Chapter 20
NIKOLAI
Five collectors are dead. All of them were knifed to death, all of them found in circumstances that suggest someone who knows exactly how to kill efficiently and disappear without a trace. Too many to be a coincidence.
The rage that’s been simmering in my chest for almost three months has crystallized into something colder. More focused. I will find her. Not because of some desperate need to reclaim lost property, but because she’s the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced in my life.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I walk into the underground fight gym at eleven forty-seven PM, scanning faces in the crowd.
The place reeks of sweat, blood, and desperation.
Concrete floors stained with years of violence, a chain-link cage in the center where two men are currently trying to beat each other unconscious while the crowd screams for more.
This is where society’s discards come to trade pain for money, where people disappear into new identities built on scar tissue and broken bones.
Perfect place for someone to vanish in Chicago.
Ezra’s intelligence had been clear—a female fighter matching Jenna’s physical description has been working the circuit for ten weeks.
Goes by Kathy, pays in cash, no background.
But everyone has a price, and the right one loosened tongues about the fighter who came out of nowhere. The timing aligns with her escape.
But what sealed it was the other pattern Ezra identified. The one that made my blood sing with recognition.
The collectors started dying around the same time Kathy appeared. Not random violence—targeted elimination of specific individuals involved in human trafficking.
Someone who’d spent two weeks in my facility and now has it out for people like me.
I choose a position in the back corner, hood up, shoulders hunched to minimize my profile.
If she’s here tonight, if she’s really become this underground fighter with a taste for vigilante justice, I don’t want to spook her.
Not until I understand what she’s become in the time since she walked out of my bed.
The current fight ends with one man unconscious and the other barely standing. Blood pools on the concrete as medics drag both fighters away. The crowd’s energy shifts as anticipation builds for the main event.
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s feature bout!” The announcer’s voice cuts through the noise, artificially amplified by cheap speakers. “In the blue corner, Maya Chen! The rematch you’ve been waiting for!”
Maya emerges from the back, small and compact. I recognize the type—technical fighter, probably trained in multiple disciplines. She’s a fighter who wins through technique rather than power. She shadow-boxes as she walks, loose and fluid, but there’s purpose in her movements. Something personal.
“And in the red corner, Kathy Morrison!”
The name means nothing to me, but when the fighter appears, my entire world narrows to a single point of focus.
There.
She’s cut her hair slightly shorter—just below the shoulders now instead of the longer waves I remember.
Her body is leaner than before, and her muscle definition is more pronounced.
But the way she moves, the cant of her shoulders, the method she uses to scan the crowd before stepping into the cage—
It’s her. It’s fucking her.
My hands clench into fists at my sides as I watch Jenna—Kathy—strip off her hoodie to reveal a sports bra and shorts. She’s covered in small scars I don’t remember, marks that speak to weeks of violence. Her face has sharper edges, cheekbones more pronounced, eyes that hold a coldness I recognize.
She’s become a predator.
The thought should repel me. Should trigger every instinct that recognizes her as a threat to be eliminated. Instead, I’m harder than I’ve been since she left, watching her stretch and prepare like some lethal ballet dancer.
“Chen’s got a personal stake in this one,” someone near me says to his companion. “Word is she’s beat her twice already.”
My attention sharpens. Chen. Kim Chen, a mid-level trafficker who ran girls through massage parlors in Chinatown. Found dead in his apartment six weeks ago, throat opened. The police wrote it off as gang violence.
But it wasn’t gang violence, was it? It was justice. Delivered by the woman I’d kept in a cage.
The fighters touch gloves in the center of the cage. Maya’s jaw is tight with fury. Jenna—I can’t think of her as Kathy, not when I know the taste of her real name—looks calm, centered. Ready.
Now I understand the look on Maya’s face. This isn’t the first time these two have met. The man beside me mutters it to his companion like everybody already knows.
“Kathy dropped Chen weeks back, fast and ugly, and Maya’s been screaming for the rematch ever since. Tonight she finally got it.”
