Chapter 10 Hunters
Hunters
Nathan moved through shadows beside me, his presence recalibrating my tactical awareness. Solo operations had made me forget what it felt like to trust someone at my six.
"Two guards at the east entrance," he murmured through comms. "One's smoking. Sloppy."
"The smoke break will kill him." I palmed my ceramic knife, its weight familiar as breathing. "West side has a service door. Rusted lock."
"Together or split?"
"Together." The word tasted strange. Gabriel would have sent me in alone, watched through scopes while I painted walls red. "I'll take point."
"Copy that."
We moved like water finding cracks, silent across rotting wood and broken concrete. The warehouse squatted against the harbor like a cancer, its windows painted black, industrial fans grinding to mask whatever sounds bled from inside.
The smoking guard never saw me coming. My hand covered his mouth as the blade found the sweet spot between C3 and C4 vertebrae, severing his spine with surgical precision. Nathan caught the body before it hit ground, lowering it into shadow while I wiped blood from my fingers.
"Clean," he said, and something in his voice made my chest tight. Not disgust or fear. Appreciation.
The service door's lock crumbled under my picks, rust flaking like old blood. Inside, the warehouse revealed itself in layers: shipping containers stacked like children's blocks, the copper tang of fear-sweat, and underneath—antiseptic and latex. Medical smells that made my shoulders lock.
"Laboratory setup in the northwest corner," Nathan breathed. "Three heat signatures in the containers."
The women. Inventory. Product. The words cycled through my mind in voices that weren't mine.
"Guards?"
"Six that I count. Plus whatever's in the office up top."
Dmitri Volkov. The name tasted like battery acid. Gabriel's old contact, the one who'd brokered deals for bodies for Institute experiments, the one who ran the transport system for the Institute and the buyer. He'd know. He'd have answers.
"I need five minutes with Volkov," I said.
"Understood."
We split without discussion, Nathan heading for the containers while I ghosted toward the metal stairs. Two guards flanked the office door—Bratva tattoos visible at their throats, prison ink and bad decisions.
I let them see me. Sometimes visibility was its own weapon.
"Chto za khuy?" What the fuck—the taller one reached for his gun.
I smiled, the expression I'd practiced in mirrors until it could stop hearts. "Dmitri will want to see me. Tell him Bunny's here."
Recognition flickered. Every Russian who'd worked with Gabriel knew that name, knew what it meant when his rabbit came calling. The shorter guard's hand trembled as he reached for the door.
"Boss—"
"I heard." Dmitri's voice, thick with Georgian accent and expensive vodka. "Send her up. Alone."
The guards stepped aside, predators recognizing an apex threat. I climbed stairs that shrieked under my weight, each sound calculated to announce my approach. Let him sweat. Let him remember.
The office door hung open. Dmitri sat behind a desk worth more than most people's cars, his bulk testing the leather chair's limits. Fifty-seven years old, scarred hands, liver spots marking time and excess. A survivor in a business that ate its young.
"Malyshka." Little one. His smile showed gold teeth. "I heard you were dead."
"Disappointed?"
"Curious. Gabriel's favorites usually stay buried." He poured vodka into two glasses, pushing one across mahogany. "What brings the rabbit to my warren?"
I didn't touch the drink. "Information."
"Straight to business. You were trained well." His eyes tracked over me, cataloguing. "Though you look different than most of his. Harder. What happened to your keeper?"
"He died." I stepped closer, noting how his hand drifted toward the desk drawer. "Badly."
"So I heard. Shame. He always provided reliable product." He sipped vodka, watching me over the rim. "But you didn't come here to share the news."
"February. Three weeks before he died. Gabriel came here." I circled the desk, predator math calculating angles. "What did he want?"
"Same as always. Subjects for his experiments. I told him the market was tight—"
"You're lying."
His hand moved for the drawer. I was faster, ceramic knife punching through meat and tendons to pin his palm to the desk. He screamed, vodka glass shattering on the floor.
"Let's try again," I said conversationally. "February. Gabriel. What did he want?"
"Suka blyad!" Fucking bitch. He reached with his free hand.
I caught his wrist, bending fingers back until bones creaked. "Wrong answer."
The crack of his index finger breaking made him scream again. Downstairs, gunfire erupted—Nathan's work, efficient burst patterns that made my pulse spike.
"He wanted transportation!" Dmitri gasped. "Safe passage!"
"Where?"
"I don't know!"
