I shake my head, unable to speak.
“That is so messed up. How could they be so evil?” Anger colors her voice.
Darius is watching me with his calculating alpha eyes, probably trying to determine if this is another deception. But he must see the genuine shock on my face because his expression softens slightly.
“They told you it was poison,” he says.
“They showed us.” My voice comes out hoarse. “Made us watch what happened to operatives who didn’t get the ‘antidote’ in time. The suffering. The death. They said it was poison working through our systems. Told us that only they had the cure.”
“It was actually withdrawal,” the male researcher says. “Severe, potentially fatal withdrawal, but not poison.”
The brutality of it hits me all over again.
They didn’t need poison. They just needed to make our bodies dependent on a substance only they could provide. Make us suffer enough that we’d do anything, hurt anyone, to get our next dose.
And every operative who got their next dose, thinking it was the antidote, was simply becoming more and more addicted.
How much more insidious could these people be?
Darius thanks the researchers, and we leave the medical center in silence. The three of us get into his car again—Anne in the back, me in the passenger seat—and the tension is thick enough to choke on.
My hands are shaking, but not from poison or withdrawal. From rage.
All of it—every moment of suffering, every desperate plea for the antidote, every mission completed out of fear of dying—all of it was built on lies.
I want to hit something so badly. My hand clenches into a fist, but there’s nowhere to direct my rage.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. The burner that Darius gave back to me. The one I’ve been carrying since the mission started, always waiting for Rick’s next check-in.
My hand grabs it automatically, fury making my movements sharp. I want to answer the call and curse Rick out, let him know that I am no longer their puppet and that I’ll put my hand through his chest the next time I see him.
“Calm down,” Darius says, his voice cutting through the red haze and stopping me. “Remember not to blow your cover.”
I pound my clenched fist against my knee three times to release some of my rage and force Darius’s words to take purchase in my mind.
My cover. I need to maintain my cover.
I take a deep breath. Another. Force the anger down to a manageable level.
Then, I tap the phone to answer the call, putting it on speaker.
“Kain.” Rick’s voice fills the car, cold and clinical as always. “You missed your last check-in.”
I tell myself to act like I’m still desperate. “I’ve been busy trying to move the mission forward. Hard to do that when I’m dying, don’t you think?”
A pause. When Rick speaks again, there’s a hint of amusement in his tone. “Ah. Still playing that card. Are the symptoms very bad?”
“What do you think?” I inject bitterness into my words. It’s not hard—the emotion is real, just redirected. “I can barely function. But I’m close. The hybrid is—”
“You’ve taken too long.” Rick cuts me off, and the change in his voice makes my blood run cold. “We’re going with Plan B. We’ll be there in two days.”
My chest tightens. “What?”
“Fall back and await further instructions. Do not attempt contact with the target anymore. You are now assigned to support duties. Do not deviate from protocol. Understood?”
Every muscle in my body goes rigid. “Understood.”
The line goes dead.
