Chapter 19
Xavier
Hellhound’s fist came at my face.
I dodged left. Muscle memory perfect. No thought required. Movement.
My body knew how to kill.
Shame it couldn’t remember why.
I pivoted, drove my shoulder into Hellhound’s midsection. He grunted. Absorbed the impact. Countered with an elbow that would’ve shattered my jaw if I hadn’t rolled clear.
The gymnasium floor was unforgiving beneath our feet. Bare walls. Equipment shoved against the perimeter to clear fighting space. Winter sunlight struggled through frost-covered windows, throwing everything into gray half-light.
Havoc watched from his perch on a pommel horse. Arms crossed. Expression unreadable.
“Again.”
I didn’t need the invitation.
I came at him harder. Faster. Drove him back with combinations my conscious mind didn’t recognize but my body executed flawlessly. Jab-cross-hook. Knee to the ribs. Sweep his legs.
Fighting to prove I wasn’t dead yet.
Fighting to prove I was still a weapon worth keeping sharp.
He caught my wrist mid-strike. Twisted. I rotated with the momentum, broke his grip, slammed my elbow toward his temple.
Blocked. Barely.
“Good. Your muscle memory is intact.” No strain in his voice despite the pace.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The words were still locked behind damaged vocal cords and whatever the hell Dresner had done to my brain.
But my fists spoke clearly enough.
We circled. He moved fluid, controlled, impossibly calm. I moved in sharp bursts and barely leashed aggression.
Different styles. Same lethality.
He feinted left. I didn’t fall for it. Anticipated the real strike coming from the right. Blocked. Countered.
My knuckles connected with his ribs. Solid hit.
He didn’t flinch. Smiled. “Better. It’s coming back.”
The approval shouldn’t have mattered.
It did anyway.
We’d been at this for forty minutes. My body was screaming. Ribs aching, shoulder protesting every thrown punch, head building that familiar pressure behind my eyes that meant the chip was doing its slow murderous work.
I ignored all of it.
Pain was just data. And right now, I needed to prove I could function despite the information suggesting I was falling apart.
Clare was somewhere in this building. Walking the frozen grounds. Processing her confession and Maeve’s existence and the catastrophic mistake of falling for a dying man.
I pushed the thought aside. Focused on his next move.
Hellhound came at me hard. Testing. Pushing.
I met him strike for strike.
Fighting felt right. Simple. My body knew what to do even when my mind was fractured confusion.
I threw a combination that should’ve landed. He deflected. Swept my legs. I hit the concrete hard. Air exploded from my lungs.
Before I could recover, he was on me. Knee on my chest. Forearm pinning my throat.
“You’re fast. But you used to be better.” Quiet. Assessing.
I glared at him. Waited for the point.
“You had a major seizure yesterday.” His gaze stayed level. “Your symptoms seem stable now. We don’t know what could happen. Another seizure in the field means we all die.”
I shoved against his weight. He didn’t budge.
I stared up at him, chest heaving, forearm still pressed against my windpipe.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? If you come to Geneva and your brain misfires during infiltration, you become a liability we can’t afford.”
My jaw clenched. Teeth ground together. Fury burned through my ribs, hot and vicious.
I wasn’t a liability. I was a weapon. A tool.
I had to be useful.
That was all I had left.
He released the pressure, standing in one smooth motion. Extended his hand down toward me.
I ignored it completely. Rolled sideways, pushed myself upright without help.
My throat worked. Sound tried to form. Broke apart halfway.
I forced it out anyway. “I’m... going.”
The words came rough, fragmentary. Each syllable scraped out.
But there. Real. Actual sound instead of silence.
His expression didn’t shift at all. “This isn’t about bravery, Xavier. It’s about reality.”
“My codes.” I swallowed hard. “My... fight. Need to be...” The next word stuck. I shoved it out. “Useful.”
The last word came out sharper than I’d intended. Almost desperate.
I hated how it sounded. Hated more that it was true.
He studied me for a long moment, reading everything I wasn’t saying, everything I couldn’t hide from someone who’d been exactly where I was standing now.
“You think being useful will make you worthy of her.”
I froze.
How the hell did he...
“I’ve seen that look before.” Quiet but relentless.
I stared at him. Hating that he could see straight through me.
Hating more that he was probably right.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “If you seize during infiltration, I leave you behind. Understand?”
I nodded once. Sharp.
Managed one word. “Understand.”
“No heroics. No one-man shows. Follow orders. We function as a unit or we don’t function at all.”
Another nod.
“And if your symptoms worsen before we leave, if the seizures return, if the tremors get worse, if your vision starts failing, you stay here. Non-negotiable.”
My hands clenched. Joints ached. I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him to go to hell, I was going to Geneva whether he liked it or not.
But he was right.
If I became dead weight in the middle of Dresner’s fortress, I’d get all three of us killed.
I forced the word out slowly, deliberately. “Agreed.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly, just a fraction. “Then you’re in.”