I broke his middle finger. "Where?"
"Fuck! Moscow! He wanted Moscow routes!"
"When?"
"Two weeks after—after he was supposed to—" His eyes went wide. "You don't know."
"Know what?"
"He's alive, little rabbit. Your master's alive."
The words hit like ice water in my veins. I twisted the knife, making him howl. "Explain."
"The death—staged! He came here, paid for new identity documents. Aleksander Volkov, no relation." He laughed, pain-drunk and desperate. "Said he was retiring. That the Institute had new management coming."
My hand found his throat. "You're lying."
"Check—check the safe!" He gurgled against my grip. "Documentation's there. Proof!"
I held his eyes, reading truth in blown pupils and fear-sweat. Then drove the second knife up under his jaw, through his soft palate into his brain. He died with surprise on his face, as if he'd really thought information would save him.
The safe opened to his thumbprint—I had to break his arm to get the right angle, dead weight being uncooperative. Inside: cash, drives, and a folder marked 'A.V.'
My hands didn't shake as I opened it. They never shook during operations.
Gabriel's face stared up from a Moscow visa. Aleksander Volkov, businessman, clean papers and a future that didn't include being dead. Transport manifests, property deeds, medical records showing recent surgery—facial reconstruction, subtle but enough to throw off casual recognition.
Alive. He was alive.
Gunfire crackled louder. Nathan's voice in my ear: "Could use some help down here."
I pocketed the documents, then stopped. A second folder, older. Institute letterhead. My deadname at the top, my real one. The one I'd forgotten until—
Subject shows exceptional adaptation to conditioning. Recommend acceleration of physical protocols despite short time in the program. - G. Mire
"Bunny. Now." Nathan's voice, edged with strain.
I burned the past and ran for the present.
Downstairs had become a Hieronymus Bosch painting rendered in muzzle flash and arterial spray. Nathan had position behind a container, laying down suppressing fire while three guards tried to flank. Blood pooled around two bodies by the laboratory setup.
I came from above like judgment, landing on the nearest guard's shoulders. His neck snapped on impact, gun spinning away as we hit concrete. The second guard turned, bringing his AK to bear.
Time slowed to honey.
I rolled, came up with the dead guard's Makarov, put two in the turner's throat. He clutched at the ruins of his vocal cords, drowning in his own blood. The third tried to run.
Cowardice offended me.
The knife caught him between shoulder blades, dropping him to his knees. I crossed the distance in heartbeats, yanking the blade free to open his femoral artery. He bled out watching me, confusion in his eyes like he couldn't understand how the world had teeth.
"Clear?" Nathan called.
"One second."
The last guard had been hiding, pressed against a container with his rifle clutched like a teddy bear. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Baby Bratva trying to earn his stars.
He came at me with a knife, all desperation and no skill.
I caught his wrist, used his momentum to drive him face-first into the wall. The tile cracked. So did his nose. He swung wild, blade catching my ribs in a line of fire. I smiled—pain was just information, and this informed me he needed to hurt more.
I slammed his face into the tile again. Teeth scattered like dice. Again. His cheekbone gave. Again. The knife fell from nerveless fingers. Again, until the wall looked like abstract art and he stopped twitching.
"Now clear," I said, touching the slice along my ribs. Shallow. Survivable. Irritating.
Nathan emerged from cover, taking in the scene with eyes that catalogued but didn't judge. "You're bleeding."
"He got lucky." I kicked the corpse. "Got less lucky after."
"The women?"
"Here!"
We found them in the containers—three girls, sixteen to twenty, bound and drugged but breathing. The laboratory held worse things: medical equipment, preserved samples, documentation in Russian and Mandarin that made my stomach twist.
"Institute protocols," Nathan said, reading over my shoulder. "They were going to—"
"I know what they were going to do." I'd been on those tables. "We need to burn this place."
"Agreed. But first—" He caught my chin, tilting my face to the light. "You okay?"
"Gabriel's alive."
The words hung between us like a blade. Nathan's hand tightened slightly. "You're sure?"
"Dmitri had documents. New identity, Moscow address. He staged his death." I laughed, the sound scraped raw. "I grieved him. I fell apart when he abandoned me, only to find out that he is dead, and he wasn't even dead."
"Bunny—"
"I'm compromised." The clinical words, the safe words. "My psychological baseline is corrupted. I can't—"
He kissed me. Hard, desperate, tasting like gunsmoke and the copper edge of violence. It shocked me out of spiraling, grounded me in the now instead of the shattering then.
