10. The Retrieval Protocol
The Retrieval Protocol
I'd been working on his files for six nights—slipping out of bed after his breathing steadied, retrieving the USB drive from its hiding place in the bathroom, and settling into the corner of the living room where the screen's glow wouldn't be visible from the hallway.
The keylogger had done its work. The encryption had yielded to the password-cracking software I'd found on a dark web forum.
And now, at last, the folders were opening like doors I'd been warned never to unlock.
The first file was labeled "Acquisition Records." I opened it with hands that barely trembled.
The spreadsheet was organized by date, location, and asset designation.
There were forty-seven entries in total—forty-seven human beings reduced to line items in a ledger.
I scrolled through them with the detached focus of a surgeon examining a wound, noting the patterns without letting myself feel their weight.
Most of the entries meant nothing to me.
Names I didn't recognize. Locations I'd never visited.
Asset designations that followed some internal logic I couldn't decode.
Then I found myself.
*Asset 47-B. Female, 23, Caucasian. Acquisition location: Seattle, WA. Method: financial inducement, psychological profiling, voluntary contract signature. Handler: G. Mire. Status: Active.*
There was more—pages and pages of more. Psychological assessments.
Conditioning progress reports. Medical records documenting the chemical adjustments that had been made to my system.
A timeline that stretched from my first meeting with Mr. Winters in that coffee shop to my final days at the Institute to.
.. to the bar. To The Lost Hours. To the moment Nathan Cross had walked through the door and taken the seat at the end of the counter and ordered a Macallan neat with a ghost of a smile on his lips.
My blood went cold.
*Asset 47-B. Retrieval status: Complete. Retrieval handler: N. Cross. Method: staged introduction, trauma bonding, chemical compliance maintenance. Current status: Active, compliant, cohabitating. Recommend continued monitoring and dosage adjustment as needed.*
The words blurred. I blinked, and the tears that fell onto the keyboard were hot as fresh blood.
Staged introduction. Trauma bonding. Chemical compliance maintenance.
The phrases Gabriel had used during my conditioning—the clinical language that reduced human beings to variables in an experiment—were here, in Nathan's files, applied to me with the same cold precision.
I kept reading. I had to. The nausea was rising, but I had to know.
The next folder was labeled "Monika." I opened it with fingers that had gone numb.
Monika Volkov. Female, 26, Eastern European.
Acquired through Mercy Logistics, the transport company Nathan had said was "too well-protected" to target.
She'd been assigned to a buyer in Miami, but something had gone wrong—the conditioning hadn't held, the compliance had fractured, and Monika had started remembering.
Started fighting. Started trying to escape.
The final entry in her file was dated eighteen months ago: Asset terminated. Retrieval unsuccessful. Recommend file closure.
Terminated. A clean word for what had almost certainly been a very messy death.
I closed the laptop and sat in the dark, my hands pressed flat against my thighs, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps.
The apartment was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant wail of a siren somewhere in the city.
Nathan was still asleep. He had no idea that I knew.
No idea that his careful construction was crumbling around him.
I made it to the bathroom before the vomit came.
I knelt on the cold tile—Gabriel's position, the posture of submission I'd never fully escaped—and emptied my stomach into the toilet.
The heaves were silent, suppressed by years of training that had taught me to suffer without sound.
Tears streamed down my face. My throat burned with bile.
And through it all, I kept thinking: He knew.
He knew what Gabriel was doing to me, and he didn't stop it.
He waited. He let me break so he could be the one to put me back together.
When the heaving stopped, I rinsed my mouth at the sink and stared at my reflection. The woman in the mirror was pale, hollow-eyed, her skin blotched from crying. She looked like someone who'd just discovered that her entire life was a lie. She looked like someone who'd been unmade.
She looked like prey.
No, I thought, gripping the edges of the sink. Not prey. Not anymore. Never again.
I washed my face with cold water. I reapplied my makeup with the steady hands of someone who'd learned to perform normalcy in the face of horror.
By the time I crawled back into bed beside Nathan, my expression was calm, my breathing was even, and the woman in the mirror had been replaced by the mask I'd been wearing for months.
The performance would continue. But now, at last, I understood what I was performing for.
Matt found me in the bar's basement the next afternoon, staring at nothing.
I'd come in early for my shift, but instead of heading upstairs to the inventory that needed counting, I'd descended the familiar stairs to the space where I'd tortured so many men.
The drain was still there. The chair was still there.
The tools were still organized on their pegboard, waiting for the next monster who deserved what they could do.
"Bunny?" Matt's voice was careful. He'd learned to be careful with me, the way you learned to be careful with a wounded animal that might bite. "What's going on?"
"I cracked his files." My voice came out flat. "Nathan's files. The encrypted ones on his laptop."
Matt didn't ask how. He'd stopped asking how I did things a long time ago. "What did you find?"
"Everything." I laughed, and the sound was wrong—too high, too brittle. "He's been tracking me since the beginning. Since before the Institute. He knew what Gabriel was doing to me, and he let it happen. He let me break so he could come in afterward and pick up the pieces."
"Jesus Christ." Matt leaned against the wall, his expression unreadable. "You're sure?"
