Through the blur of motion, she caught one last glimpse ofBrie.
Her surrogate sister was being pulled from the chaos by two of the private security team. She was limp but alive.
Kiki’s lips twisted into a wry smile. Satisfaction burned like fire in her chest. Next time, she and Brie would accomplish their own mission. Kiki knew it. She’d seen it.
She ignored her handler’s barked order to lower her head. He couldn’t hurt her. No one could. Not any longer.
The man shot her a heated glare before he gave the driver an order in French-accented Arabic. “Go. Now.”
The vehicle lunged forward.
“You need to do as you’re told, Kiki,” Diana Mead coolly stated.
Kiki didn’t look at the woman beside her. She didn’t speak. Instead, she leaned her head back against the seat and stared out the window, the compound disappearing behind a curtain of dust and flame.
She knew what had always come next.
The experiments.
The silencing.
The black bags.
The glass rooms.
But it wouldn’t happen this time.
This time, she and Brie would run. They would break their chains before the shackles could tighten again.
They would escape—together.
She felt it in her bones, in her blood, in whatever strange, twisted power pulsed beneath her skin.
For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel powerless. The woman beside her, the one who had made her life a living hell, would die. So would Oscar. Brie should’ve left him lying in the sand.
She wasn’t sorry—not even a little.
It was hard to care about people when she knew what they were really like inside.
As for the soldier who had hung beside Oscar… she hadn’t touched him. Hadn’t seen his thread.
His fate remained uncertain.
But hers and Brie’s? That was already written.
Kiki smiled again—sharp and full of smug satisfaction.
Soon, they would be free.
And she would never, ever let anyone use them again.
The air still shimmered with the heat of the day, but that wouldn’t last long. They’d been here for eight months. This was their third tour in this region, and Nikos Aeto didn’t know if he would ever get used to the dry heat and coarse sand. The fine grains had infiltrated every pore no matter how much he tried to keep it out.
He crouched low behind the jagged ridge of boulders, the barrel of his M24 sniper rifle resting steady against his shoulder as he stared through the scope at the illuminated perimeter below. The compound—if you could call a haphazard fortress of piled rocks, sandbags, and rusted corrugated metal a ‘compound’—was lit like a carnival in hell.
And dead center, beneath the humming glare of floodlights, hung his twin brother, Markos, just like the anonymous source saidhe would be. Nikos didn’t know if this was a trap or if there was a sympathetic mole inside. He didn’t give a damn about anything but his brother.
He studied the scene below. Markos was suspended by his wrists from a crude wooden A-frame. Blood soaked the front of his torn uniform. His head hung low in a way that made Nikos’s stomach clench with fear.
