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Nausea roiled in my belly. The thought of touching this man in any capacity made me want to vomit.

“So, in reality, I’ll be a slave,” I said. “You mean to use me. Again.”

His casual chuckle chilled my blood. “You make it sound so crass. Have I made it so bad to be used by me? You have everything you could ever want: a house to yourself, furnished extravagantly, with an overflowing wardrobe and staff at your beck and call, day or night. Personal security. An unlimited spending account.”

I did my best to avoid wrinkling my nose. This, I understood, was what he thought of women: craven, materialistic creatures who’d abandon their morals and their dignity for the wealth and status they prized above all.

Whatever women would willingly tolerate Julius’s presence probably were exactly like that, so it wasn’t too difficult to imagine how he got such an impression. Still, I couldn’t help being a little insulted, and my voice had an edge to it as I replied, “And while that is a tempting offer, my answer is still no.”

“What have I not offered you?” Julius asked, a challenge in his eyes. “Everyone has a price. Name yours.”

I snorted. “I have no price you’d be willing to pay, Julius. The one thing I want is the only thing you’ll never give: my freedom.”

“Ah, yes, freedom,” he sneered. “That strange word so many throw around carelessly. Tell me: when you lived at the Cave, working your little teaching job, fucking the husband we assigned you, was that freedom?”

No. The word was on the tip of my tongue, but I bit down on it. Because I knew freedom. It was a white farmhouse with an old-fashioned, wrap-around porch and a faded red front door. John’s soft, drowsy kisses in the morning, rousing me from sleep. The scent of omelets made with eggs I gathered from the hens with Kimmy. The fresh morning air, and my husband’s warm body snuggled next to mine on the porch swing, steaming mugs of herbal tea warming our hands. The way he always rested his head on top of mine as we watched the world wake up together.

The memories made my eyes prick with tears, and I swallowed hastily to hide them. Love. Home. Family. Things I’d had before in theory, but never in practice. They’d freed me from a prison I hadn’t known I inhabited. And because of this scheming bastard, I stood to lose all of it.

Anger resurfaced in me, heating my blood, and I said through gritted teeth, “I may not have been free…but at least I wasn’t a puppet, paraded in front of the public and told what to do and say every minute.”

“My dear Claire,” Julius said, clucking his tongue in condescending sympathy. “You’ve always been a puppet. You just didn’t know we were pulling the strings. Your father made the same mistake many years ago.”

The mention of my father made me lose control, and in an instant, I was on my feet. The crash of the heavy dinnerplate spiked my adrenaline and filled me with sweet—if temporary—satisfaction. The gougères went flying all around the room, and the plate broke in two when it collided with his face. A small cut above his eyebrow oozed a trickle of blood.

I recoiled, expecting him to explode, but he didn’t. Instead, he picked up his napkin and dabbed at the cut, as though he’d expected all of that.

“Yes, I suppose you would be rather sore about all that,” he said casually. “Take a seat, Claire.”

“I’d rather stand,” I shot back. I was breathing hard, though not from effort. From sheer, unadulterated rage. “I don’t sit with murderers.”

He chuckled. “Oh, but you have and you do, my dear. Even your father understood that. I must admit that I’m rather impressed by your little excursion into the Archives. Major Hamilton was quite furious, but in reality, I don’t think anyone would’ve successfully stood between you and the truth—isn’t that right? Your whole life has been leading to this moment where you confront me and cry, how could you? like some outraged, innocent schoolgirl, when it’s really very simple: your father betrayed me, so I crushed him.”

“Betrayed you?” I burst out indignantly. White-hot hatred like I’d never felt before coursed through my veins. “He tried to stop you from murdering more innocents for your trumped-up elixir of life. Killing others so you can keep living forever. Is that what you’d call justice?”

“Justice is a salve mediocre people seek to soothe their failures,” Julius replied, steepling his fingers. “The powerful have no need of justice. Only enforcement of the natural hierarchy. Which is what I’m doing, choosing you as a handmaiden. Like a dog on a leash, you’ll remember your place.”

“Fuck you,” I spat. “I’ll never be your handmaiden, or anything else. I’d rather die.”

“That’s an option,” he said, rather cheerfully. “You’ll find that those who remain useful to me live a lot longer than those who don’t. Or would you like to rejoin your father? Find out what he felt, in those last moments? It’s been some time since our last harvest. I’m certain my inner circle would approve.”

Fear wormed its way inside me, making my chest tight. Before the video of my father’s death, I’d never known true hatred. Now, I could barely contain the sickly, bubbling cauldron of hostility in my belly—all for this one man, who’d stolen so much from so many.

When I didn’t reply immediately, Julius went on. “Shall I tell you how I punish those who displease me?”

“Besides murdering them?” I asked, my voice full of venom.

He chuckled. “Death is a final punishment, my dear. But sometimes, making them suffer makes a far stronger point.” He cleared his throat. “Cade Campbell was a respected army captain at the Delta for many years. When he left the compound a few years ago with a couple of his comrades, there was outrage. We discovered that he’d settled in a small, abandoned fishing village some way from here, just outside the range of his tracking beacon. He thought he was being sly. He even invited Wastelanders to live among them as equals. I suppose he thought he was building a community.”

Julius scoffed, as if such a thing were ridiculous.

“I had no real interest in killing him; he was no threat. But I did make an example of him. I arranged for a vendor in one of those filthy Wastelander hovels to sell him items infected with a strain of the virus. Thanks to their implants, he and his fellow soldiers were immune, but the Wastelanders were not. One by one, they died, and everything those traitors thought they were trying to build collapsed with them. They disappeared then, probably to rot away somewhere else. It was no concern of mine; the point was to send a message to any of his fellow soldiers thinking of doing the same.”

I gaped at him as he gave me a sly smile. “So, you see, Claire, killing is a final solution. It doesn’t teach lessons. But suffering does. And if you continue to defy me, you’ll learn the same lesson Campbell did.”

He won’t kill you as long as you stay useful to him. Hamilton’s words came back to me, and I knew I had to regain some semblance of calm. I needed to survive this confrontation, or the plan we’d concocted would be moot. I inhaled deeply, trying to reclaim control. If I pretended to be as unthreatening as he believed, I could still pump him for more information.

“But you miscalculated,” I said, a little more composed, and when he raised his eyebrows, I added simply, “Jim J. You didn’t think he’d be able to overthrow your government at the Cave and use your life serum for himself. You didn’t know how powerful he’d become.”