Relief hit me harder than I expected. Made my breath stutter for half a second before I locked it down.
I was going to Geneva. Going to get those deactivation codes. Going to rip them out of Dresner’s servers and destroy them if I had to.
Going to fix this.
Going to survive long enough to tell Clare everything I couldn’t say yesterday when she walked away from me.
Her name circled through my head with a certainty I had no business feeling. Not when I didn’t even know my own past. Not when Maeve’s name still echoed in my skull.
But I felt it anyway. Something absolute whenever I thought about Clare. About how she’d dragged me out of that alley half-dead and refused to leave even when Hellhound gave her the chance to run. Her hands on my skin. Her voice pulling me back from the edge of oblivion.
She mattered.
More than made sense. More than I could explain.
And Maeve, whoever she was, whatever she’d meant to me, didn’t change that.
The name was still there in my head. Undefined. A woman’s face I couldn’t see clearly, features blurred from water damage. Someone from before. Someone who’d mattered, probably. Maybe still did, in ways I couldn’t remember.
But not the same.
Not even close.
I should probably feel guilty about that.
Should feel something for this woman I’d called out for during a seizure, whose name had surfaced from the wreckage of my conditioning.
Should question what it meant that I felt nothing when I thought of her except distant recognition.
A building I’d once walked past without going inside.
I felt nothing.
Just absolute certainty about the woman currently walking the frozen grounds outside, trying to convince herself she was making the wrong choice by staying. Trying to protect herself from what might happen if she let herself care too much about a dying man who couldn’t promise her tomorrow.
She was wrong.
I just needed to survive long enough to prove it.
“Xavier.”
Havoc’s voice cut through my thoughts. He’d moved from the pommel horse, was standing beside Hellhound now. Both of them watching me with the same calculation. The look of men deciding whether I was an asset or a liability they couldn’t afford.
“Geneva. CuraNova headquarters. Twenty-four hours from now.”
My pulse kicked up automatically. Combat response, muscle memory I couldn’t suppress.
I tested my voice carefully, feeling the words scrape up my damaged throat. “Why... twenty-four?”
Each word hurt. But they held together. Mostly.
“Security protocols change every forty-eight hours.” Hellhound pulled a tablet from the equipment bag near the bleachers.
He brought up building schematics. Twelve floors of reinforced concrete and biometric security systems. “We have a twenty-four-hour window before the next rotation. After that, access codes are worthless. We miss this window, we wait another two days.”
He didn’t say the rest.
Didn’t need to.
You don’t have three days to spare.
I studied the schematics on the tablet screen. CuraNova headquarters looked exactly like what it was. A fortress disguised as a pharmaceutical research facility.
And somewhere inside those walls: servers containing deactivation codes for every chip Dresner had ever implanted in a human skull.
Including mine.
“Three-person team.” He zoomed in on the lower levels. “You, me, Havoc. We go in during shift change at oh-six-hundred. Maximum chaos, minimum visibility. Guards are tired, distracted. Security’s weakest then.”
I tried the next question, forcing the words out one syllable at a time. “My... role?”
Two words. Clean enough. Progress.
“Muscle memory.” Havoc’s voice was blunt.
No sugar-coating, no gentle phrasing to soften the reality of what they needed from me.
“You’re Quinta generation. Dresner gave you free rein of that facility.
Even if you don’t consciously remember, your body knows the layout.
The routes. The shortcuts nobody’s supposed to know about. ”
My hand stilled against my thigh.
They needed me because my subconscious remembered what my conscious mind had been wiped clean.
Because somewhere in the dark spaces of my brain, pathways still existed.
Routes I’d walked a hundred times, doors I’d opened without thinking, corridors I’d navigated on autopilot while my mind was locked away behind conditioning protocols.
The chip had stolen my memories. But it couldn’t steal how my feet knew where to go. How my hands reached for doors that should be unfamiliar. How my body moved through spaces my conscious mind had never seen.
“Dresner compartmentalized his operatives for security reasons.” He traced routes through the building’s lower levels on the tablet screen.
“I knew some areas from my time as his second. Havoc knows others from active missions. But Quinta assets? You had unrestricted access. Training facilities, medical labs, server rooms, places even I wasn’t cleared for. ”
“You’re our map.” Havoc’s tone stayed flat. “Even if you can’t tell us where to go, your body will take us there automatically. Muscle memory doesn’t lie.”
The logic was sound.
Also terrifying in ways that made my chest tight and my hands want to curl into fists.
What else did my body remember that my mind had forgotten?
What had I done in those halls while my conditioning kept me locked in obedience?
Who had I hurt? Who had I killed on Dresner’s orders while my conscious mind slept through it all, while someone else operated this body programmed for violence?
I pushed the questions back hard. Focused on what actually mattered right now. Not the past I couldn’t remember, but the future I might not have if we didn’t get those codes. If I didn’t survive Geneva.
Getting those codes.
Surviving.
Clare.