Every piece of evidence screamed the same horrifying conclusion: someone had forcibly abducted Elena and dragged her into this decaying structure.
In broad daylight. Marcus's mind reeled at the audacity. On campus grounds, during school hours, these entitled little psychopaths think they can just—
His heart slammed against his ribs with such violence he could feel his pulse in his temples. Fury and terror warred for dominance in his chest, producing a toxic cocktail of adrenaline that made his hands shake and his vision sharpen to predatory focus.
He didn't hesitate. Didn't pause to consider consequences or protocol or the potentially catastrophic implications of a grown man storming into a situation involving minors.
Marcus vaulted over the severed caution tape and plunged into the abandoned building's gaping entrance, swallowed immediately by shadows that reeked of institutional decay.
The interior existed in perpetual twilight—sunlight barely penetrating through grime-coated windows and holes in the deteriorating roof. Dust motes swirled in the thin beams that did manage entry, dancing like particles in a snow globe that had been shaken by malevolent hands. The air tasted of mold, rot, and something else Marcus's bodyguard instincts identified as danger.
He moved with the silent efficiency of someone who'd conducted building clearances in hostile territory, his footfalls careful, deliberate, leaving no sound to announce his approach. His breathing regulated itself automatically—shallow, controlled, optimized for oxygen intake without audible detection.
Every sense operated at maximum capacity. His eyes adjusted rapidly to the gloom, cataloguing structural hazards while scanning for human presence. His ears filtered ambient noise—the building's settling groans, distant traffic, wind whistling through broken windows—searching for anything organic, anything wrong.
Floor by floor, he ascended through the skeletal remains of classrooms and administrative offices. Graffiti covered the walls in layers of profanity and artistic despair. Broken furniture created obstacle courses in empty rooms. Evidence of previous trespassing littered the corridors—beer cans, cigarette butts, used condoms that made Marcus's lip curl with disgust.
Then, on the top floor—in a secluded corner where the building's original stairwell terminated in a dead end—he heard it.
Crying. Muffled, broken, the sound of someone trying to suppress sobs through sheer willpower and failing.
Marcus's entire body went rigid. He knew that voice.
Summer.
He pressed himself against the wall—paint flaking away beneath his palm, the surface cold and slightly damp—and edged toward a damaged window that offered sight lines into the adjacent room. His movements were glacially slow, minimizing any chance of detection.
What he saw through that grimy, cracked pane made his blood transmute into liquid nitrogen.
Summer Chen sprawled on the concrete floor in an undignified heap, her school uniform torn and filthy. A male student—tall, athletic build, probably eighteen or nineteen—had positioned himself above her with calculated dominance. His knee pinned her legs, immobilizing her lower body. One meaty hand wrapped around her throat with enough pressure to control without completely cutting off oxygen—a technique that spoke to either experience or natural sadism.
In his other hand: a mineral water bottle, label torn away, containing liquid that definitely wasn't water based on its suspicious color.
He was forcing it into Summer's mouth with the brutal efficiency of someone gavaging livestock.
"Drink it, you little bitch!" The boy's snarl carried genuine rage, his face flushed with exertion and excitement. "Swallow!"
"No... please... ugh—" Summer choked on the liquid, tears carving clean tracks through the grime coating her face. Her hands scrabbled weakly at his wrist, fingernails leaving scratches that he ignored entirely.
Marcus's jaw clenched so tightly his molars ground together, the muscle jumping beneath his skin. His hands curled into fists—knuckles whitening, tendons standing out in sharp relief. Every combat instinct screamed at him to explode through that window and introduce the boy's face to the concrete floor at terminal velocity.
Control. He forced the rage down, compartmentalized it. Assess first. React second. Rushing in blind gets people killed.
Movement in his peripheral vision. Veronica Xue—the classroom bully he'd watched trip Summer earlier—stood nearby with arms crossed beneath her chest, radiating smug satisfaction. She extended one leg, the pointed toe of her designer heel connecting with Summer's shoulder in a casual kick.
"Won't drink?" Veronica's voice dripped with theatrical concern. "That's fine. We can always have your dear friend take your place."
