Chapter 9 Dante
North Carolina, USA
“Nothing from Ezra?” Jason asks, bringing a glass of water to his lips. His eyes are swollen with exhaustion, bruised with red and violet veins, as if his skin can’t hold the weight of all those sleepless nights anymore.
Ezra Thompson. Our link to the outside. He’s been keeping track of everything—every mission, every contact, every kill. But it’s been a week since we’ve heard from him. Jason’s been restless, convinced something went wrong, and I should care as much. I want to care.
But all I can think about is her.
“The answer is still no, Jason,” I say finally, trying to inject a note of concern into my voice. It comes out hollow, like an empty shell of emotion that refuses to sound real. I scrub a hand down my face, more to hide that I’m somewhere else entirely than to ease the weariness.
It’s not the travel that’s killing me—not the endless flights, the coded messages, the paranoia of being followed—I’ve learned to survive that. What’s breaking me apart is how alive I felt with Estella.
That day was supposed to be just another exercise in control. She was supposed to be a mission—a profile to study, understand, and complete.
But something fucking happened.
I told her things I never tell anyone—about my first love, my father, things I’d buried so deep I almost forgot they existed. And I don’t know why. Maybe because that day, with her, the world stopped feeling so sharp around the edges.
It wasn’t just her words. It was the way she looked at everything, from the sky to the street, the food, and the trinkets, as if the world still deserved to be admired. And when she turned that gaze on me, I felt like maybe I did too.
For a few hours, I wasn’t a man chasing ghosts. I wasn’t defined by loss or revenge or the blood on my hands.
I was just… a person. Sitting in the sun. Breathing. Existing.
And it terrifies me how much I miss that feeling.
The moment she started talking about her past, I felt the pain. It was in the way her eyes glistened, the way her lip trembled just slightly before she caught it. I kept telling myself it was all a performance, another one of her masks. She’s fooled me before, back when I pulled her out of prison.
But that day, it wasn’t the same. I know it wasn’t. I could feel it in my bones, in the way the air shifted around us. I haven’t told anyone, and I won’t. I already know what they’d say.
She’s playing you.
She’s a manipulator, a liar, a killer.
She’s poison.
And they’d be right. But even then, I don’t care. Because whatever this is, whatever spell she’s cast on me—I can’t fucking break it.
It’s like she’s gotten under my skin, taken root inside me.
She’s there when I close my eyes, when I breathe, when I try to think about anything else.
I can still feel her hands on me—just a few quick touches, and yet they burned deeper than anything else I’ve ever felt.
It’s like she branded me without trying.
When I told her I’d never met anyone like her, I wasn’t trying to manipulate her into opening up. Not that time. I meant it.
I’ve seen every kind of killer—cold, efficient, detached, broken.
Yet somehow, Estella is alive. She moves with chaos, color, and confidence, all contained in a single body.
She loves what she does, and it’s terrifying how breathtaking that is to witness.
It’s impossible not to be impressed when someone embraces their darkness so completely.
Harder still is realizing that you’re falling for it.
“I think they got to him.”
The words slice through my thoughts, yanking me out of the spiral that’s been looping in my head since Barcelona. I blink, grounding myself back in the room—the hum of the fluorescent lights, the smell of cold coffee, the mess of scattered papers.
Every time I stop thinking about her, the craving grows stronger.
Jason sits across from me, his hand trembling slightly as he twirls a pencil between his fingers, pressing so hard that his knuckles bleach white. “I don’t know how or why,” he continues, his voice cracking around the edges. “And I don’t know what the fuck to do.”
I study him for a moment. The shadows under his eyes run deep, darkened not just by sleeplessness but by something heavier.
Guilt. Fear.
“When was the last time you slept?” I ask, and his gaze snaps to mine. “And I don’t mean an hour with your face buried in paperwork. I mean real sleep.”
“How the fuck can I sleep, Dante?” he explodes, the pencil snapping in half between his fingers. “We spent years planning this, and our agent disappears six weeks in.”
“I know, Jason,” I say, my voice sharp as I match the rough tone of his words. “I’m the one who decided to bring these bastards down, remember? You don’t have to remind me what’s at stake. I’m not fucking stupid.”
