Chapter 11
VICTORIA
Well, fuck—what the fuck was that?
I walked into that warehouse as a woman ready to shatter on her own terms—and left as something he dismantled way too easily to actually be fun.
I expected him to do some sort of poof-poof and to get under my skin, find something in my brain and try to set it on fire.
I fully expected him to use the already standardized, a.k.a.
useless, techniques to make me surrender to whatever bullshit he was preaching, just to be disappointed he failed.
I was even prepared for physical torture, for fuck’s sake.
What I was not prepared for was for him to strip me naked—and not in the way I wanted.
Or for him to hack my phone. How the fuck did he even do that? Why did he do that? All the money invested in security developed by the greatest hackers, just to be played by a fucking university Professor.
Seeing the footage of my team was a gut punch. A professional failure of the highest order.
Actually, it doesn’t even matter how or why Azrael did that. What matters is that he did it. He played me and my team, and now I have to find a way to make him pay for it. Not to mention I have to figure out a way to tell Alex and Gabriella that their information has been leaked.
As for the data itself, everything is coded, and only I can understand the shit Azrael has in his hands.
Without my brain, it’s just a bunch of ones and zeros.
Plus, it’s not like we are a top secret agency.
I’m an on-demand killer, so people are supposed to know about me.
And I know better than to keep my targets’ info on a phone.
Sure, my team runs on the black market. I mean, it’s not like we can put an ad in the newspaper “Do you want to delete your ex from existence? Call me!” But the government is contracting us.
We are really good. I am really good. Everyone that needs to know about us already knows, and the rest of the population is ignorant to care.
And if Alex finds out and bitches about it, I’ll just add an obscene bonus to their paychecks with the next kill, and they’ll both forget their very personal information was leaked.
Oh, fucking fuck of the fucks! Now I need to have a meeting with both of them. Fucking team building. But I can fix it.
The entire situation, the whole “I hacked you,” was bad because he made me look like a fool.
The real thing that stretched the last shred of self-restraint is what came after.
At the beginning, when he started stripping me, I was confused.
I thought, what on God’s green planet is this fetish, and will I enjoy it?
Probably. It’s not like I hadn’t asked him to do just that in the past. But then the humiliation started, and every one of his words cut to the bone.
It had nothing to do with my job, my skills, my physical appearance, my brain, or anything else I’d accounted for.
Instead, he went for what I deigned to look back at: me, the one responsible for creating this empty shell of a mind.
The same mind I now want to fill with emotions, while still trying to forget everything about the past.
I am, unfortunately, not a pure creation of Mother Nature, nor is my sensational personality. I was not born with this twisted mind. A man with too much power over an immature mind handcrafted me fourteen years ago. My number one. My first kill.
Azrael was behind me, whispering all the right words to make my lucidity slip.
My chest tightened. My thoughts spiraled back to that time, that moment in front of the mirror when I had been forced to choose: predator or prey.
Now, the same choice closed in on me—humanity or survival—and my body refused to move.
Rage shot through me. My mind screamed to end what the Professor had started, to draw the blade tucked in my jacket and make him number forty-four. But my voice stayed silent. My limbs stayed still. Layer by layer, I felt myself vanish.
He was right; my clothes are armor. Not to pretend, but to protect what little remained of me, to hide it under the fabric.
Yet, right there in front of him, I became weak. A version of me that could no longer defend herself. My body turned into an object, toyed with at will. My mind scrambled, unable to latch onto reality.
Only when the door clicked behind him did I exhale, letting my body finally respond. The aftermath wasn’t pretty—everything but the tape lay in ruin. But it didn’t touch the wounds in my brain, it didn’t quiet his words looping over and over in my mind.
I spend twenty minutes on the kitchen floor with my back against the kitchen island. Fully clothed, barely breathing, and with a brain still trying to figure out how to reboot.
I need wine.
Not comfort-wine. Not job-wine.
War-wine. The Professor will pay for this.
I go to the wine column and take out a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino 2016. It’s a modern vintage, built with a structure so well created it is supposed to last decades. But after today, God knows if I’ll still be around in 2040.
