Ellie #2
New footage appears: a government-style building, multiple camera angles showing corridors and offices. The timestamp shows it's from several years ago.
"This was his final assignment with us. A federal prosecutor who'd been building a case against the Order's operations. Watch carefully, Ellie. This is where your beloved Killian finally started to crack."
The footage shows Killian moving through the building, but he’s not the machine from earlier operations. He stops outside an office door. Starts toward it. Stops again. The target sits at his desk, working late, a framed photo facing him. Wife, two kids, all smiles.
I watch Killian try to enter that office for an entire hour. He approaches with his weapon drawn, then retreats. Approaches again. Backs away. His hands shake. Even through the grainy footage, I can see him unraveling.
"Notice how he falls apart," Grace continues conversationally. "Multiple approach attempts, extensive hesitation, obvious psychological distress. He eventually completed the mission, but it took two hours instead of the usual five minutes."
The footage shows the final approach, Killian entering the office, the brief confrontation, and then the kill. But even in the grainy video, I can see his hands shaking afterward, see him standing over the body in what looks like shock.
"But the real failure," Grace says, her voice taking on a note of satisfaction, "was that he left evidence.
Fingerprints, DNA, security footage he failed to disable.
For the first time in his career, Killian Blackthorn made mistakes.
His training was unraveling completely. We believe this trail of evidence was left purposefully and not accidentally, as he claimed. "
I swallow hard.
The monitors flicker to different footage, security cameras from what I recognize as a federal courthouse. I watch Killian surrender himself to the authorities, allowing his arrest without resistance.
"Rather than risk him becoming a liability, Julian decided to kill him," Grace explains. "But Killian anticipated this. His surrender was tactical. Prison provided protection from the Order's retaliation while he planned his next move."
"You couldn't reach him there," I realize.
"Precisely. Though we certainly tried." Grace's expression turns almost admiring. "He survived three assassination attempts during his incarceration. Impressive, really. The student finally surpassed the teacher."
My cheeks are wet from tears I didn’t realise were falling.
"This is why you're here, Eleanor. Not as bait for Killian, though that serves our purposes as well. You're here because your father's research created men like him. Everything you thought you knew about your father's research was a lie. And you're going to help us understand how to create more."
"My father's research? Wait, what?"
"Project Ghost. The classified psychological conditioning program that produced Killian and several others like him.
Your father was the unwitting architect of the techniques we employed in Romania.
Killian was our first successful candidate to come out of Project Ghost, earning him the nickname Ghost."
The Ghost
My stomach plummets.
Killian isn’t just a killer.
He’s the killer.
All those fragments I’d been trying to ignore suddenly slam together into a picture I can’t unsee. The classified files. My father's late-night calls. The way he'd grown distant in those final months. He wasn't just tracking the Ghost.
He was tracking Killian.
The man who raised me to heal people built the science of destroying them.
"Dr. Gregory Hart," Grace continues, "was a pioneer in psychological conditioning and trauma-based behavioral modification.
He believed he was conducting legitimate government research, but it was his research that laid the groundwork for everything you've just witnessed.
He genuinely believed he was helping to heal people. "
Relief hits me like a drug. My father wasn’t a monster. He didn’t—
"But his research was being perverted," Grace continues, and my relief crumbles.
"Every technique he developed to rehabilitate criminals, we reversed.
Every method he created to heal psychological damage, we used to inflict it.
Your father's compassionate work became the blueprint for breaking human beings down and rebuilding them as weapons. "
"No," I whisper, but the denial sounds weak even to my own ears.
"Oh yes," Grace says with satisfaction. "Without your father, Killian, as he was, wouldn't have been created.
And now, Dr. Hart, you're going to help us perfect his work.
Because the man you love is both the greatest success and the greatest failure of your father's legacy.
And through you, we're going to understand exactly how to ensure future subjects never develop the humanity that led to Killian's betrayal. "
The man I love?
Do I? Can I? After everything I’ve just seen?
Grace is going to use that. Use me. To turn everything my father built to heal people into a weapon. Again. More of them. More Killians. But worse, ones who won’t break. Won’t feel. Won’t develop the guilt that saved whatever humanity he has left.
I’m cracking. The air in the room is getting thicker and thicker. My lungs scream out for oxygen, but I can't get them to take a breath properly.
“He created the psychological framework that turned natural fighters like Killian into perfect killers. He just never knew it.”
“That’s impossible.” But my voice cracks on the denial. “He would have realized—"
"Eventually, he did," Grace interrupts. "Your father started noticing patterns.
Assassinations that used psychological profiles matching his research too precisely.
Criminal behavior that followed his theoretical framework too closely.
He began to suspect his rehabilitation work was being reversed, used to create violence rather than prevent it. "
My stomach drops. "That's why he was killed."
"Precisely. The moment Dr. Hart realised his life's work, his desire to heal people, had been twisted into a method for creating monsters, he became our greatest threat.
He couldn't live with the knowledge that his compassion had been weaponized.
And we couldn't risk him exposing how his research had been perverted.
Reed’s hands drop onto my shoulders. I jump, and I can feel his satisfaction at my weakness.
On the monitors, footage of Killian's operations continue to play, an endless loop of violence and death carried out by someone I thought I understood.
The weapon my father unknowingly created, forever bound in a cycle that started before we ever met.
The monitors go black.
My father wrote the manual on how to break a human mind. And my session is about to begin.