended moment—even I wonder if some programming remains, some deep conditioning carved into her psyche that no surgery could remove.
She pulls out her gun in one smooth motion, the movement so fluid it's like watching water flow. Raises it with the steady hands of someone who's done this a thousand times before.
And aims directly at Jerzy.
"No," she says, her voice steady as steel despite the slight tremor in her hand, not from fear, I realise, but from barely contained rage.
Jerzy's eyes widen, genuine shock replacing his smug confidence. It's beautiful, watching his control shatter like glass. For the first time in probably decades, someone has told him no and meant it.
The sight of his arrogance crumbling makes my fingers itch to pull the trigger, to end him right here, to splatter his brains across his pristine office. But this isn't my kill. It's hers. Has to be hers. This bastard stole her childhood, her innocence, her agency. She deserves to take it back with interest.
"I remember everything," Kasia continues, taking a step closer to me. Her free hand finds mine, and I squeeze gently, grounding her, letting her know I'm here. Her skin is cold, clammy with fear-sweat, but her grip is strong. "How you killed my father, your own brother. How you murdered my mother while I watched. Made me watch." Her voice cracks slightly, twenty years of suppressed grief bleeding through. "Your own niece. Your brother's daughter. How could you?"
Jerzy's face contorts with rage, the mask of civility finally slipping completely. "Your mother was a whore, and your father, my weak, pathetic brother," he spits the words like venom, "was an idiot who couldn't see the bigger picture." His hand moves back to the device, pressing the button repeatedly now, desperation making his movements jerky. Click-click-click-click. "Work, damn you!"
The pathetic display almost makes me laugh. He's lost control of his favourite puppet, and he can't fucking handle it. This is what power looks like when it crumbles. Desperate, ugly, small.
"You can press that button all you want," Kasia says, and there's a hint of dark satisfaction in her voice that sends heat through my veins. "It won't work. Not anymore."
She glances at me, and I'm thrown back to yesterday afternoon. The memory hits with crystal clarity. Her lying on Dante's dining table, the dark wood stained with disinfectant. Arrow's medical team standing by with equipment that looked more suited to a hospital than a dining room. My hands, steady despite the years since medical school, making the first incision...
"You sure about this?" Lucas's voice crackles through the speaker phone. "It's been years since you've done any surgery, Angelo. And the C1-C2 junction..."
"I know." My scalpel parts the skin at the base of her neck with surgical precision. "I'm not letting anyone else touch her."
"Romantic and stupid," my old college roommate, turned brain surgeon, mutters, but continues guiding me. "Remember—the chip is embedded at the atlantoaxial joint, where the skull meets the spine. One wrong move and she's dead. The brainstem is millimetres away."
I've been preparing for this for hours, studying the scans, but knowing doesn't make it easier. The C1-C2 junction is where the spinal cord is most vulnerable, where all the signals from brain to body pass through. The slightest tremor, the tiniest slip, and I could sever her brainstem connection. Instant death. Or worse, locked-in syndrome, aware but unable to move or speak.
"Still want to do this?" Lucas asks, reading my silence.
"Yes." I force my hand steady, fighting the tremor that wants to creep in. "Just... keep talking me through it."
"The device will be nestled against the odontoid process. You'll need to navigate around the vertebral arteries—nick one of those and she'll stroke out on the table. And watch for the spinal accessory nerves."
Sweat drips down my forehead as I work, each movement precise and terrifying. Kasia's unconscious form is so still, so vulnerable. Alessa holds her hand while Dante and Luca pace the room like caged tigers. They don't understand how close to death she is with every second that passes.
"I see it," I breathe, catching sight of something foreign amongst the delicate anatomy. Black polymer, no bigger than a pill, with hair-thin wires spreading into her nervous system like a malignant spider web. It's wedged right against the atlas vertebra, the filaments disappearing into the spinal cord itself.
"Careful," Lucas warns. "Those filaments are integrated with her neural pathways. They're designed to interface with the ascending and descending tracts. You need to—"
"I know what I need to do." But knowing and doing are different things when you're millimetres from killing the woman you love. My hands remember the training, the years of precision work before I traded healing for killing. Carefully, so fucking carefully, I trace each wire, cutting the connections one by one.
The moment we extract it—bloody but intact—Kasia's body shudders on the table. Her vitals spike wildly. For a terrifying second, I think I've severed something critical.
"Breathe," Lucas commands. "Check her reflexes."