The bell rings.
Maya comes out aggressive, throwing combinations designed to overwhelm. But Jenna doesn’t engage the way fighters usually do. She moves in a way I always knew she could—calculating, patient, looking for the perfect opening rather than trading blow for blow.
She ducks under a hook and drives an uppercut into Maya’s solar plexus. The smaller woman doubles over, gasping, and Jenna follows up with a knee that snaps Maya’s head back.
The crowd roars, but I’m not hearing them anymore. I’m watching Jenna stalk around the cage like a predator that’s learned to hunt in confined spaces. Every movement is purposeful. Every strike is designed to end rather than impress.
Maya recovers and tries to close the distance. Jenna lets her, then explodes into action—elbow to the temple, followed by a takedown that puts Maya on her back. Jenna works her way to the mount position and starts raining down punches.
The referee stops it at 2:47 of the first round. Maya’s unconscious, blood streaming from her nose and mouth. Jenna stands over her fallen opponent, chest barely rising from exertion, and for a moment her eyes sweep the crowd.
Those gray-green irises pass over me without recognition, but the electricity that runs through my nervous system is devastating. She’s twenty feet away, separated by chain-link and hundreds of people, and my body responds like she’s pressed against me.
Like she still belongs to me.
I watch her collect her purse and disappear through the back exit. She moves like smoke, there one moment and gone the next. But I’ve been tracking people for over twenty years.
I know where she’s going before she does.
The alley behind the gym is poorly lit, industrial dumpsters providing perfect concealment. I position myself in the shadows and wait. Patience is the hunter’s greatest tool, and I’ve had three months to recall who I really am.
She emerges twelve minutes later, hair damp with sweat, gym bag slung over one shoulder. She’s changed into street clothes—dark jeans, black hoodie, boots that look military-issue. Everything chosen for function over form, for disappearing rather than attracting attention.
I let her get half a block ahead before I start following. Not the careful distance I maintained during her original surveillance—she’s dangerous now, trained to notice pursuit. But I know this district, know every alley and escape route better than she does.
She takes a circuitous path, doubling back twice, using reflective surfaces to check for tails. Professional-grade countersurveillance that would lose most pursuers. But most pursuers aren’t me.
Her destination is a run-down apartment building wedged between a check-cashing place and a liquor store. She uses three different keys to get through the security doors and checks the stairwell for threats before ascending to the third floor.
I memorize the address, the apartment number, the timing of her security routine. Then I fade back into the shadows and make my way to where I left my car six blocks away.
The drive back to the warehouse gives me time to process what I’ve seen. Jenna has transformed herself from a victim into a hunter, systematically eliminating human traffickers. She’s turned her captivity into a weapon, her trauma into a tool for justice.
It’s magnificent.
It’s also incredibly dangerous. To the networks she’s dismantling, to the balance of power in the underground, and most importantly, to herself.
Because predators like the ones she’s hunting are dangerous, and one wrong move and they’ll catch her.
And some of those hunters are going to be much worse than me.
My phone buzzes with a message from Darius.
How’s the Walsh surveillance going?
Right. Jennifer Walsh, the Treasury investigator who’s gotten too close to our operations. I was supposed to be planning her elimination tonight, not watching my escaped acquisition beat a woman unconscious for the entertainment of degenerates.
Making progress. Will update tomorrow.
Another lie to add to the growing collection. But Walsh can wait another day. Right now, I have more pressing concerns.
Such as figuring out how to approach a woman who’s spent three months learning to kill people like me. And deciding whether I want to drag her back to my bed or simply eliminate the threat she’s become to operational security.
In the privacy of my own thoughts, I can admit that watching her move like liquid death in that cage was the most aroused I’ve been since she disappeared.
The Nexus appears ahead, all concrete and industrial lighting. Home. Sanctuary. The place where eight other broken weapons gather to plan violence against the people who made us.
But tonight, for the first time since she escaped, it doesn’t feel like enough.
Tonight, I know exactly where she sleeps.