Thorne (Cerberus Personal Security #7)

Chapter 1 Repulsion

Repulsion

THORNE

I've never wanted to kill someone as much as I want to put a bullet in Julianna Stratton's chest.

The thought arrives clean and absolute while I watch her stand in the wreckage of Phoenix's control room, answering questions as if she's at a job interview instead of an interrogation.

Ghostwater Dam. Nevada. The server racks are dark behind the shattered glass of the observation window, the AI that lived in them now caged in its own architecture—Sarah Vance's Hard Lock burning through its satellite access, Halo's containment protocols boxing it in from every angle.

We won.

Forty-eight hours ago, Phoenix was a god. Now it's a wounded animal bleeding out in a digital cage, its cloud fragments scattered and crawling back toward the only home it has left.

We won. Senator Marcus Vance is standing near the console with the hollow expression of a man who just watched his empire burn.

His daughter—Sarah—put the knife in. The Hard Lock was her code.

Her kill shot. He's been muttering about contingencies ever since, something about ML-273, about thousands of people already infected and waiting.

I filed it away. Tactical information. Threat assessment. The kind of data I process without letting it touch anything that matters.

Then Ghost brought Julianna Stratton up from a holding cell.

The Rook. The financial architect. The woman who bankrolled Phoenix's creation and then vanished months ago. Phoenix had been keeping her—for whatever a caged god needs from the woman who helped build its infrastructure.

She looks like someone who's spent days being questioned by a machine that doesn't need sleep. Thin. Gaunt. Dark hair tangled and unwashed. Bruising along her jaw and wrists from whatever Phoenix's people did to her.

She's talking. Distribution frameworks. Shell companies. The ASHFALL architecture she built that Phoenix runs on. Financial trails that can be traced back to clinics, to patient records, to names.

I'm only half listening.

Because Vance is still muttering about ML-273, and somewhere in the back of my skull, a clock is ticking that I don't understand yet.

"Meridian ran the trials through multiple programs." Ghost studies Julianna with the flat assessment of a man who's already calculated six ways to kill her. "Adult oncology. Autoimmune disorders. What else?"

Julianna hesitates.

Something crosses her face—a flicker that might be shame.

"Compassionate use protocols." Her voice scrapes out, rough and damaged. "Experimental immune support for children undergoing cancer treatment."

Children.

Cancer treatment.

Experimental protocols.

The clock in my skull stops ticking.

Something else starts.

"What did you say?" My voice comes out wrong. Too controlled. Too level. The kind of level that comes right before something breaks.

Julianna's eyes find mine. She's assessing me now—the same systematic scan she gave the room when she walked in.

"Meridian ran compassionate use trials for children with—"

"Which hospitals?"

The question cracks through the room like a whip. I haven't moved. My weapon is still holstered. But something has shifted in me—something coiled and dangerous that has nothing to do with tactical assessment.

"Several." Her voice is careful now. Measured. "CHOP was one of the primary sites. They had a pediatric oncology partnership with—"

CHOP.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Where my daughter finished treatment just days ago.

Where she rang the bell in the oncology ward while my parents held her, and I listened through a phone pressed to my ear because I was doing the job that was supposed to keep her safe.

Lily.

Six years old. The voice on that phone call—I did it, Daddy. I rang the bell. I'm better now.

She's not better.

She's carrying something inside her that this woman put there.

My weapon comes up.

I don't remember drawing it. Don't remember crossing the distance. But suddenly I'm three feet from Julianna Stratton with the Glock centered on her chest. My finger finds the trigger, and the only thought in my head is a very simple equation:

She poisoned my daughter.

She should die.

"Thorne." Ghost's voice. Sharp. Warning.

I don't hear him. Don't care.

"My daughter." The words are ice. "Six years old. Lily. She finished cancer treatment at CHOP. Experimental protocol. Immune support therapy."

Each word is a knife. I want them to cut.

"Is she infected?"

The room has frozen. Nobody's breathing.

Julianna's face has gone white. Not fear of the gun—something worse. Recognition. The dawning horror of someone who's just understood the full scope of what they've built.

"I don't know individual names." Her voice is barely steady. "There were thousands of patients across dozens of sites. I managed the funding structure, not the enrollment—"

"But CHOP was funded through your architecture."

"Yes." The syllable drops after a long, heavy pause.

"The pediatric compassionate use protocol. Was it funded through your system?"

"Yes. CHOP was one of our primary distribution nodes. The pediatric program was—"

"Then she's carrying it."

My finger tightens on the trigger.

