Author Sahara Foley

Exile

The Price of Talent Book 5

by AK Nevermore

Genre: Spicy Dystopian Romance

Together or not at all.

On an alternate earth, a cataclysm has altered a subset of the population. Talents are persecuted for their psychic and physical mutations, giving rise to two conflicting societies based upon maintaining genetic purity. And the Source, a shadowy corporate entity dependent upon the exploitation of captive Talents, is hunting them…

Flynn Scot is spiraling.

After a cataclysmic chain of events and devastating loss, Flynn’s grasp on reality is slipping. Backed into a corner by the Assembly and his sanity called into question, the threat of exile and having his talent stripped endangers not only him, but any chance he might have of getting his family back…if they’re not already past saving.

Deep in stasis, Kara’s fate is uncertain.

Stolen away and in the clutches of a madman, Kara’s future depends solely upon Titus’s sufferance. With unfettered access to her genome, his attention is fixated upon the next iteration of Talents—especially after events in the North change her status from prize to bait.

Because Flynn is coming for her, and he’s not coming alone.

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Cal grimaced and climbed to his feet as Glynfyls stopped shaking. He clutched his breast, groping for the ward Miriam had set some thirty-odd years ago that tied Flynn back to him. Please, God… Cal exhaled, his knees buckling in relief. Still there. Felt different, but the boy wasn’t dead.

Not yet at least.

His gaze slid from the calamity outside the window to the blood spattered across the wall and the gore-soaked carpet. In the unlikely event House Scot survived the next seventy-two hours, the whole damned room would have to be gutted. He dropped the last of his cigarette and ground it out beside Cordelia Kerns’s corpse.

And if they didn’t survive, screw the resale value. What a goddamned mess.

“Here’s a spot, there’s a spot…” he muttered to himself, bastardizing lines from his brief stint in community theater. Seemed appropriate. He couldn’t clearly remember his last wife’s smile or the faces of any of the children he’d buried, but every goddamned line from that play, every goddamned moment he’d spent with her, was seared into his memory in high goddamned definition.

Her. Elize. Lizzy. His Lilith.

Cal ran a shaking hand down his face. Squatted. Knees cracking, he leaned forward to lower Kerns’s lids and cover the look of surprise in her grayed-over baby blues, his gaze locking on the imprint of a bloody crescent between her brows—

A flash of memory—the same mark on his second wife—hit him hard.

He stumbled into a chair and pulled out his pouch of tobacco, cursing the tremor in his hands. Fingers fumbling, he threw aside the botched attempt. Deep breath. Rolled another. It was passible, barely. He lit it. Blew out a frenetic puff of smoke and spat tobacco from his lip.

His gaze drifted back to Kerns’s corpse. Another woman with her throat slit. Wasn’t related to Julia’s earlier demise, but that wouldn’t stop Crandall and the city’s rumor mill from having a goddamned field day with it.

Christ. Between that and Flynn’s tantrum destroying everything as far as the eye could see, House Scot was on borrowed time.

And when the press caught wind of Kara’s abduction, it would be worse.

What a clusterfuck. If there’d been any place to go, Cal would’ve started packing his bags, but this time, there wasn’t. Jane—Mother—had made sure of that.

He blew out a ragged stream of smoke and glanced at the couch as he brought the sad excuse for a cigarette to his lips again. Kara’s cat glared back. Miserable animal was wrapped around Fitz’s throat with its green eyes narrowed. Cal frowned at the rise and fall of the boy’s chest. Looked like taking pity on fuck ups was still part of Elize’s MO.

Not that the boy was losing any sleep over his brush with death. He was sawing wood like he didn’t have a care in the world thanks to Nora’s induced coma. Must be nice.

Cal took another drag, cursing himself and the lingering scent of Elize’s perfume. The barest hint of bergamot dragging his mind back to that first summer they’d met. To the stolen kisses during rehearsals. To the way the lighting had hit the curve of her cheek and the look she’d throw over her shoulder as she sauntered into the wings. Christ, that still got his dick hard.

Too bad her seduction had been as much of a role as the one she’d played on stage.

He’d hauled sets around the whole damned summer for that shit, podunk production to be close to her. Senator Dashell’s daughter. What she’d seen in the son of a pig farmer—Christ. In retrospect, he knew exactly what she’d seen. Or rather, what her father had. Man hadn’t blinked twice at pimping her out for twelve hundred acres just outside of town where the Corporation could build their research facility.

And damn them, but they’d gotten it.

Why her and her brother had stuck around after, slumming with the five of them—

Cal shook his head, staring at the blood pooling beneath Kerns. What was done, was done, and his hands had never been clean. No. He’d been up to his goddamned elbows in this shit from the get-go, but this right here? This was gonna sink him and everything he’d worked for since.

As intended.

He fished the slip of paper Elize had left on Kara’s pillow from his breast pocket, his fingers shying from the braid coiled beside it. Entwined E’s on the letterhead and beneath the monogram, a set of coordinates with four damning words.

40°49’26.99” N-73°55’20.99” W

Queen takes pawn.

Check.

Elize…Enoch…the twins were just pieces, not who he’d been playing against. Cal stroked a heavy hand over his mustache. Knowing the message for the invitation it was.

Jane had made her move, and now it was his. For better or worse, the endgame had begun.

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AK Nevermore enjoys operating heavy machinery, freebases coffee, and gives up sarcasm for Lent every year. A Jane-of-all-trades, she’s a certified chef, restores antiques, and dabbles in beekeeping when she’s not reading voraciously or running down the dream in her beat-up camo Chucks.

Unable to ignore the voices in her head, and unwilling to become medicated, she writes Science Fiction and Fantasy full time.

She pays the bills editing, wielding a wicked hot pink pen and writing a column on SFF. She also belongs to the Authors Guild, is a chapter treasurer for the RWA, teaches creative writing, and on the rare occasion, sleeps.

 

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