Free The Violet Awakening (The Elementum Trinity Book 2) by Styna Lane Page A

of Mattie’s voice alarmed me. After realizing she had spoken aloud, she clasped her hands to her mouth and stared at me with wide, regretful eyes. My scowl at Al received nothing more than a shrug, before he turned back toward the stairwell.
    William’s office looked like something out of an odd and violent video game. The glass labyrinth Al had created out of sand still stood, but large sections of it were busted. Bullet casings mingled with the shattered glass across the once-pristine floor, and patches of dried blood smeared the table. Some of it was surely mine, some of it Al’s, but there was much more than either of our wounds had produced. My stomach felt as though it were attempting to turn itself inside-out and free itself from the gelatinous confines of my body.
    We continued downward until we finally landed on the tenth floor. Five of the six apartments were just as barren as they had been when I lived there, but mine was still occupied by the phantoms of recent memories. The window at the far end of the living room was stuck on a loop of the half-deer I had seen on the night of my escape. It would spend the rest of its life—or the rest of however long the generators lasted—trying to walk into the woods and off-screen, only to reappear a moment later in the same place it had been before; one more prisoner, held captive by The Facility.
    My apartment was in relatively the same state it had been in before I left, with the exception of its obvious ransacking. The few cupboards and drawers were left open, their contents scattered across the floor. They had twenty-four-hour video footage of most of my life; had there been anything interesting in those drawers, they would have known about it without needing to toss my underwear all over the place. I made an effort to look away from the crumple of black cloth on the floor next to my bed—the dress I had worn to Eddie’s funeral—as I tugged at the edge of a piece of paper from inside my pillowcase. I kept my face cold and hard as I folded up Jenny’s drawing and tucked it into my shirt.
    I didn’t glance back at my apartment when we left. I didn’t want to—I didn’t need to. The only thing it contained of any importance to me was sitting next to my heart, where it belonged. That place was no longer my home.
    We all reacted in our own ways to the sight on the eleventh floor. Mattie gasped, Jason’s face went pale and sweaty, Al sighed with regret, and I relentlessly dragged Mattie along behind me as I rushed toward Paula’s apartment. I emotionlessly stepped over the unmoving bodies that lined the hallway, obvious bullet-holes in their heads. Al stopped at each one, checking to ensure that life had indeed left them. Perhaps I was being selfish in focusing on the people I loved before tending to the others, but as I pushed wide the open door of Apartment Sixteen, I didn’t care.
    Paula’s body was nearly unrecognizable. William’s men had certainly spent more time on her than they had the others littering the hall. She sat, hunched over in a chair in the middle of the kitchen, blood still dripping into a puddle from her tied hands. They hadn’t just killed her; they’d tortured her, mutilated her, destroyed her—and it was my fault. I’d been so close with her, maybe they thought she’d had some sort of information that could help them find us. Maybe they knew we would come back, and they just wanted to break me. If that was their goal, they had succeeded. Although I kept my cold, hard expression, broken was the only thing I felt. Broken, and guilty.
    Al placed his hand on my shoulder, pulling back enough to let me know that we needed to carry on. I wanted to do something for Paula, but I knew there was l ittle that could be done. Mattie made sure to hold tightly onto one of my hands, as my other untied Paula’s body and pulled her to the living room floor. I wiped as much of the blood from her face as I could, pushed her matted hair behind her