The first third of the bottle does nothing, and I almost kick myself in the gut for wasting it.
The reflection of me—us—in the mirror is burned into my retinas, and my weakness is the only thing I can see.
The second third tastes like surrender may not be the worst idea.
By the time I finish it, I can’t tell if I’m shaking from the temperature or from the memory of his words.
“Yeah, give up while you still can.” I hear the unbelievable words come out of my mouth.
This session was supposed to leave me pleased and him wondering why he was wrong.
Yet I’m the one on the floor right n—hold on.
Surrender? My half-drunk, half-enraged brain is finally processing what I just said less than five minutes ago.
Surrender. Me, Victoria, give up? If I give up after just this session, I might as well throw myself off the Needle and call it a life. A killer, defeated by a professor.
But what are the options? It’s not like I can do anything to him.
I still need the fucker alive. I also cannot tell him to go easier on me.
I’d rather die before admitting I’m weak.
Considering the stupid situation I’ve put myself in, all I can do is suck it up and learn to deal with whatever he’s doing.
This is not the moment for a pity party.
What I need to do is understand him and figure out exactly what exactly he saw in me that made it so easy for him to manipulate me. For that, I need to, once again, do what Azrael ordered and watch the warehouse footage.
The images leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
I see myself, trembling, shaking from my core—okay, an exaggeration, but it’s not that far-fetched.
With each piece of clothing that drops to the floor, my eyes are more and more distant.
I’m rewatching my past, memory by memory.
I don’t even see myself trying to fight it.
That ghost from the past, that is now nothing more than an unfortunate event, is back to haunt me and in full control. Again.
Throughout the entire session, Azrael just stands there, trying to look unimpressed and cynical, but he broke character a couple of times and almost touched my body, almost kissed my neck.
This is the silver lining in all this chaotic experience—he needs to restrain himself from reacting to my body. Well, that’s something I can work with.
I open my laptop and pull up the file from Alex.
The “full profile” on Azrael Lennox is exactly forty lines long, based on less than ten sources, most of them being archived websites. In a few words, a huge waste of kilobytes. The little bitch gave me a fucking résumé.
Rage blooms through my veins so fast, and before I realize what I’m doing, I’m already on a call with Alex.
He picks up on the second ring. “Something wrong?”
Something wrong? Something wrong? The audacity! Yes, your fucking existence. Fucking bastard. Cutting his throat? Forget that. I’ll skin him alive, piece by piece, fry it and feed it to him on a plate made out of his balls.
“Yes, update your testament,” I say too loudly through the speaker.
Silence.
When no reply comes through, I continue, “You told me he is boring with slightly psychopathic tendencies, but not violent. A thinker. Someone I could manipulate if I mirror enough of his intellectual ego.”
“Yeah? And?” His uninterested tone makes me wish I had the ability to punch someone through the phone.
“Are you fucking joking? Do you have any idea what this stupid mistake cost me?” I ask, the volume of my voice even louder this time.
“He made me look pathetic, useless, a puppet in his game. The Professor knew about the cameras I installed, Alex! He knew everything. He fucking stalked me! Me! Not the other way around. Me!”
Alex exhales. “That’s not possible.”
“Then explain how he knew everything. He had access to my phone, my fucking phone! Gabriella’s and your locations.
All my schedules for the missions. I was about to foot the cost of this bullshit, but fuck no.
How the fuck did he do that when you were supposed to prevent something like this from fucking happening? ”
He goes quiet again before answering in the most monotonic voice possible, “I gave you everything I had.”
“No. You gave me a résumé. I’m not fucking hiring him!”
He is irritably disinterested while I’m fuming here. “What do you want, Victoria? I’m not a magician. This hobby of yours is not something I want to be part of.”
Breathe in, breathe out.
“No, but you were supposed to know everything and anything about whoever even looks at me for a second, and you failed. Listen.” I’m now slightly calmer. “If he ends up killing me, I’m coming after you from my grave.”
“He’s just a professor, Tory,” he answers while sounding practically done with this conversation.
“I know,” I sigh, exasperated. I can’t wrap my head around this obsession either. “But I really think he’s planning on killing me.”