Present

I felt sick. My stomach was turning in knots as I watched Max try to come to terms with what I had just told her.

Queen killed Jake to get to you.

I was going to throw up.

"Show me." My eyes shot up to meet hers, drawing away from her shaking hands that I had been watching with far too much intensity.

"Show you what?" I asked. Her entire body was shaking. Her eyes completely focused on mine, unwavering. I could see the tears brimming her eyes that mirrored the colour of dark chocolate. God, she was beautiful when she cried.

"The video. Show me the goddamned video, Es." She said, snapping me out of my tangent thought. I wanted to vomit again.

"You don't... Max, it's bad."

"No fucking shit, he died. I have to see it for myself." She said, taking a step towards me. As much as I wanted to keep her from it, to stop her from seeing the devastation of that video and what it means for the world, I knew I couldn't stop it. Even if I didn't show her, there was no way she wouldn't get to it herself.

Which was why she couldn't know about my notebook.

She would stop at nothing to read it and there were things I needed to keep hidden from her.

"If at any point you want me to stop the video, you tell me." The tears in her eyes dried up as I spoke. They became glassy as she stared at me and nodded. I took a deep breath and pulled out my phone. We should have made it to my apartment by now. We were wasting precious time, but I knew she wouldn't be able to move until she saw the video.

"Show me." She said again as I opened the video from the email and gave the phone to her. She adjusted it and started playing the video as I walked to stand behind her, watching over her shoulder.

I breathed slowly, trying to keep calm for her as the visual played. A man in a white lab coat walked into the concrete walled room, only a canvas bed in the corner and a stainless steel toilet along the wall. The man in a lab coat reached a man on the bed who had dark, curly hair and golden skin.

"Jake..." Max's voice was quiet, her finger almost brushing the screen over where he was lying down. Jake sat up on the bed and looked at the person in the lab coat. The next few minutes involved Jake fighting the person in the lab coat, but it ultimately ended with him being force fed the drug.

Max skipped sections of the video, watching as he went through the high the drug gave and then crashed. He was in a heap on the floor, unmoving, when she started watching it in real time again. He wasn't breathing, not for ten minutes. But then his body shakes, going into a seizure, which ended after a minute. He breathes again, but the breaths are shallow, his fingers twitching as his body seems to come back to life.

She fast forwarded again, watching his body slowly stand and look around the room. The camera catches his eyes, which lacked any form of life, and showed hunger. Pure hunger. I knew what came next.

"Max, you should probably-"

"No." She cut me off. Her hands had stopped shaking, the phone completely still as she continued watching the video. She stopped speeding through the video when another person was forced into the room, terror on their face. The young man tried to escape the room by bashing on the door.

"I recognise him. He worked for Queen. Thomas... I worked with him. He spoke openly about wanting to leave the Court." Max said as the blonde man kept trying to escape the room. I was watching Jake, or what was left of him. The timestamp told me it had been a day since he died and came back to life. His skin was grey, the golden glow he once had was gone.

His eyes were sunken in, he didn't sleep anymore, didn't need to.

But the way his head snaps towards Thomas always sent a chill down my spine. It was predatory, and Jake started walking slowly towards the panicking man.

"Max, please..."

"No." She was stubborn, but she didn't want to watch this. Thomas turned around and tried to run away, searching the room for anything to use against the shell of Jake, but there wasn't so much as a sheet on the bed. My stomach was already twisting with the pre-emption of what was going to happen.

I had to turn my eyes away before I watched it again.

Even with my eyes closed, I could still see it.

How Jake tore into Thomas and ripped out his throat. Using his teeth to remove chunks of Thomas' skin and muscle. The blood that poured from every wound. I was glad that there was no audio with the video, because the visual was enough to wake me up at night in a sweat, let alone adding the screams I'm sure were ripping from Thomas' chest.

I would have to live with knowing his name, but I could have done without it.

Max was far too still as she watched what I couldn't.

She fast forwarded through the video again. No one ever bothered to remove Thomas' body from the room, no one bothered to clean up the blood that coated the floor. Jake's footprints trailed the red liquid everywhere. It covered his face and dripped from his hands. Thomas eventually went through a seizure and came back as what Jake had become.

They sent in three more people over two weeks.

They all went through the same process. They were attacked and killed, and each of them became a monster.

After the third, the doors didn't open again.

Without food to sustain them, they dropped off one by one. From what I could tell, it took another week for them each to lose the integrity of their bodies and fall to the ground, unmoving once more. Somehow, Jake was the last one standing, staring at the camera after nearly two weeks without food.

The way he stared... there was no humanity left in his eyes. It was just hunger, predatory hunger.

He stood still for over twenty-four hours, just staring at the camera, before his body collapsed to the floor. His chest was still, his fingers no longer twitching.

He was finally dead, finally at peace.

Or at least, that's what I hoped.

When the video stopped, there were people in lab coats walking into the room, putting the bodies on trolleys, covered in white sheets that were already staining with blood. I don't know what they did with the bodies, but I hoped they burned them.

After the video stopped, Max kept staring at the blank screen.

"Max?" I whispered her name, hoping to break her from whatever she was stuck in. "Max, look at me." She slowly looked at me, her irises void of emotion as she did so.

"She killed him." Max said.

"Yes."

"In the most disrespectful, horrible way possible."

"Yes."

"Does Micah know?" She asked, mentioning Jake's twin brother. The one who ran the Simmons family business, a business I knew wasn't even close to the right side of the law.

"Yes." He was who I went to after I took the video to MI6, after they showed far too much interest in what this drug could mean for them.

"Good. I'll need to contact someone on the inside to see if we can find the manufacturing plant and where they keep these drugs. Jacques is probably the best bet..." This wasn't good. She wasn't grieving, she was pushing it all down.

"Max, you have to grieve-"

"I can grieve after I kill Queen."