I found bolt cutters in the guard's supplies, but the collar was beyond simple tools. Electronic, probably GPS-enabled. Cutting it wrong could trigger any number of fail-safes.
"Hold still," I told her, then pressed the taser to the lock mechanism.
The device fried in a shower of sparks. She screamed, the sound too close to my own memories, but the collar fell away. Angry burns marked her neck, but she was free.
"Jesus, Bunny," Nathan muttered, but he was already working on the cages, shooting locks when keys couldn't be found.
We freed seventeen women in total. Some walked out on their own. Others had to be carried. The youngest couldn't have been more than fourteen, and when she saw the blood on my hands, she started screaming—high, thin wails that scraped against my skull.
"It's okay," I tried to tell her. "You're safe now."
But she looked at me and saw a monster covered in other monsters' blood. Maybe she wasn't wrong.
The mop-up took hours. Statements, medical evaluations, processing survivors. I found clothes in an office—ill-fitting men's pants and a shirt that reeked of cologne—and tried to wash the blood off in a utility sink. It had dried under my nails, in the creases of my palms. Evidence of choices made.
"Bunny."
I looked up to find Nathan in the doorway, his own clothes bearing testament to the night's violence.
"Seventeen women," he said. "Because of you. Seventeen lives saved."
"Minus three lives taken." I scrubbed harder at a stubborn stain. "Does the math work out?"
"You know it does."
"Do I?" The water ran pink down the drain. "I killed them the same way Gabriel taught me. Used their expectations against them. Performed submission until the moment I didn't." I met his gaze in the mirror. "I did exactly what he trained me to do."
"To save people. Not to hurt them for sport."
"The actions were the same. Only the motivation differed."
"The motivation is everything." He moved closer, not touching but present. "You think soldiers are the same as murderers because they both kill?"
"Aren't they?"
"No. Intent matters. Choice matters. You chose to use your skills to protect rather than prey." His hands covered mine, stilling their frantic scrubbing. "That's what makes you different from him."
"The guard I cut—he bled out screaming. Took almost four minutes." My voice sounded detached, clinical. "I could have gone for a cleaner kill. Chose not to."
"Because you're human. Because anger is human. Because after everything you've endured, you're allowed to not be perfect in your mercy."
"The girl, the young one. She looked at me like I was him. Like I was the nightmare."
"And tomorrow, when she's safe, when she's starting to heal, she'll remember the woman who broke her chains. Even if that woman was covered in blood."
I sagged against the sink, exhaustion hitting like a tide. "I need to get out of here."
"Come on. Let's go home."
Home. His apartment, but somehow the word fit.
The ride back was silent. I stared out the window, watching the city blur past, trying to reconcile who I'd been three hours ago with who I was now. The same but different. Stained but not corrupted.
I hoped.
Nathan's apartment felt like another world. Clean, quiet, absent of screams and blood spray. I stood in the entryway, suddenly unsure how to exist in spaces without violence.
"Bath," he decided, reading my paralysis. "Come on."
