The concrete underneath my feet splintered, the world slowed, and I was hurtling toward Lucas in the very next heartbeat. My fist butchered the empty space between us. Electricity wrapped around my arm, collecting around my fingers and bursting from my knuckles. One shot, one chance, hit him, end it. He taught me the same thing for years on end. He’d taught me to shoot for the kill. To not waste time toying around. Then he moved. I went past him. I saw his eyes track me, glimmering with flakes of burnt gold. He grabbed my shoulder, then slammed his knee hard into my gut. The world sped up. I vomited. He grabbed my jaw and dug his fist into my ribs. Crack. Pain surged through my side. Blood flooded my mouth. I sent a burst of electricity through my body, punching him backward and away.

  I doubled over as a slew of blood gushed out of my mouth. I spat. Looked up. He was rolling up his sleeves and tugging down his tie. Younger Me went straight through the ceiling, flooding the hallway with crimson colored concrete dust. Just us now, like it’s always been. I straightened, watching him as he cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. He looked like the old Lucas. The one that wore the black costume. The one that would put criminals into handicapped parking spaces if they were lucky enough to catch him on a good night. And he knew that too.

  “Time conquers the weak,” he said, his voice an echo. “But fate fortunes the brave, don’t you think?”

  “Your heart is gonna explode,” I told him. “It’s beating too fast, and you know that.”

  Lucas then started walking toward me, stepping onto his fallen sidearm and crushing it under his shoe. I backed up several steps, the pain in my side getting more and more dull. “When the time comes, I’ll give all of this up, but for some fucking reason, nobody knows how to keep a city clean anymore. Everyone’s too soft. Too ready to make the bureaucratic decision. And for a while, you knew what I meant—this system isn’t going to work. We need superheroes and we need the kind who get the filth off the street.” His fist connected with my jaw in a heartbeat. It felt like lightning had just shot through my face. I slammed into the wall and collapsed onto one knee. And through the veil of dust he came, parting them with a wave of his hand. “You know it in your heart that America is falling, and it’s only going to be a few more months before the world folds in on itself. What I’m doing is trying to save it.”

  His foot would’ve gone through my face if I hadn’t lunged aside, rolling and standing. “You’re crazy!”

  “I’m right,” he said, turning around. “Your father knew how best to save the world. Criminals are like maggots, the lesser species of humanity. They deserve to get killed. They deserved to be removed from the evolutionary genepool, Rylee. Weakness doesn’t belong. It’s the powerful who need to protect, and what kind of people are we if we let our fellow man keep suffering? Women and children—” He was on me like a bullet, his fists a flurry that connected with my jaw, my nose, my gut and my ribs; he swept my legs out from underneath me and grabbed the back of my head and, in one fluid motion, slammed me face first into the floor, “—sons and fathers, all of them die every single day because you don’t understand your own importance.” Lucas lifted my head. Blood poured down my nose, over my lips. Everything was a haze. Every movement was agony. My lips slowly moved, blood bubbling on them, gargling my words and choking me. He snarled and put his ear to my mouth. “Say it, Ry. Give up,” he said quietly, fingers coiling painfully around my hair. “Then this can all be over, and we go home.”

  My lips moved, but my voice didn’t work. I forced them out of my throat. “Bite me.”

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  Lucas sneered and stood up, lifting me high and pulling back his fist to—

  I grabbed his wrist and swung my leg, slamming my foot into the side of his head. He let go of me as soon as his body smashed deep into the concrete. I dropped, then lunged, slamming the top of my head into his gut. He gagged. I twisted and dug my knuckles into his jaw with an uppercut so hard that it smashed his teeth together and sent blood and bone gushing from his mouth. He screamed. It was a sound that threw me off, shocking me out of my bloodlust. I stepped back as he grabbed his mouth, blood pouring from the gaps in between his quivering fingers.

  I shook my head and told myself this wasn’t training. This wasn’t a game. He was after my head.

  “Fuck,” he snarled, words garbled. He looked at me, death in his eyes, his hair falling over his face in loose, sweaty-bloody strands. “You hit hard, I’ll give you that, but you’ve not got it in you. You’re not a killer. At least, not with me.” He straightened and rolled his shoulders. His jaw set itself, snapping back into place. “And here I was thinking I trained you to be effective, but I guess we’ve still got one more lesson to get you through, Rylee.”

  Dennie, Ben—so many others. He had blood on his hands. So much blood. More than I do.

  Innocent people gone before they should have called it a day had their lives cut short by a man who barely even knew himself anymore. The Lucas I first met hadn’t been this man. Or maybe he’d always been like this, and now he had no reason to keep pretending. Shrike had been Lucas. Shrike had been the person he could hide behind. If he took a life, it was the man behind the mask, not the one tying my shoelaces and driving me home from school.

  And fuck me, Emelia was right—splitting myself in two parts was crazy talk.

  If it meant I was two people, I’d rather be Rylee any day.

  Just as long as it meant Rylee was the one ripping his heart out.

  Olympia was his product. Rylee was mine. Bianca’s. The people who actually still somehow cared about me after everything I’d managed to put them through. Lucas had tried to strip away that side of me, to take away the bits and pieces of humanity that were still lingering somewhere in my gold-tainted blood, and for a long time, I’d let him do that. I’d let him do that because I thought it would make me stronger. Faster. Hungrier for what I was meant to own in this city and for a fickle fucking statue of a person who was never really me, but his. Lucas’ little pet project. The dog he kept on a leash. The girl that conquered the world for him because he sculpted her into a bloodthirsty, snarling, angry teenager who thought that every single life underneath her was all but worthless.

  My whole life, he’d made me someone I was never supposed to be. I’d alienated people who had wanted to be my friends. I’d let Selina die. I’d failed over and over again, and he saw that as an opportunity to keep telling me that I was getting closer and closer to being better, to being perfect—to being everything that he would ever want me to be and leaving me nothing but a fist for him to use. But fuck that. I’ll wear my heart on my sleeve and look him dead in those glimmering eyes and put my fist through his chest and take his heart home with me as my piece of him, since he tried to steal mine years ago. Besides, I thought, electricity crackling around me, making my hair snap and the air stink like burning ozone. He’s so hellbent on murder, I doubt he’ll even need a heart to keep being alive.

  Humans deserved to have hearts, but Lucas wasn’t human—he hadn’t been for a very, very long time.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Lucas,” I whispered. “I’m gonna make you suffer a thousand times over.”

  “Please,” he said. “You don’t have the nerve to kill me. You would have by now if you wanted, but if you get rid of me then there’s nobody else you can blame on your failures except yourself, and Rylee can’t accept that.”

  “You don’t know half of who I am,” I snarled. “And you don’t know half of what I’m capable of either.”

  “Then show me what I’ve created.”