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"You think I`m acting like Eli? You think I`m playing God? Fine, you play, Sydney. You decide, right now, who should live. Us, or them." Tears hovered on her lashes. She didn`t look at him, kept her gaze focused on his shirtfront as her lips moved, short and soundless. "What was that?" he asked. This time, he heard it. "Us."

Victor had never been fond of doctors. Even back when he wanted to become one, it had never been in the interest of saving patients. He`d been drawn to the field of medicine for the knowledge, the authority, the control. He`d wanted to be the hand holding the scalpel, not the flesh parting beneath it.

"What now?" asked Mitch. Two small words. Single syllables had never weighed so much. For the last ten years, Victor had focused on revenge. He`d never truly intended to see the other side of it, but now, he`d fulfilled his objective — Eli was rotting in a cell — and Victor was still here. Still alive. Revenge had been an all-consuming pursuit. Its absence left Victor uneasy, unsatisfied. What now?

"I fix cars. I put engines back together. Not people. Cars are easy. Nuts and bolts and fuel lines. People are too much more." Victor didn`t believe that. Had never believed that. People were more intricate perhaps, more nuanced, but fundamentally machines. Things that worked, or didn`t, that broke down, and were repaired. Could be repaired.

“Victor.” A pause. “You were supposed to stay dead.” “It didn’t take.”

Once upon a time, power was determined by lineage—the age of blood. Then it was determined by money—the age of gold. But I think it’s time for a new age, Victor. The age of power itself.

Marcella didn’t understand that June would always be hiding. But the woman was right about one thing. People had tried to bend June. Tried to break her. Tried to make her feel small. Perhaps it was time for them to understand how small they were. June could never be herself, not the self she was before, but she could be someone. She could be seen. And when EON came calling, well, they wouldn’t catch her. Which left only one question, really. Who was she going to wear?

“Yesterday Holtz found me heaving my guts out in a closet. And last week I broke into a cold sweat in the middle of a training seminar. I’ve claimed hangover, PTSD, anything I can think of, but I’m running out of lies.” And I’m running out of lives, thought Victor, pushing off the lockers.

Some people were matches, a bit of light and no heat. And some were furnaces, all heat but little light. And then, once in a blue moon, there was a bonfire, something so hot and bright you couldn’t stand too near without burning. Marcella was a bonfire if ever June saw one.

Some women spent years planning their wedding. Marcella had spent the last decade planning a hostile takeover.

They say people grow on you, and maybe that was true, because every time Marcella saw Tony, she felt the need to scrub him off her skin.

War needed both kinds of people—those who played the long game and those who played the short one. Victor was the former. Dominic was the latter. That didn’t make him a pawn. It made him a good soldier.

She flashed him a smile, and Eli felt like a mirror turned toward the sun, relieved to have a source of light he could reflect.

She plucked a piece of broccoli from his plate. “It’s rude to steal food.” “You never finish anything. Didn’t your parents teach you to eat your vegetables?” “No,” said Victor blandly, “they told me to tap into my inner psyche and realize the truths of my potential. Vegetables never really came up.”

Victor would have enumerated any number of symptoms—diminished sense of consequence, lack of remorse, self-absorption, amplification of demeanor and aspect—but Eli said only, “They have no soul.”

The first time Dr. Haverty cut out Eli’s heart, he thought he might finally die. The doctor held it up for him to see before cutting it free, and for a fraction of a second Eli’s pulse faltered, failed, the equipment screamed. But by the time Haverty set the heart in its sterile tray, there was a new one already beating in Eli’s open chest. The doctor breathed a single word. “Extraordinary.”

And then he began to cut. Dissect—that was the word for it when the subject was dead. Vivisect—that was the word when they were still alive. But when they couldn’t die? What was the word for that?

What’s the point of having beautiful things, if you don’t put them on display? She hadn’t realized, at the time, that Marcus had referred to her as a thing.

But hey, like I said, not all family is blood, right? Sometimes we have to find a new one. Sometimes we get lucky, and they find us.