"Thorne." Brass now. Somewhere behind me. Moving closer. "Brother. I know. I know what you're feeling. But she's the only one who can help us find them. She's the only one who knows where the money went."

"She poisoned my daughter."

"She might be the only one who can help us save your daughter."

The words land like ice water.

My daughter. My six-year-old little girl with her stegosaurus collection, her purple coat, and her brave little voice on the phone saying I'm better now, Daddy.

She's not better.

She's carrying a monster in her blood.

Killing this woman doesn't change that. Doesn't undo it. Doesn't do anything except eliminate the only person who might be able to help me find out how to save her.

The math is obscene.

I lower the weapon.

Something in my back teeth grinds flat and stays there.

"You're going to save her." The words have the absolute weight of an order to execute—not a question, not a request, not a hope.

A fact I am making true by force of will.

"You're going to reconstruct every transaction, trace every clinic, identify every patient who might be carrying this thing.

And if my daughter dies—if anything happens to her because of what you built … "

I don't finish the sentence.

I don't need to.

"I understand." Julianna's nod is barely visible, her voice dropping to a whisper.

"You don't." The hollow words scratch at my throat. "But you will."

I step back. Holster the weapon. Don't take my eyes off her.

The room exhales.

Sarah turns to her father. He's been silent through the whole exchange, watching with eyes that have gone flat and calculating.

Something's changed in his expression—the defeat giving way to something else.

Something I should be tracking but can't because my head is full of Lily's voice and the sound of a bell ringing in a hospital corridor.

Vance suddenly moves.

Fast. Faster than a man his age should be able to move. He lunges for my weapon.

I react.

Two shots.

Center mass.

Senator Marcus Vance staggers back. Looks down at his chest. Two holes, spreading red across his white shirt.

He looks at Sarah.

"I would have given you the world." The whisper is a dying rattle in his throat.

Then he falls.

The silence that follows is absolute.

I lower my weapon for the second time in five minutes. Look at Sarah. She's staring at her father's body with an expression I can't read—not grief, not relief. Something that doesn't have a name.

"He was going for my weapon."

"I know." Sarah's voice is quiet. Steady.

She doesn't look away from the body.

Torque moves to her. Hand on her shoulder. I file that too—the connection between them, the way she leans into it without seeming to realize she's doing it.

"We need to move." Ghost's eyes sweep the room, dark with urgency. "Extraction window is closing."

I turn back to Julianna Stratton.

She hasn't moved. Hasn't flinched. She's still standing there with her bruised wrists and her defeated posture and those eyes that see too much.

I cross to her. Grab her arm. Spin her toward the wall.

Not gentle. I'm not here to be gentle.

I take her wrists—already purple from whatever Phoenix's people did to her—and run a zip tie around and through, cinching it hard. The plastic bites into the bruising.

For what she's done to my daughter, she deserves nothing less.

She makes no sound. Doesn't pull away, doesn't tense, doesn't try to create space. Just stands there and takes it.

That makes it worse somehow.

I turn her around, get my hand on her arm, and move her toward the door.

She goes.

No resistance. No drag.

She walks where I put her, at the pace I set.

And my body …

My body notices everything.

The heat of her skin under my palm. The brush of her hip when she turns too close. The faint hitch in her breathing when I tighten my hold.

Every one of those details lands somewhere low and unwelcome.

I hate that it does, because I hate her.

That part is true.

The other part?

The other part I shove down hard and pretend doesn't exist.

With her hands bound, she can't clip her safety belt. I reach across her—have to, no choice—and pull the buckle across her chest, clicking it home. My knuckles brush her breast. She goes very still while I do it. Neither of us says anything. I pull back and look at the canyon wall.

"Thank you." She speaks to the empty air between us.

I don't answer. She doesn't deserve the breath it would take for a response.

Ariel lifts us off the canyon floor.

The MH-6 is loud in the way all Little Birds are loud—filling everything, no insulation, the canyon walls dropping away as we climb. Nobody talks. I keep my eyes on the terrain below, on the sightlines, on anything that isn't the two inches between her shoulder and mine.

She looks at the horizon.

Forty minutes. Nevada below in the early light, the dam, its servers, its caged god receding behind us. I watch her the way I'd watch a device I don't fully understand—tracking for signs of activation, change, some indication of what it is and what it plans.

She doesn't give me anything. Doesn't flinch when the helicopter banks. Doesn't look at the zip ties.

Doesn't look at me.

That keeps landing wrong in some part of my brain I have no use for.