6. The First Hunt of the Game
The First Hunt of the Game
The warehouse crouched at the edge of the industrial district like a tumor, its windows painted black and its walls weeping rust. I watched it from the rooftop across the street, my breath fogging in the cold night air, my hands steady on the binoculars despite the chill that had seeped through my tactical gear.
"Six guards," I murmured. "Two at the front, two at the loading dock, two rovers. Rotating every twenty minutes."
"Cameras?" Nathan's voice came through the earpiece, calm and professional. He was positioned on the opposite rooftop, covering the north entrance with a rifle I'd never seen him use but which he handled with the familiarity of long practice.
"Four. All positioned to cover the main approaches. But there's a blind spot on the west wall—the old fire escape. The camera there is angled wrong."
"How can you tell?"
"Because the lens is cracked." I lowered the binoculars. "Someone tried to disable it a while ago. Did a half-assed job. The crack catches the light differently than the other lenses."
A pause. Then: "Good catch."
The praise shouldn't have warmed me. I was learning to be suspicious of his praise—the way he deployed it strategically, the way it made me want to perform better, the way it echoed Gabriel's conditioning with unsettling precision.
But my body responded before my mind could intervene, a flush of pride spreading through my chest like whiskey.
Good girl, the warmth whispered. You're being good.
I pushed the thought away and focused on the mission.
The target was a man named Andrei Volosin, a mid-level trafficker who specialized in moving Eastern European women through a network of shell companies and fake modeling agencies.
He'd been on Nathan's radar for months, he'd said, but the intel had only recently solidified enough for action.
The warehouse was his primary processing facility—the place where new arrivals were catalogued, assessed, and distributed to buyers across the country.
"There are women inside," I said. "Current inventory. Probably twelve to fifteen, based on the transport van that arrived this morning."
"We'll get them out." Nathan's voice was steady with certainty. "We always do."
He was right. We always did. In the months we'd been hunting together, we'd freed over fifty women from facilities like this one. Fifty lives saved. Fifty families reunited. It was good work—important work—and I'd believed in it completely until the cracks had started forming in my reality.
Now I wasn't sure what I believed. But the women were still real. Their suffering was still real. And whatever else Nathan might be hiding from me, he'd never hesitated to help me rescue them.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready."
I descended the fire escape with the silence Gabriel had drilled into me, my boots finding each rusted rung with muscle memory that predated consciousness.
The alley below smelled of diesel and rotting garbage, and I pressed myself against the damp brick wall, counting the seconds until the rover passed my position.
Twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten.
The guard rounded the corner, his rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder, his attention on his phone. He didn't see me. Didn't even look up before my arm wrapped around his throat and my knife found the gap between his third and fourth ribs.
He went down without a sound. I dragged his body into the shadows and kept moving.
The first two guards at the loading dock went almost as easily.
The third—a heavyset man with prison tattoos and a cocaine habit—put up more of a fight.
He got his hands around my throat before I could reach my knife, slamming me against the concrete wall hard enough to make stars explode behind my eyes.
"Little bitch," he snarled, his breath hot and sour against my face. "Think you can—"
I drove my knee into his groin. His grip loosened just enough for me to slip free, and then my knife was in my hand and his throat was opening like a second mouth, blood spraying across the loading dock in an arterial fan.
He staggered backward, clutching at the wound, and I watched him fall with the detached interest of a scientist observing an experiment.
Four down, I counted. Two to go.
The interior of the warehouse was worse than I'd expected.
The women were kept in cages—actual cages, the kind used for transporting livestock—stacked two high along the far wall.
Most of them were young. Some were barely more than children.
All of them had the hollow eyes of people who'd learned that hope was a luxury they couldn't afford.
I catalogued their faces as I moved through the facility, memorizing details for the report I'd file later.
Brunette, early twenties, bruising on her wrists.
Blonde, maybe seventeen, track marks on her arms. Redhead, mid-thirties, clutching a torn photograph of a child she probably hadn't seen in months.
Focus, I told myself. Finish the mission. Grieve later.
Volosin was in his office on the second floor, a glass-walled box that overlooked the processing floor like a king surveying his kingdom. He was on the phone when I entered, his back to the door, his voice oily with false concern.
"—told you, the shipment will arrive by Friday. My girls are the best quality, you know that. No damage, no resistance. They've been properly conditioned—"
I shot him in the leg before he could finish the sentence.
The sound was deafening in the enclosed space. Volosin screamed, dropping the phone, his hands flying to the wound in his thigh. Blood pulsed between his fingers, dark and arterial, and I felt a savage satisfaction at the sight.
"You—who are you—"
"I'm the one who conditions things now," I said, and shot him again. This time in the shoulder. "The one you sold girls to tell me what you know about him."
Volosin's face cycled through emotions faster than I could track—pain, confusion, recognition, terror. "The Institute? You're one of Mire's products?"
"I'm not a product." I pressed the gun barrel against his other knee. "I'm a consequence. Now tell me what you know about Gabriel Mire."
