Chapter 18 Hunt Continues
Hunt Continues
The warehouse smelled like fear and industrial cleaner—a combination that had become too familiar these past weeks. Seven operations down, each one carving away another piece of whoever I used to be. Nathan said we were making progress. All I could see was how many were still out there.
This cell was bigger. Meaner. The intelligence that had gathered suggested they specialized in "breaking" difficult products. The kind of girls who fought back.
Girls like I should have been.
"Six targets inside," Nathan murmured, checking his tablet one last time. "You sure you're ready for this?"
"Stop asking me that." The words came out sharper than intended. Everything came out sharp these days, like I was made of broken glass held together by rage. "I'm always ready."
He studied me in the dim light of the van, and I knew what he saw. Hollow eyes. Hands that shook until I gave them violence to do. The careful distance I'd been maintaining since the nightmares got worse.
"Bunny—"
"Don't." I checked my weapons for the third time. Knife. Gun. The surgical kit I'd started carrying. "Let's just get this done."
The entry was textbook perfect. We'd gotten good at this dance—Nathan handling electronic security while I dealt with the human element. The first guard went down silent, my knife finding the gap between his vest plates before he could draw breath to scream.
I felt nothing. That was the problem. Each death should have meant something, should have satisfied the hungry thing growing in my chest. Instead, they were just meat. Obstacles between me and answers that never came.
The main floor was a maze of cages. Some empty, some not. The occupied ones held girls in various stages of breaking—bruised, vacant-eyed, past caring who came through the door. They didn't even look up as we passed.
"Get them out," I told Nathan. "I'll handle the office."
"We stick together. That was the rule."
"Rules change." I was already moving. "They need medical attention. Call the cleanup crew."
I heard him curse but didn't stop. The office was up a flight of metal stairs, voices drifting down. Male laughter. The sound of it made something in my brain shift sideways, like a train switching tracks.
Three men inside, playing cards around a desk covered in money and product samples. Pills. Restraints. Photo portfolios of their "inventory." They looked up when I entered, more annoyed than alarmed.
"You're early," one said. "Delivery's not till—"
The knife was in his throat before he finished. Blood sprayed across the poker chips, turning them all the same color. The other two scrambled for weapons, but I was already moving. Already empty. Already gone.
The second man got his gun halfway out before I broke his wrist. The sound was wet, organic. He screamed, and I grabbed a metal folding chair, bringing it down on his face. Once. Twice. The facial bones gave way on the third strike, but I kept going. Four. Five. Six.
"Jesus Christ!" The third man had his hands up, backing toward the window. "Take the money! Take whatever you want!"
"I want names." My voice didn't sound like mine anymore. Too calm. Too flat. "Everyone in your network. Suppliers. Buyers. Everyone."
"I can't—they'll kill me!"
I smiled then, and he flinched. "What do you think I'm doing?"
Nathan appeared in the doorway, took in the scene—me standing over the destroyed face, blood splatter painting the walls, the third man trying to become one with the window glass.
"Bunny." Just my name. Careful. Like talking to a wild animal.
"He was about to give us names," I said conversationally. "Weren't you?"
The man nodded frantically. "Yes! Yes, I'll tell you everything!"
I duct-taped him to the chair, methodical and precise. His eyes darted between me and Nathan, trying to figure out which one might save him. He chose wrong.
"Please," he said to me. "I'm just middle management. I don't make the decisions—"
"Neither did I." I opened the surgical kit, laying out tools in a neat row. "Funny how that works. Following orders. Doing what you're told. Being a good little cog in the machine."
"Bunny," Nathan said again, a warning now.
I ignored him, selecting a scalpel. The man had tattoos up both arms—gang markings, territory claims, little trophies of his rise through the ranks. Skin came off easier than most people thought, if you knew the right angle.
He screamed when I started with the first tattoo. High, breathless. The sound should have bothered me. Instead, it felt like music. Like balance being restored. All those girls who'd screamed in these cages, and now him. Mathematics of suffering.
"Names," I reminded him between cuts.
He gave them. Babbled them between sobs while I worked. Nathan wrote them down, jaw tight. I focused on the task, peeling away his history in strips. Each tattoo a choice he'd made. Each one leading him here.
"That's all!" he gasped when I'd finished one arm. "That's everyone I know!"
I believed him. Didn't matter. The other arm still had ink. Still had stories written in skin about who he'd chosen to become. When I was done, when both arms were raw and weeping, I stepped back to admire the work.
"You're insane," he whispered.
"No." I wiped the scalpel clean, precise as Gabriel had taught me. "I'm a product. Your product. All of us are what you made us."
The belt came off his waist easy—cheap leather, worn from use. I'd been strangled before. Knew exactly how much pressure it took, where to position the hands. He fought, but the tape held. His eyes bulged, vessels bursting like tiny fireworks.