He’s forgetting something. Without me, none of this would exist. Not the network, not the leads, not even the idea of justice we built from scraps of rage and grief.
He and Lucia are good, and I’ve never questioned their skill or their commitment.
But if he’d been alone, he’d still be that lost kid with too much pain and nowhere to put it.
Jason and I go way back. He was a mess growing up—unstable home, self-destructive habits, the kind of darkness that eats you alive if you don’t learn how to feed it something else. I remember the night he almost ended it all. I barely talked him out of it.
He’s been trying to repay me ever since, though I never asked him to. I didn’t save him for that. But working for the greater cause gave him something real. It gave both of us something real.
A purpose.
A meaning.
Lucia, on the other hand, carries a different kind of wound. Her death was social, legal, and reputational. Her fiancé—a man with too much money and not enough soul—orchestrated it all. He erased her name without ever pulling a trigger. He used every weapon power could buy.
By the time he was done, she had no friends, no family, no voice.
Even the people closest to her turned their backs on her.
So she fled across borders, carrying the ashes of who she used to be.
Jason found her months later, half-starved, half-mad, living under a borrowed name.
He helped her build a new identity and get out of the country.
She fights now because she already died once—not by a bullet, but by a system that lets people erase others for convenience.
And we keep going because that system keeps breathing. We know it will never truly die, not completely. But if we can sever one of its heads, maybe the rest will learn to live in fear, too. Let them spend their lives paranoid, always looking over their shoulders, knowing people like us exist.
Watching. Waiting.
But my nerves are shredded now. And at this moment, I’m holding more questions than answers.
All I want is constant progress, but instead I’m watching my colleague unravel in front of me.
The purpose is slipping through our fingers—because an agent is gone, because I can’t stop thinking about her, and because somewhere deep down, I’m starting to lose sight of who I truly am and why I feel this way at all.
“Where’s Lucia?” I ask flatly. If they could just handle this on their own, I could focus on the bigger picture. For all we know, Ezra’s silence might be nothing but a product of our paranoia.
Jason exhales, long and heavy. “She’s been driving around, questioning everyone who knows him—old contacts, old clients. Ten minutes before you came in, she called. Still nothing.”
I frown, my gaze snapping to the wall covered in maps, strings, and photographs. Sometimes it all feels unreal, like I’m still nineteen, lying in a wrecked car with metal twisted around me and cold air biting through the gashes in my skin.
The memory crashes over me too vividly, too suddenly. I drag a hand down my face again, scraping against the roughness of my beard as if I could scrub the image away.
“When was the last time you even shaved?” Jason asks, his chair squeaking as he spins toward me. “Jesus, man. I haven’t seen you with a full beard in years.”
Shaving used to mean something—a sign that I still cared, that I wasn’t losing control. But ever since Estella, I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s like I want to keep a piece of her words with me, even if it’s ridiculous.
She seemed to truly like it, after all.
“I just don’t pay that much attention to it,” I say, lying through my teeth. I nod toward his computer, needing the shift. “Any leads? Last place Ezra visited?”
Jason turns back, brushing aside a pile of papers and grabbing the mouse before he starts clicking through the windows.
“I checked everything. His house, his street, nearby spots, even his mother’s place—nothing.
” His voice cracks at the end, stretched thin by exhaustion. “It’s like the guy just vanished.”
I hum under my breath, my mind already sifting through memories.
Ezra was the kind of man who always stayed balanced, the sort who never gave too much or too little.
Lucia once called him an exemplary son, saying he would answer his mother’s calls even in the middle of a mission briefing, and for some reason, it stuck with me.
“You said you checked his mother’s house?” I ask, leaning closer.
Jason nods. “A couple of times. Nothing there.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
He stands, lifting his arms in mock surrender. “Be my guest. Maybe you’ll magically find what I couldn’t,” he mutters, sarcasm dripping from every word. I ignore him and drop into the chair. Following his directions, I pull up the footage.
“There,” Jason says, pointing at the screen. “That’s from a few days before he went missing. She goes out, takes out the trash, waters the garden—normal routine. Nothing strange.”
I squint at the footage, a small jolt flaring inside me. The sensation is fleeting at first, but it grows, swelling into something stronger.
“Remember what Lucia called him?” I ask.
Jason frowns. “What?”