He talked. They always talked, in the end.
Between the pain and the fear and the careful pressure I applied—techniques Nathan had taught me, techniques that echoed Gabriel's training with unsettling precision—Volosin gave me everything.
Names. Dates. Locations. A network of buyers and sellers that stretched across three continents and reached into places I hadn't imagined.
And at the center of it, a name I hadn't expected: Mercy Logistics.
The transport company Nathan had mentioned in passing, the one he'd said was too well-protected to target directly.
According to Volosin, Mercy wasn't just a transport company.
It was the spine of the entire operation, the thing that connected the Institute's graduates to their eventual buyers.
"Who runs Mercy?" I demanded.
"I don't know—I swear I don't know—they have intermediaries, cutouts—"
"The name."
"I only know one. Cross. Someone named Cross."
The world tilted. I felt it shift, felt the pieces of the puzzle rearrange themselves into a pattern I didn't want to see.
Cross. Nathan Cross. The man who'd found me, saved me, loved me.
The man who might be Gabriel's brother. The man whose study was full of encrypted files and locked drawers and photographs of a childhood I wasn't supposed to know about.
"Thank you," I said to Volosin, and then I put a bullet through his skull.
The cleanup was mechanical. I freed the women, called the anonymous tip line we always used for police notification, and met Nathan at the extraction point on the roof. The blood on my tactical gear was already drying, flaking off in dark crescents that scattered in the wind.
"Volosin?" Nathan asked.
"Dead." I handed him the USB drive where I'd copied Volosin's files. "He had more intel than we expected. Connections to Mercy Logistics."
Something flickered in Nathan's expression—too fast to name. "Mercy? That's bigger than we planned for."
"I know. But the intel is solid. We can use it."
He nodded, pocketing the drive. "Good work. Really good work."
The praise hit me like a drug, and I hated how much I craved it. Hated how my body leaned toward him, seeking more approval, more warmth, more of the validation that Gabriel had trained me to need and Nathan had learned to provide.
"You're bleeding," he said, touching my neck where the guard had grabbed me.
"It's not mine."
"Good." His hand lingered on my skin, and I felt the heat of him even through the blood and the cold. "I hate it when you get hurt."
The kiss started rough—adrenaline and relief and the primal need to affirm life in the face of so much death. His hands found my hips and pulled me against him, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and let him press me against the rooftop door.
"Here?" I gasped.
"Here." His mouth was on my throat, teeth grazing the bruises the guard had left. "Need you. Need to feel you."
The tactical gear was a barrier, but we worked around it—zippers pulled down, fabric shoved aside, the cold night air a shock against my exposed skin.
He entered me with a force that bordered on violence, and I welcomed it.
Welcomed the pain. Welcomed the way it drowned out the questions circling my mind like sharks.
Cross. Someone named Cross.
"Harder," I demanded, and he complied. The door rattled against its frame with each thrust, the sound echoing across the empty rooftop. His hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise, and I dug my nails into his shoulders and let myself fall into the sensation.
This was what we did. This was who we were. Hunters in love, predators in partnership, two broken things that fit together in ways that shouldn't work but did.
Cross. The name is Cross.
I came with a cry that might have been his name or might have been a warning, my body convulsing around him while the cold wind dried the blood on my face. He followed moments later, his release a shuddering groan against my shoulder.
Afterward, we stood in the dark, breathing hard, our bodies still tangled together. The city sprawled beneath us, indifferent to our violence and our passion and the terrible secrets we were keeping from each other.
"I love you," Nathan said.
"I love you too." The words came automatically, and I wasn't sure if I meant them.
But I knew one thing with absolute certainty: the hunt was changing.
The prey I'd been chasing—the traffickers, the buyers, the monsters who traded in human flesh—they were still out there, still deserving of justice.
But somewhere in the shadows, another prey was taking shape.
One that wore a familiar face and spoke in a familiar voice and held me at night like I was the most precious thing in the world.
Cross. Someone named Cross.
I pulled away from Nathan and started gathering my gear. "We should go. The police will be here soon."
"Right." He zipped himself up, his expression already shifting back to professional calm. "Same time tomorrow? We can go through Volosin's files, plan the next move."
"The next move," I echoed. "Yes. Tomorrow."
But tomorrow, I'd be looking for more than trafficking intel. Tomorrow, I'd be hunting the truth about Nathan Cross and the network he might be part of. Tomorrow, the real hunt would begin.
Tonight, I'd just go home with the man who'd saved me, and I'd let him hold me, and I'd pretend the cracks in my world weren't spreading wider with every breath I took.
Hunters in love, I told myself as we descended the fire escape. That's what we are. That's all we are.
But the lie tasted like ash, and the photograph hidden in my underwear drawer was still waiting to be explained.
The war was coming. I could feel it in my bones. And when it arrived, I wasn't sure which side I'd be standing on—or whether I'd recognize myself in the wreckage.