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.
11
Recruitment
Nathan's apartment had become my confessional, the place where truths I'd buried deeper than bodies clawed their way to surface. Tonight, he sat across from me with files spread between us like tarot cards predicting a past I'd tried to forget.
"Her name was Sally," he said, touching a photograph of a woman with hollow eyes. "Twenty-four when she signed the contract. They offered her fifty thousand to participate in a psychological study. Six months, they said. Controlled environment. Good money for a grad student drowning in loans."
I studied Sally's face, noting the familiar blankness that came after conditioning. We all got that look eventually—thousand-yard stare in a ten-by-ten room.
"What did they actually want?" My voice stayed clinical. Safe.
"Everything." Nathan's jaw tightened. "The contract gave them total authority. Where she lived, what she ate, who she spoke to. They renamed her Subject Seven. Wouldn't respond to her real name after month three."