Her gaze swiveled toward the room's darkest corner, where shadows pooled like liquid darkness.
Elena sat there in her wheelchair, almost invisible in the gloom. But as Marcus's eyes adjusted further, he could make out her silhouette—rigid posture, hands resting on the armrests with deceptive casualness.
Her face betrayed nothing. No fear. No anger. No plea for mercy.
Just that terrible, crystalline calm that Marcus had learned to recognize as her most dangerous state.
A shaft of light from a broken window slanted across her features, illuminating her delicate profile—the elegant line of her nose, the slight parting of her lips. But her eyes remained shadowed, unreadable.
Her fingers moved almost imperceptibly against the gemstone ring she always wore, a subtle stroking motion that looked absent-minded but probably wasn't.
Elena raised her head fractionally, meeting Veronica's gaze with the kind of direct eye contact that lesser predators interpreted as submission.
"Can you let us go?" Her voice emerged quiet, almost gentle. Perfectly modulated. "Please?"
That single syllable—please—carried a quality Marcus couldn't quite identify. To anyone else, it might sound like genuine pleading. Defeated acceptance.
Marcus knew better.
Oh god. His internal monologue devolved into panic. Oh fuck. Oh no.
He wanted to scream at Veronica through the window: Say yes! For the love of everything holy, SAY YES! Agree immediately! Release them with profuse apologies and maybe—MAYBE—you'll survive what's coming!
A fragment of the original novel surfaced in his memory with devastating clarity. The scene where the original Marcus Chen—that sadistic monster—had Elena at his mercy during her most vulnerable time. She'd looked up at him with eyes reddened from crying, voice breaking: "Please... can you let me go?"
And the original Marcus had smiled—that shark's grin—and replied: "Where's the fun in that?"
What followed had been... Marcus shuddered, refusing to let his mind complete that particular thought spiral.
The original deserved everything he got, Marcus thought viciously. Deserved worse. But if I were in Veronica's position right now? I'd be RUNNING. Sprinting. Breaking the sound barrier in my haste to evacuate this situation.
Because when Elena used that tone—that specific inflection of polite inquiry while asking if you'd show mercy—your death certificate had already been signed. The executioner was simply waiting for the paperwork to process.
Veronica's face transformed with malicious glee, apparently interpreting Elena's question as victory. She retrieved the bottle from her lackey, even going so far as to wrap the mouth with tissue paper—as though contamination was a concern while orchestrating assault—and approached Elena's wheelchair with the swagger of someone who'd never experienced genuine consequences.
"Well, well, well!" Veronica's voice pitched higher, carrying across the abandoned space. "Look who's learned to beg! Our precious heiress, the untouchable Miss Nightshade, actually asking me for something!"
She paced in front of Elena like a predator circling wounded prey, her heels clicking against concrete. "You finally understand, don't you? All that family money means nothing here. You're isolated. Vulnerable. Completely at our mercy." She gestured expansively at the derelict surroundings. "Even if we did something truly horrible to you right now, you couldn't do anything but swallow it down and stay silent."
Veronica crouched, bringing herself to Elena's eye level. Her gaze crawled across Elena's face with the invasive quality of insects on skin.
"Such a pretty face," she murmured, voice shifting to something darker. "Almost makes me feel sorry for you. Almost." Her expression curdled into contempt. "But then I remember—you're just a useless cripple! All that beauty wasted on someone who can't even stand! Hahaha!"
Her laughter echoed off the concrete walls, shrill and grating.
Elena watched Veronica's performance with the detached interest of a scientist observing bacterial cultures. Her lips pressed together fractionally—barely noticeable. Her eyelashes lowered, thick and dark, casting shadows across her cheeks that concealed whatever emotions might be brewing beneath.
When she spoke again, her voice had dropped several registers into territory that made Marcus's survival instincts scream warnings.
"So there's truly... no chance at all?" Elena asked, each word precisely enunciated. "No possibility of mercy?"
