After he left, I stood frozen for a full minute before Matt's voice snapped me back.
"You okay?"
"Fine!" Too bright. Always too bright. "Just thinking about that poor developer. Gregory whatever. Such a tragedy."
Matt gave me a look that said he wasn't buying it but wouldn't push. Yet. "Take your break. You look like you need air."
I escaped to the alley, pulling out the trafficking phone to check messages while my real mind processed. Nathan knew who I was. Had known the whole time, probably. Every conversation had been a careful excavation, him digging for truth while I fortified my lies.
The smart thing would be to run. Pack up my pattern wall and my growing collection of evidence and disappear into another city, another name, another life. But I had leads here. Dr. Petrova arriving next month. The Volkov brothers' transport network. Other Institute girls who might know if Gabriel was really dead or just very good at hiding.
Besides, some traitorous part of me whispered, Nathan came every day at 3:17. Had I ever been someone's routine before? Someone worth searching for?
Gabriel made you his routine, my mind supplied.You were his last project. His Batch 47.
But that was different. I was an assignment to Gabriel, a doll to be perfected. Nathan was looking for Lilah, and even though she didn't exist anymore, the fact that someone had noticed her absence felt like touching a live wire.
The next few days followed the new pattern. I worked my shifts, hunted my prey, searched for Gabriel. But now there was this added layer—performing innocence for someone who saw through it, dancing around truths with someone who collected them professionally.
"You know what I find interesting?" Nathan said on day eighteen, swirling his scotch. "Missing persons cases usually gocold after the first forty-eight hours. But Lilah's parents didn't report her missing for almost two weeks. Like they expected her to come back on her own."
"Maybe she'd run away before," I suggested, wiping glasses that didn't need it. "Some people are just naturally restless."
"Maybe." He watched me align bottles with obsessive precision. "Or maybe they knew something about where she'd gone. Why she'd gone. Maybe they were giving her time to come back from something specific."
My hands stilled. What had my parents—did I even have parents? The memories felt watercolored, too vague to trust—known about where I'd gone? Had I told them about the Institute? About the man who promised to fix what was broken in me?
"You think a lot about people's maybes," I said.
"Occupational hazard. Though you're one to talk, pattern hunter." He leaned back, studying me. "What kind of patterns have you been finding lately? Still connecting dots?"
I thought about last night's work. Two more Institute girls located through careful digital tracking. Both sold to international buyers, probably overseas by now. The Transport company's routes mapped and documented. Three more names added to my list of people who deserved basement time.
"Always," I said. "Though lately the patterns keep pointing to Prague. Weird, right? Everything leads to Prague eventually."
His expression sharpened. "Prague's interesting this time of year. Lots of medical tourism. People go there for procedures they can't get elsewhere."
"So I've heard." I met his eyes directly. "There's a doctor there who specializes in... behavioral modification. Very exclusive clientele."
"Dangerous clientele, from what I understand." He set down his glass carefully. "The kind of people you don't want to get tangled up with. Even if you're looking for someone specific."
The way he said it made me wonder how much he actually knew. About the Institute, about the network, about what I did in basements when I wasn't serving drinks. Nathan Cross was too informed to be just looking for one missing girl.
"Good thing I'm just a bartender," I said brightly. "My biggest danger is paper cuts from inventory lists."
"Right." He smiled, the real one that actually reached his eyes and made my stomach do complicated things. "Just a bartender who works Thursday through Saturday, always has bruised knuckles despite claiming to avoid danger, and occasionally smells like bleach and copper."
"I'm very clumsy," I protested. "And Matt makes me clean the taps. They get gross if you don't bleach them properly."
"Of course." He stood to leave, earlier than usual. "By the way, there was another body found this morning. Some businessman with connections to human trafficking. Tortured before he died, just like Marsh. Police think there's a serial killer targeting the network."
"How terrible," I murmured.
"Terrible," he agreed. "Though some might say appropriate. Some might even say overdue." He left his usual cash plus a significant tip. "Some might say be careful, because that network has resources and reach, and they'll notice eventually if their members keep turning up creatively dead."
After he left, I spent my break in the bathroom, staring at my reflection and trying to reconcile all the fractured pieces. Bunny the bartender. The girl who hunted predators. Lilah Winters who existed only in missing person reports. Batch 47 who belonged to Gabriel, created by Gabriel, existed only in relation to—
"Stop," I told my reflection. Gabriel wasn't here. Might be dead. Might have abandoned his dolls to scatter in the wind while he disappeared into a new life somewhere. And I was here, playing word games with a detective who made my pulse race in ways that had nothing to do with fear.
