Chapter 26 #2
I take a step closer, the rug muting the impact of my boots.
“You think I needed a contract to get to you?” I ask darkly.
Color rises in her cheeks. Shame, not fear. “I don’t know what to think. You killed the other men, you took me—”
“Because someone else originally accepted payment on your life before I interfered,” I cut in.
She stares, the edges of her mouth trembling. “So you indeed weren’t the one who put it out?”
“No, and I don’t know who did, at least not yet.
” I shift my weight, feel the familiar burn of suspicion settle into my muscles.
“But the contract is wrong. Sloppy in the right places, careful in the wrong ones. The origin is scrubbed too clean, corrupted. Payments routed through dead accounts. Someone with resources and a lot of power, but not the practice. I assume they have never ordered a contract before. Things don’t add up. ”
Her fingers start to tap out an agitated rhythm on the armrest before she catches herself. “So you’ll… what? Hunt them?”
“I will find them,” I say. “And then we’ll decide what they deserve.”
“We.” It slips out of her like she didn’t mean to put it that way.
I hear it anyway. Something in me sharpens around the pronoun.
“Yes,” I say. “We.”
Silence lays down between us for a beat.
The tracker device hums faintly as it settles into its new duty. Above us, the generator’s low song brushes the concrete. Somewhere far away, winter presses its face against the earth, unaware or uncaring that two people have just agreed to something lethal in a room full of fire.
Her brow furrows, the fire catching the confusion in her eyes. “Why do you do that?” she whispers. “Why do you care who put a hit on me?”
I almost laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because she truly has no idea what kind of creature she’s talking to.
I tilt my head, studying her the way my father once taught me to study fractures; slow, thorough, looking for the place where pressure will tell the truth.
“I find the idea of you being dead inconvenient.”
A beat.
“And I find the idea of someone else wanting you dead far more inconvenient.”
Her pulse jumps at her throat, a quick betrayal of how deeply that lands. Her cheeks stain red.
I drag us backward, to the beginning. To the blood on her floor.
“Enough of that, tell me about the two men at your house,” I say. “Every detail.”
She exhales hard, frustration twisting through it. She pushes hair back from her face with fingers that still shake slightly.
“There were two of them,” she begins. “Both taller than me. Dark clothes, nothing distinctive. They showed me their bare faces. The first one had an old eyebrow scar, straight, deliberate. The second was heavier. Strong.”
Bare faces? That’s for men who don’t plan on leaving any witnesses, or not making any.
“Accents?” I ask. “Smells, habits, tells?”
She frowns, eyes unfocusing as she drags memory out from under terror. “I… I think one of them was Icelandic. The other maybe not. His vowels were… off. Further east? I don’t know.”
“What did they say?”
“Not much,” she says. “They weren’t… talkative. Just orders. Easy. Calm down.” Her throat tightens, voice thinning. “Only one of them said my name.”
Everything in me goes still, they knew the target by her name.
“Do you remember anything else, especially about their physique?”
“No.” She shudders. “They’re just… blurs in my head. Dark shapes. Your entrance is the only part that’s… sharp.”
My entrance. Gunshots.
Of course it is.
“Fine,” I say. “If your memory gives you anything else, you tell me. Immediately. You don’t decide for yourself it’s irrelevant.”
Her chin lifts a fraction. “You think I’d hide something that might help?”
“I think you’re a journalist,” I reply. “Curiosity makes you… selective. You keep things in your head until you have a story. I don’t want a story. I want data.”
“You want carnage,” she counters.
“We’re fortunate those can overlap,” I say.
That hangs there for a moment. She studies me like she’s trying to see the algorithm under the scar tissue.
“Can I ask you something?” she says finally.
The question is cautious. She shifts slightly in the chair; the tracker catches the angle change and sends a soft ping I feel more than hear.
“You do it anyway,” I say. “Might as well be honest about it.
“Am I just a weakness you haven’t killed yet?”
Harsh silence.
For a heartbeat, I see the scene from a distance: a woman barefoot by a stolen fire in her captor’s shirt, with an invisible leash around her bone, asking the monster to define the shape of the knife he’s holding against her future.
I sit back down in my chair.
Distance. I need distance. At least the illusion.
The fire sheds its heat unevenly; one side of my face burns, the other remains cold. She sits half in light, half in shadow. It feels appropriate.
“Here is what you are,” I say. “You are the only person alive who has seen my face, heard my name, walked my corridors, and lived. You are tied to a contract I did not originate but cannot ignore. You are an anomaly in the data. And my work does not tolerate anomalies.”
“Then why am I still breathing?” she whispers.
Because my hand stopped shaking the first time you touched it.
Because your pulse under my fingers made something in me remember what it was like to be a subject instead of a tool.
Because I am weak in exactly one direction, and it is yours.
“Because I decided you are more useful alive,” I say instead.
I lean forward, letting the darkness in me step closer, the part that keeps this bunker running and the dead where they belong.
“This doesn’t make us equal,” I say. “That tracker around your ankle talks to my system and to me. You try to run, you will not like what happens.”
Her eyes drop to the band. “What does it do?”
“You’ll never find out,” I say, “if you’re a good girl.”
There’s the intimidation. I feel it settle over the room like a heavier air. It’s familiar. Safer than all this fragile honesty.
A part of me watches her with clinical interest: will she push? Will she test? Will she bare her teeth and demand more?
She doesn’t.
Her shoulders lower, fractionally. Her throat works. She looks up at me, eyes bright with a dozen unsaid arguments… and chooses the path of least resistance.
“Okay,” she says quietly. “I understand.”
I know she doesn’t. Not fully. She understands enough to survive. For now, that’s all I require.
“Say it properly,” I murmur.
Her jaw tightens. Her hands flatten on her thighs, fingers splayed. “I’ll behave. I won’t run. I won’t… get anything in my head.”
A corner of my mouth threatens to move. I kill the impulse before it reaches the surface.
“Lying to yourself is your problem,” I say. “Lying to me is another.”
“I’m not lying,” she says. “I’m being,” she pauses and watches me, “a good girl for you.”
A laugh breaks out of me; low, rough, more of a breath than a sound.
“That,” I murmur, “is dangerous vocabulary to use on me, darling.”
She watches me, and I watch her for too long.
“Get some sleep,” I say finally, standing again. “You’ll need it.”
“And you?” she asks.
I pause with my hand on the back of my chair.
“I go to work,” I say. “There are wrong people to find.”
Her gaze tracks me as I move toward the corridor, as if memorizing every angle, every shadow I pass through. It’s not the way victims watch their killers.
It’s the way writers watch the ending they know they’ll never publish.
Her stare follows me like a touch between my shoulders, hot and unwelcome and… anchoring.
No one has ever watched me like that.
By the time I reach the ladder, of course, my tremor is back.