Her finger continued that slow, methodical caressing of her ring. In the dim light, the gemstone refracted illumination strangely—the red taking on qualities of congealed blood, wet and fresh.
"Chance?" Veronica's voice spiked with sudden fury, as though Elena had struck a nerve. "Who gave me a chance?! When your precious teacher humiliated me in front of the entire class—made me stand there while everyone laughed—did ANYONE show me mercy?!"
The rage seemed disproportionate, untethered from rational grievance.
Summer, still pinned to the floor, managed to lift her head. "That... that only happened because you attacked me first!" Her voice broke with tears and indignation. "I don't even understand why you hate us so much! What did we ever do to you?!"
"I need a reason to hate you?" Veronica shrieked back, but her expression betrayed the truth: she couldn't articulate one.
Perhaps it was jealousy of Elena's beauty—luminous even when damaged, even when disabled. Perhaps it was resentment that someone Veronica deemed "worthless" still commanded genuine friendship, attracted attention from desirable men, received preferential treatment from respected teachers.
That corrosive envy—burning through her chest like acid—was reason enough. Twisted, irrational, but sufficient.
Seeing Summer dare to talk back, watching droplets of the contaminated liquid splash onto her own face, Veronica's composure shattered completely. She grabbed the bottle and shoved it into Summer's trembling hands.
"You do it!" she commanded, her voice ragged with fury. "Make your precious friend drink it! Force it down her throat!"
Summer's hands shook so violently the liquid sloshed dangerously close to the bottle's rim. She looked up at Elena through tear-blurred vision, shaking her head with desperate negation. "No... I can't... I won't..."
"One of you drinks it!" Veronica gestured sharply at her two male accomplices. "Today. Right now. I don't care which!"
The boys moved with practiced coordination—probably not their first rodeo—grabbing Summer and dragging her toward Elena's wheelchair. They pinned her arms, holding her in position like a human offering.
"Stop! Let me go!" Summer thrashed with the desperate strength of absolute terror, and in that moment of frantic resistance, she hurled the bottle with all her remaining energy.
It arced through the air in slow motion—Marcus tracked its trajectory with the clarity of someone whose brain had shifted into combat time dilation. The bottle tumbled, liquid sloshing, and several drops escaped the opening.
Those drops fell with poetic precision directly onto Veronica's upturned face and exposed collar.
Veronica's shriek could have shattered glass. She clawed at her face, smearing the liquid, her expression contorting into genuine panic. "My face! MY FACE! Kill them! I want them DEAD!"
Marcus's tactical assessment had been operating on one critical assumption: this scenario would play out according to the original novel's script. Adrian Qi would arrive at the pivotal moment—the heroic teacher rescuing his student, cementing Elena's devotion and gratitude.
The girls would be frightened, maybe roughed up a bit, but ultimately fine.
He'd been counting on that narrative inevitability.
But watching the situation spiral—watching Veronica's hand crack across Summer's face with a smack that echoed like a gunshot, watching the girl's cheek bloom immediate crimson—Marcus realized his catastrophic miscalculation.
I underestimated how vicious these little monsters actually are.
Then the situation deteriorated beyond redemption.
One of the boys—apparently deciding violence was too slow—grabbed Elena's wheelchair and shoved.
The chair tilted, balance lost. Elena toppled out with a sickening thud, her body hitting concrete with an impact that made Marcus flinch in sympathetic pain. She sprawled across the filthy floor in an undignified heap, her useless legs twisted at awkward angles.
She lifted her head slowly, and for one crystalline moment, Marcus saw her face in profile.
Her eyes—those black, fathomless eyes—had transformed into something inhuman. Hatred so pure and concentrated it became almost visible, radiating off her in waves. The look she aimed at Veronica could have flash-frozen magma.
Veronica wavered, clearly unnerved by that gaze. But her own momentum and rage carried her forward. She stepped closer, raising one designer heel, and brought it down deliberately on Elena's skirt where it had spread across the floor.
Pinning her like an insect to a board.
"Elena Nightshade," Veronica hissed, pupils dilated with sick excitement, "you can go straight to hell."
That's when Marcus stopped thinking and started moving.