Chapter 17
Clare
The bed was empty when I woke.
My hand hit cold sheets where Xavier should’ve been. Panic spiked before I saw the notepad on his pillow.
Outside. Didn’t want to wake you. - X
The handwriting was steadier than yesterday. That should’ve been reassuring.
It wasn’t.
I sat up slowly. My knee throbbed, yesterday’s slip on the ice, the mad scramble away from Dresner’s kill team, all of it catching up now that adrenaline had burned off. Sunlight filtered through frost-covered windows, turning the world outside into fractured crystal.
Like the two-week deadline sitting in my chest like a stone.
The shower helped. Hot water, decent pressure, someone else’s shampoo that smelled like lavender and mint. I found clean clothes in the dresser, women’s sizes, clearly left here for emergencies like this. Black jeans that fit reasonably well. A sweater soft enough to make me sigh in relief.
Whose life was I borrowing now?
I pushed the thought away. Focused on moving. One foot in front of the other. Down the creaking stairs to the main floor.
The kitchen was empty. Coffee pot still warm. Someone had been here recently, two mugs in the sink, crumbs on the counter suggesting breakfast had already happened without me.
I poured coffee. Found bread, cheese, some kind of jam that was probably fancy and French. Made myself eat despite my stomach’s protest.
The chip. The deadline. PSI-317 flooding Xavier’s brain with chemical poison. I shoved the thoughts away. There would be time enough to think about them later.
I forced down another bite of bread. Chewed mechanically. Tasted nothing.
Outside the window, movement caught my attention. Two figures near what looked like a woodpile. One chopping. One watching.
Xavier and Havoc.
I grabbed my coffee and went to the back door.
The cold fogged my breath immediately. Frost crunched under my borrowed boots as I made my way across dead grass toward the sound of splitting timber.
Xavier saw me first. Stopped mid-swing. The axe hung in his grip, dangerous, competent, like everything else about him. He wore a thermal shirt I didn’t recognize, jeans, boots. His exhalations came in white clouds.
He looked... good. Better than he should after yesterday’s firefight and last night’s intensity.
The thought sent warmth flooding through me despite the freezing temperature.
Havoc sat on a stump nearby, blade in one hand, whittling something from a piece of cedar. He glanced up when I approached. Grinned.
“Morning, Sleeping Beauty. Heard you had an eventful night.”
I stopped. “Excuse me?”
“The walls are thin.” His grin widened. “Very thin. And you’re very loud when...”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll remove your tongue with a rusty spoon.”
The words came out flat. Deadly serious.
Havoc laughed. Actually laughed. “I like you more every time we talk.”
Xavier’s jaw tightened. He drove the axe into the stump with more force than necessary. Came to stand beside me, close enough that our shoulders brushed. His hand slid to my waist and pulled me against him before I could process the movement.
His mouth crashed into mine. Fierce, demanding, possessive. The kiss held no gentleness. No question. Just a declaration made in front of a witness, intentional and brazen.
My coffee mug almost slipped from my grip.
When he pulled back, he locked onto Havoc for one beat. Two. Then he released me, picked up the axe, and returned to the woodpile like nothing had happened.
I stood there, breathless, face burning despite the cold.
Havoc’s eyebrows had climbed toward his hairline. “Well then.”
The axe bit into timber with a sharp crack.
“Point taken,” Havoc muttered, resuming his work with what might have been amusement flickering at the corner of his mouth.
I took a long drink of coffee. Ignored the flush still spreading across my skin. “Where’s Hellhound?”
“Making calls. Coordinating with contacts. Planning the impossible infiltration you so graciously bought us time for.”
Right. The infiltration. Geneva headquarters. Dresner’s servers.
Two weeks to pull off something that would probably get them killed.
Outstanding.
“So.” The blade kept moving. Casual. Like we were discussing weather instead of life and death. “What’s your plan here? You think there’s a happily ever after waiting at the end of this?”
I blinked. “What?”
“You. Him.” He gestured vaguely with the tool. “You’re falling for a dying man with a kill switch in his brain. That’s not romance, that’s tragedy.”
“I don’t recall asking for your opinion on my love life.”
I kept my voice even.
“You didn’t. I’m giving it.” He looked up. The teasing faded into something more serious. “I’ve seen this play out before. Good people getting attached to broken weapons. It never ends well.”
