Victor craned his head and considered the sky.

“It wasn’t my first try,” he said quietly. “The night I died. I’d already tried once, and failed. An overdose, which, it turned out, provided too much control, and not enough fear. So I set out to try again. Eli had already succeeded, and I was determined to match him. I created a situation in which I couldn’t take back control. One in which there was nothing but fear. And pain.”

“How?” whispered Sydney.

Victor closed his eyes and saw Angie, one hand resting on the control panel.

“I convinced someone to torture me.”

Syd drew a short breath behind him. Victor kept talking.

“I was strapped to a steel table, and hooked up to an electrical current. There was a dial, and someone to turn it, and the pain went up when the dial was turned, and I told them not to stop until my heart did.” Victor pressed his palms against the icy rail. “People have an idea of pain,” he said. “They think they know what it is, how it feels, but that’s just an idea. It’s a very different thing when it becomes concrete.”

He turned back toward her. “So when you ask me what the episodes feel like—they feel like dying all over again. Like someone turning up the dial inside me until I break.”

Sydney’s face was white. “I did this,” she said under her breath, fingers gripping her knees. “I did this to you.”

Victor went to Sydney’s chair and knelt before it.

“Sydney, I am alive because of you,” he said firmly. Tears spilled down Syd’s cheeks. Victor reached out and touched her shoulder. “You saved me.”

She met his eyes then, ice blue laced with red. “But I broke you.”

“No,” he started, then stopped. An idea flickered through his mind.

The first spark of a thought, bright but brittle. He shielded its fragile heat, trying to coax it into something stronger, and as it kindled, he realized—

He’d been looking in the wrong place. Searching for ordinary solutions.

But Victor wasn’t ordinary. What had happened to him wasn’t ordinary.

An EO had broken his power.

He needed an EO to fix it.

IX

TWO YEARS AGO

SOUTH BROUGHTON

IT was amazing what passed for music.

Victor leaned against the bar as sound blared out from the stage, where a group of men slammed their hands against their instruments.

The upside, he supposed, was the way they drowned out the rising sound in his own head. The downside was the ache forming in its place.

“Hey!” shouted the bartender. “Get you a drink?”

Victor twisted back toward the bar. Toward the man behind the counter.

Will Connelly was six-foot-three, with a square jaw, a shock of black hair, and all the markers of a potential EO.

Victor had done his homework, had instructed Mitch to rebuild a search matrix, the same one Eli, and then the police, had used to find EOs, the same one that had led Victor to Dominic.