"I read the files. The acquisition records. The retrieval protocol. The name of the handler who was assigned to bring me back after Gabriel abandoned me." I met his eyes. "Nathan Cross. He didn't save me, Matt. He collected me. Like a package that had been delivered to the wrong address."
The silence stretched between us. Matt had been a soldier once—he understood the weight of betrayal, the way it could shatter everything you thought you knew about yourself.
"What are you going to do?" he asked finally.
"I don't know yet." I stared at the drain in the floor, remembering all the blood that had washed down it. "Part of me wants to kill him. Part of me wants to pretend I never saw the files. Part of me wants to run so far he'll never find me."
"But you're not going to run."
"No." The word came out hard. "I'm done running."
Matt nodded slowly. "What do you need from me?"
"The name of someone who can analyze a pill. I found something in my vitamins—something that doesn't match the others. I think he's been dosing me."
"I know a guy." He pulled out his phone. "Ex-military, runs a private lab. Doesn't ask questions."
"Thank you." I stood, my legs steadier than they'd been in hours. "And Matt? Don't tell anyone about this. Not even the other staff."
"I figured." He pocketed his phone. "You want my advice?"
"Probably not."
"Don't let him know you know. Not yet. Not until you have a plan." His eyes were hard with the knowledge of someone who'd seen too much violence to be shocked by it anymore. "Men like that—men who've been playing a long game—they don't react well to losing control."
I thought about Nathan's hands on my throat during sex, the way his gentleness could shift to dominance in a heartbeat. Thought about the files on his laptop, the ledgers in his desk, the photograph of two brothers standing in front of a building where girls were unmade.
"I know," I said. "I'll be careful."
But careful wasn't what I was feeling. Careful wasn't what was burning in my veins like fire. What I was feeling was rage—cold and absolute and terrifying in its clarity. Nathan had made me into a weapon. Now I was going to aim that weapon at him.
That night, I initiated sex with a violence that bordered on assault.
Nathan had come home late—a meeting that ran long, he said, a client who needed extra convincing.
I'd been waiting in the bedroom, wearing the lingerie he'd bought me last month, the black lace set that made him lose his mind.
The smile on my face was perfect. The hunger in my eyes was real, even if it wasn't the kind he thought it was.
"There you are," he said, loosening his tie. "You look incredible."
"Shut up." I crossed the room and pushed him against the wall. "Don't talk. Just let me—"
I kissed him with teeth, my hands working his belt with frantic urgency. He made a sound of surprise against my mouth, but he didn't stop me. He never stopped me when I took control—another pattern I'd catalogued, another weakness I was learning to exploit.
"You're wound up tonight," he breathed, his hands finding my hips.
"I need you." The words were true in ways he'd never understand. I needed him vulnerable. Needed him off-balance. Needed him to believe that my passion was desire instead of the desperate attempt to reclaim something he'd stolen. "I need to feel you inside me. Now."
I pushed him onto the bed and climbed on top of him, my hands pinning his wrists above his head. The position was dominant—Gabriel would have approved—and I watched Nathan's pupils dilate as I settled my weight onto his hips.
"God, Bunny." His voice was already rough. "What's gotten into you?"
You, I thought. You've gotten into me. You've been inside me since the beginning, and I didn't even know it.
But I didn't say that. I said, "I love you," and I lowered myself onto him, and I rode him with a fury that made him gasp.
The sex was brutal. I set a pace that bordered on punishing, and he met it with an enthusiasm that would have been flattering if I hadn't known what I knew.
His hands gripped my hips. His head fell back against the pillows.
He was completely, utterly vulnerable—and I could have killed him right then, could have wrapped my hands around his throat and squeezed until the light left his eyes.
But I didn't. Because Matt was right. I needed a plan. I needed leverage. I needed to understand the full scope of what Nathan had done before I decided how to make him pay for it.
I leaned down and bit his shoulder—hard, harder than I'd ever bitten him, my teeth breaking skin. He cried out, his body arching beneath me, and I tasted copper. Tasted his blood. Tasted the truth of what he was.
That's for Monika, I thought. That's for every girl you collected and sold. That's for me.
"Fuck," he gasped. "Bunny, that was—"
"Good?" I licked the blood from my lips.
"God, yes. Do it again."
I did it again. I bit him until his shoulder was marked with the imprint of my teeth, until the blood ran down his chest in thin red rivers, until he was so lost in the mixture of pleasure and pain that he didn't notice the coldness in my eyes.
When he came, it was with my name on his lips and my teeth still buried in his flesh. I held him through it, my tongue tracing the wounds I'd made, memorizing the taste of his betrayal.
That's what you taste like, I thought. That's what a liar tastes like.
Afterward, he held me with a tenderness that made my skin crawl. "I love you," he murmured against my hair. "I love you so much."
"I love you too." The words came automatically, and they tasted like ash.
But I kept playing. Kept smiling. Kept being his good girl, his perfect partner, his Bunny. The performance was all I had left.
And somewhere beneath the performance, a plan was forming. A plan that would make Gabriel proud and Nathan sorry and me... me something new. Something neither of them had anticipated. Something that belonged to no one but itself.
The hunt was changing again. The prey was in my bed, and I was memorizing the shape of his throat.