“He’s not a weapon.”
“He was built to be exactly that.” Havoc set down the carved figure. “The conditioning, the chip, the training, Oblivion designed him to kill on command. You can’t love that away, Clare. You can’t fix him with enough determination and medical expertise.”
My fingers tightened around the coffee mug. “I’m not trying to fix him.”
“No?” The scraping resumed. “Then what do you think you’re doing?”
“Keeping him alive long enough for you bastards to get those deactivation codes.” I took another drink. Bitter. Hot. Real. “What he does with the time after that is his choice.”
“Assuming there is an after.” His tone gentled slightly. “You understand the odds, right? Even if we get the codes, even if we shut down the overdose, these people don’t just recover. I’ve seen what happens when the conditioning breaks down completely.”
He stopped carving. Met me directly.
“They fragment. Lose themselves piece by piece. The personality you’re falling for might just be a temporary state before everything collapses entirely. Before he becomes something you don’t recognize.”
Pressure built in my ribs. “You’re saying he might never recover.”
“I’m saying the man you know might not exist in two weeks.
Might never have existed at all, just a gap between what Dresner made him and what the malfunction turns him into.
” Havoc leaned forward. “And even if he does recover his memories, you need to understand what you’re signing up for.
Every single operative Dresner kidnapped came from somewhere dark.
Criminals. The worst kind. Men who did things that landed them in places where people like Dresner could pluck them out and remake them. ”
The implication hung heavy between us.
“You think Xavier was...”
“I don’t know what he was or did.” Havoc cut me off. “Neither does he. But when those memories come back, if they come back, are you going to be able to look at him the same way? When you find out what he did before Dresner got his hands on him?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
The question I hadn’t let myself think about.
Xavier stood twenty feet away, splitting timber. Silent. Lethal. Gentle with me.
But what had he been before?
“It doesn’t matter.”
I forced the words out steady. Certain.
Havoc’s eyebrow rose. “Doesn’t it?”
“The man he was before is dead. Whoever he was, whatever he did, Dresner killed that person when he put that chip in Xavier’s spine. Erased him. Rebuilt him into something else entirely.”
I watched Xavier pause, wipe sweat from his forehead despite the cold.
“The man standing there now? The one who tried to make me leave to keep me safe? Who was always gentle and protective, trying his best to do the best in the brink of death?” My throat constricted.
“That’s who I’m choosing. Not who he might have been.
Not who the malfunction might turn him into.
Him. Right now. For however long we have. ”
Havoc studied me for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression, not quite respect. Not quite resignation. Maybe recognition.
“You really mean that.”
“Yes.”
The pause stretched between us. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
Finally, Havoc nodded. Picked up the carving again. “Fair enough. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when the past comes back to bite your fine ass.”
I smirked. “Careful, Havoc. Love might come back to bite you in the ass too.”
The blade stopped moving. He looked up, expression flat. “Not happening.”
“Never say never.”
“I’m saying it.” He returned to his work with sharp, deliberate strokes. “Love is for people who still think the world gives a damn about their happiness. I’m not one of them.”
“What about Hellhound?”
“What about him?”
“You two seem close.”
“We’re colleagues. Partners in mutual destruction.” The scraping grew more forceful. “That’s not love. That’s strategy.”
Right. And I was Xavier’s nurse.
I studied Havoc’s profile. The hard line of his jaw. The way his shoulders carried tension like armor. Something darker lurked beneath the sarcasm, fury so deep it had calcified into purpose.
“Why do you hate Dresner so much?”
The carving stilled. “You mean besides the obvious?”
“Yeah. Besides the obvious.” I took a drink of cooling coffee. “Hellhound wants to save people, dismantle the organization. You want blood. There’s a difference.”
The pause stretched. The axe bit into timber behind me, sharp, rhythmic, grounding.
Havoc set down the figure.
“Dresner doesn’t just break people, Clare.
He perfects the process. Refines it. Studies what works and what doesn’t like we’re experiments instead of humans.
” His voice went cold. Flat. “Some of us remember enough to know what we lost. Most don’t.
I’m somewhere in the middle, and that’s the worst possible kind of torture. ”
The bitterness in those words made my throat ache.
“That’s why you want him dead.”