Victorious

The third and final installment of the Villains series picks up three years after the events of Vengeful. In this world, EOs (ExtraOrdinaries) are people who gained supernatural abilities after surviving near-death experiences, and EON is a clandestine organization dedicated to capturing and containing them. The novel weaves between past and present timelines, tracing its characters' converging paths toward a violent reckoning.

A brief prologue shows Victor Vale, an EO who can control pain through electrical currents, standing before EON's doors, inhaler in hand, reflecting on the irony of choosing to be a hero. The narrative then jumps backward to fill in three years of events.

After his enemy Eli Ever's death at Sydney Clarke's hands, Victor severs ties with the people closest to him: his former cellmate Mitch Turner, Sydney (a young EO who can resurrect the dead), and her dog, Dol. Victor's power has been glitching since Sydney brought him back from the dead, causing fatal cardiac episodes. He survives only by inhaling Haverty's compound, which suppresses his abilities entirely, leaving him ordinary and dependent. He is adrift, haunted by increasingly vivid hallucinations of Eli and Sydney, a side effect of the compound's neurological damage. June, a shapeshifting EO mercenary who can assume the body of anyone she has touched, tracks Victor down and offers her services. He asks her to spy on EON.

A parallel origin story unfolds. Dr. Gabriel Gray, a psychiatrist in Merit, takes on a patient named Paul Barnett, who claims his dreams manifest into reality. Gabriel confirms the claim when snakes materialize from Paul's sleeping body during a sedation exercise but lies to Paul and studies the phenomenon secretly. Paul discovers the deception and breaks into Gabriel's home, having accidentally killed his sister with his dream abilities. He is knocked unconscious and dreams of an earthquake. The house collapses, killing Gabriel's wife, Iris, and son, Ian, while Gabriel is impaled on the stairs.

Gabriel wakes in a hospital nineteen days later. When he touches Iris's body in the morgue, she breathes and her wounds heal. Gabriel has become an EO with the power to resurrect the dead. He brings Ian back too, but both return as hollow shells, obeying commands but incapable of independent thought or emotion. When he accepts they will never recover, he reduces them to ash with a touch, the inverse application of his power.

Helena Roy, EON's new interim director, offers Gabriel a position as therapist to the EO prisoners. He accepts, seeing an opportunity to study EOs up close. Over the following months, he seizes control of EON. He poisons and resurrects Helena as a puppet, using her authority to install himself as acting director via video call with the board. He gases and kills the on-site soldiers, then resurrects them under his command. EON also employs two EO field agents: Lilian Rios, who can walk through solid surfaces, and Noah Harris, who can turn invisible. When Rios senses something wrong and flees, Gabriel sends the converted Noah after her. June, who had cultivated a relationship with Rios while gathering intelligence, arrives at a rendezvous only to find Rios already converted. Ambushed by agents and Noah, June escapes but is shot in her real body. Terrified, she goes dark, abandoning all her connections.

Gabriel's attempts to convert EO prisoners prove far harder. Resurrected EOs retain their personalities and memories, resisting his control, and their powers return damaged. Xavier Pascal, a teenage EO who could erase memories, finds his own memories now fade constantly. Malcolm Olipett, an EO with technological abilities, becomes permanently fused to EON's mainframe, serving as a sentient digital security system. Gabriel destroys Xavier when the deterioration becomes irreversible.

Six months before the present, Gabriel resurrects Eli Ever from EON's morgue. Eli's healing power has glitched, producing excess bone and scarring with every injury. He resists Gabriel's control fiercely, drawing on his experience resisting the compulsion power of Serena Clarke, Sydney's older sister. Gabriel probes Eli's faith, his history with Victor, and his motives through therapy sessions. Eli reveals Sydney's existence and her resurrection power, which mirrors Gabriel's own. Gabriel finally breaks Eli by exploiting his childhood trauma: He recreates the dynamic of Eli's abusive father, then offers forgiveness instead of punishment.

During this period, Victor finds Professor Daniela Dean, a biochemist at Lockland University. Through months of dangerous experimentation, Dani develops a new compound that stabilizes Victor's heart without suppressing his powers. Victor regains full control of his abilities for the first time in years, though accumulated cardiac damage limits how much power he can safely exert.

In the present, Mitch and Sydney have been living in a remote cabin. A stranger named Noah appears, claiming a connection to the property's former owner. Mitch, suspicious, drives them to a motel in the town of Bethany. That night, EON agents led by Noah attack. Eli, armed with tranquilizer darts, hunts Sydney. Dol attacks Eli before being tranquilized. Cornered on the rooftop, Sydney opens a red tin containing Serena's charred bone fragments and resurrects her sister.

The resurrection dramatically alters Serena's power. Instead of her original voice compulsion, Serena now creates immersive illusions that trap everyone within range inside personalized dreams constructed from their own memories. The agents on the roof walk off the edge, lost in false reality. Serena carries the unconscious Sydney to a nearby abandoned amusement park. Victor, who tracked Dol's embedded chip to the motel, arrives to find the aftermath and frees Mitch from a transport van. They enter the amusement park, where Serena's illusion engulfs them. Only sharp physical pain snaps Victor back to reality. Inside a funhouse, Sydney realizes the dream is false but cannot wake from it. Noah pushes through the illusion and tranquilizes Serena, shattering the dreamscape. Sydney flees but is captured by Eli. EON transports both sisters toward the facility in separate vans.

Victor contacts June. She abandons her latest job and ambushes the convoy carrying Serena, but when Serena opens her eyes, June is pulled into the illusion. Victor, Mitch, and June regroup and drive toward EON. Mitch cracks EON's mainframe by realizing its defender is Malcolm, who has secretly been trying to help. Mitch exploits a logical paradox in Malcolm's directives to gain administrative access.

Serena escapes the wrecked convoy and drives toward EON, her expanding illusion field causing accidents along the road. She enters the compound, overwhelming Gabriel's agents. Gabriel conducts a final session with Sydney, attempting to recruit her and demonstrating his power by reducing Helena to ash. Sydney stabs him with his own pencil, escapes, steals Noah's gun, and kills Noah. Victor fights through converted EOs to reach Gabriel's office, where Eli, now fully broken to Gabriel's will, awaits. During their brutal fight, Victor destroys the office camera and challenges Gabriel to face him personally, gambling on the therapist's need for control. Gabriel enters. Victor forces Eli aside and fires his last bullet into Gabriel's head. Because all of Gabriel's resurrected creations are tethered to his life force, Eli and every converted person throughout EON crumble to ash simultaneously.

Inside Serena's dream, Mitch forces himself free by walking away from its comforts. Serena shoots him, and he dies. Sydney resurrects him; he returns as an EO who can create duplicates of himself. June attacks Serena but is killed. Sydney, accepting that she created Serena's power and must undo it, takes her sister's hand, reaches for the thread connecting them, and lets go. Serena crumbles to ash.

Sydney and Mitch find Victor in Gabriel's office, badly wounded. His inhaler vial cracked during the fight, leaving him without the compound that stabilizes his heart. He hides this. As they drive away, Victor quietly lets his heart fail, turning off his own pain so his death is peaceful. An epilogue shows Sydney and Mitch burying him in his original grave. Sydney fights the urge to resurrect Victor but decides to let him go. Three years later, Mitch owns a diner, Sydney studies at Lockland under Dani, and for the first time, they are home.