"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 withtears 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.
19
Breadcrumbs
The twenty-one names had yielded thirty-two locations, nineteen confirmed kills, and one phone.
One phone that changed everything.
I stared at the device in the evidence bag, unremarkable except for what it represented. A burner, naturally. Probably meant to be destroyed after use. But the trafficker we'd taken it from—a middle-management piece of shit who'd tried to bargain his way out with information—had been sloppy. Or maybe just arrogant. The phone still had data. Messages. Call logs. GPS history.