"You're not compromised," he said against my mouth. "You're angry. There's a difference."
"I want to hurt him. Want to take him apart piece by piece until he understands what he made me." My hands fisted in his tactical vest. "Is that angry or compromised?"
"That's human."
The word broke something in me. Human. After everything, still human.
I kissed him back, needing the anchor of his taste, his heat, his solidity in a world suddenly shifted off-axis. He pressed me against the wall, hands careful of my ribs but desperate everywhere else.
"The women," I gasped when we broke for air.
"Anonymous call to paramedics once we're clear." His mouth found my throat. "Five minutes."
"Here?"
"Need you." His voice had gone rough. "Seeing you like that—Christ, Bunny. I've never seen anything more terrifying and beautiful than you in that room."
The praise hit different in this context, tangled with adrenaline and blood-scent. I yanked at his vest straps. "Stairs. More privacy."
We stumbled to the stairwell, hands pulling at gear and fabric. He pressed me against the brick wall, its rough surface scraping through my shirt. I welcomed the sensation—real, grounding, mine.
"You're sure?" he asked, hands bracketing my face.
"Stop asking. Start doing."
He spun me to face the wall, hands yanking my tactical pants down just enough. I heard fabric tear—my underwear, soaked through with adrenaline and want. His fingers found me ready, making me gasp against brick.
"Fuck." His voice broke. "You're—"
"Please." I pressed back against him. "Need you inside me. Need—"
He pushed in without further preamble, the stretch burning perfect. My hands flattened against the wall, brick dust grinding into my palms as he set a pace that had nothing to do with gentle mornings and everything to do with still being alive.
"Watched you," he gasped against my neck. "Watched you move like death itself and thought—mine. Thought—"
"Yours." The word ripped from me. "In this. Yours."
He fucked me harder, one hand tangled in my hair while the other gripped my hip hard enough to bruise. I welcomed the marks, evidence of choosing this, wanting this, taking this because I needed it and not because anyone commanded it.
"Close," I gasped. "So close—"
His hand found where we joined, fingers circling that bundle of nerves that made lights explode behind my eyes. I came with a sound that might have been a scream, might have been his name, might have been pure animal triumph at surviving another night.
He followed, pumping deep as he groaned my name like a prayer. We'd forgotten protection, forgotten sense, forgotten everything but the need to affirm life in the face of so much death.
We stayed pressed against the wall, panting, foreheads touching as the world reassembled itself around us.
"Gabriel's alive," I said again, tasting the impossibility of it.
"Then we hunt him." Simple. Certain. "Together."
"He made me." The words scraped. "Everything I am—"
"No." Nathan turned me to face him, hands gentle now. "He shaped parts of you. But this—" he touched my chest where my heart hammered, "—this is yours. The choices you make, the person you're becoming. That's yours."
"What if I'm just his echo? What if without him, I'm nothing but programming and learned responses?"
"You're not." He traced the cut on my ribs, making me hiss. "Know how I know?"
"How?"
"Because his Bunny wouldn't have saved those women. She'd have seen new subjects for his research." He kissed me, soft this time. "You saw people. That's you, not him."
Sirens wailed in the distance—our cue to vanish. We straightened clothes, gathered evidence, doused the laboratory in accelerant. The women we moved outside, anonymous call already placed from a burner phone.
As flames ate the warehouse, I stood beside Nathan watching our sins turn to smoke. Somewhere in Moscow, Gabriel wore a stranger's face and thought himself free.
He was wrong.
"I'm going to find him," I said.
"We're going to find him." Nathan took my hand, lacing our fingers. "But first, we get you stitched up. Then food. Then we plan."
"That's very practical for post-murder afterglow."
"I'm a practical man." He squeezed my hand. "With an impractical obsession with keeping you alive."
"Even knowing what I am? What I'm capable of?"
"Especially knowing." We walked away from the burning pier, two hunters with blood on their hands and something that might have been love burning between them. "You're magnificent in your violence, Bunny. But you're more magnificent in your choices after."
"He won't expect me to come." I touched the documents in my pocket. "Probably thinks I fell apart without him."
"Then he's in for a surprise." Nathan smiled, sharp as any blade. "The rabbit learned to hunt."
As we vanished into the night, I felt something shift in my chest. Not healing—too soon for that. But maybe the possibility of it. Gabriel had made me a weapon.
I was choosing what to aim at.