Somewhere behind the blood roaring in my ears, I heard myself sobbing. Not for him. For all of them. For S-047 who should have died clean. For the girls in cages. For the woman I might have been if Gabriel hadn't found me first.
When it was over, when he was just meat like the others, I stood on shaking legs. Nathan hadn't moved from the doorway. Watching. Witnessing. Not intervening.
"Feel better?" he asked quietly.
"No." I looked at my hands. Blood under the nails. Blood in the creases. No amount of washing would make them clean. "But I don't feel worse either."
"That's what worries me."
The cleanup crew arrived— efficient and discreet. They processed the survivors, documented evidence, made bodies disappear. Professional trauma janitors, sweeping up the mess so the world could keep pretending it didn't exist.
I watched from the van, coming down from the violence high. Nathan sat beside me, not touching. He'd learned not to touch me after. Not until I asked.
"twenty-one names," he said eventually. "He gave us twenty-one new leads."
"Good." The word felt empty. They were all empty now. "How many more until we find Gabriel's current operation?"
"I don't know."
"How many more until I feel fixed?"
"That's not how this works."
I laughed, brittle as old bones. "Then how does it work? Because I'm running out of pieces to cut away."
The hotel was the same as always. Anonymous. Clean. No trace of what we'd done. I stood in the bathroom, watching pink water swirl down the drain. Third shower and I still felt coated in it. In them. In what I was becoming.
Nathan appeared in the doorway, still in his blood-stained clothes. We stared at each other in the mirror, two broken people playing at justice.
"I'm losing myself," I admitted.
"I know."
"You're letting me."
"I know that too."
Something snapped between us—the careful distance I'd been maintaining, the control he'd been exercising. I turned and kissed him hard, tasting copper and desperation. His hands tangled in my wet hair, pulling me closer.
"This is fucked up," he said against my mouth.
"Everything's fucked up." I pulled at his clothes, needing skin. Needing connection. Needing to feel something besides the void where my soul used to be. "Please. Make me feel human again."
We came together desperate, still half-dressed. My back against the bathroom counter, legs around his waist. No tenderness. No careful consent negotiations. Just need raw as exposed nerves.
"Harder," I demanded, nails digging into his shoulders.
He complied, driving into me like he could fuck the violence out of my system. Like he could reach the human underneath the weapon I was becoming. His teeth found my neck, biting down, and I cried out—pain and pleasure indistinguishable.
"I've got you," he growled. "Let go. Just let go."
But I couldn't. Couldn't release the rage or the emptiness or the growing certainty that I was becoming exactly what Gabriel had made me to be. A successful experiment after all. Just not the kind he'd intended.
We moved together brutal and desperate, chasing something neither of us could name. When I came, it was with tears streaming down my face. When he followed, I barely felt it—too lost in the white noise of my breaking brain.
After, we lay on the bathroom floor, a tangle of limbs and ruined clothes. The tile was cold against my back, grounding me in the present.
"We can't keep doing this," Nathan said eventually.
"The hunting or the fucking?"
"Yes."
But we both knew we would. Tomorrow there would be another warehouse. More names. More blood under my nails. More pieces of my humanity offered up to the hungry thing growing inside me.
"He made me to self-destruct," I said. "Maybe this is just a different kind of bomb."
Nathan turned to look at me, and I saw my own damage reflected in his eyes. "Then we go down together."
"That's not a solution."
"No," he agreed. "But it's what we have."
I thought about arguing. About pointing out all the ways this was destroying us both. Instead, I moved closer, seeking warmth from another damaged soul.
In the morning, we'd check the names. Plan the next hunt. Pretend we were doing good while the darkness ate us alive. But tonight, on the cold hotel floor with blood in our clothes and violence in our veins, we were just two broken people holding each other together.
It wasn't enough. It would have to be.
The twenty-one names glowed on Nathan's laptop across the room. Twenty-one more operations. Twenty-one more chances to lose myself completely.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I'd felt like before. Before Gabriel. Before the collar. Before I learned that love could be programmed and humanity could be trained away.
Nothing came. Just white noise and the taste of copper. Maybe some dread and hunger.
"Sleep," Nathan said, pulling me to my feet. "Tomorrow we hunt again."
"And the day after?"
"We keep hunting until we find what we're looking for."
But I was starting to suspect what we were looking for didn't exist. There was no magical number of dead traffickers that would make me whole. No amount of blood that would wash me clean. No perfect revenge that would undo what had been done.
There was just this. The hunt. The violence. The desperate connection afterward.
And the growing certainty that I was becoming something worse than what Gabriel had tried to create. Not a perfect victim. Not a broken toy.
A monster who remembered how to love.