I stared at the ceiling and made my decision.
The hunt was not over. It had simply changed prey.
The next morning, I took my vitamins. The normal ones. The ones that might be keeping me foggy, compliant, unable to see the truth. I swallowed them with a glass of water and smiled at Nathan across the breakfast table.
"Sleep well?" he asked.
"Like the dead," I said, and the lie tasted like poison.
But the clarity from yesterday was still there, buried beneath the fog but not extinguished. I could feel it, a small flame in the darkness of my mind. And I knew that if I could find a way to feed it, to keep it burning despite the chemicals, I might finally see what was really hiding in the shadows of my life.
The game had changed. I was no longer the prey, stumbling blindly through a cage I couldn't perceive. I was a hunter again, and my hunt had brought me home.
Now I just had to figure out what to do with what I found.
5
The Off-Limits Room
The lock on Nathan's study was a Schlage Primus, high-security, six-pin sidebar mechanism with a reinforced strike plate. Commercial grade. The kind you installed when you wanted to keep out everyone except a professional.
Or someone who'd been trained by a professional.
I knelt in the hallway with a tension wrench and a pick I'd fashioned from a bobby pin, my ear close to the cylinder, listening for the telltale clicks that meant success. My hands were steady—steadier than they'd been in months. The clarity from two days ago had faded slightlyunder the resumed vitamin regimen, but I'd skipped yesterday's dose and half of today's, and the fog was thin enough to see through.
Click.
The first pin set. Then the second. The third fought me—spring tension heavier than expected, the kind of trap that might make an amateur hesitate—but my fingers knew the counter-pressure before my mind did. Muscle memory from lessons I didn't remember learning.
Click. Click.
The cylinder turned. The deadbolt slid back with a sound like a whisper, and the door swung open into a room I'd never seen in five months of living in this apartment.
Nathan's study was a study in contradictions. The furniture was expensive but sparse—a mid-century desk in walnut, a leather chair worn soft at the arms, bookshelves that lined two walls from floor to ceiling. The books themselves were a mix of psychology texts, security manuals, and leather-bound volumes that looked like journals. Everything was meticulously organized, the way Nathan organized everything, from his sock drawer to his interrogation techniques.
But the third wall was different. The third wall was covered in technology that didn't match the room's academic aesthetic. Three monitors mounted on articulated arms. A server rack humming softly in the corner, its lightsblinking a steady green. And on the desk, a laptop that I recognized as the one Nathan took on his "consulting" trips—the one he never let me near, the one he said contained sensitive client information.
I crossed the room on silent feet, my heart hammering against my ribs. The laptop was password-protected, of course. I tried his birthday. His mother's maiden name. The street he'd grown up on. Nothing worked, which I'd expected. Nathan was too careful for obvious passwords.
The server was harder to access. I didn't have the encryption keys, didn't know the system architecture, didn't even know what operating system it ran. But I knew someone who might, and I had the presence of mind to photograph the make and model with my phone before I moved on.
The desk drawers were locked, but the lock was cheap—a basic wafer tumbler that yielded to my bobby pin in under thirty seconds. Inside, I found what I'd expected and what I'd feared: files. Paper files, the kind you kept when you didn't want a digital trail. Personnel dossiers on people I'd hunted. Intelligence reports on trafficking networks. Financial records that showed payments from entities I didn't recognize.
And at the bottom of the drawer, beneath a folder labeled "Insurance," a photograph.
It was old. The paper was yellowed at the edges, the colors faded to sepia tones. But I recognized the building inthe background—a stone facade with arched windows, the kind of institutional architecture that had been popular in the early twentieth century. I'd seen it before, in the final days before Gabriel had abandoned me. The Mire Institute, before it had been renovated into the pink-and-white nightmare of my conditioning.
Standing in front of the building were two boys. One was maybe twelve, dark-haired and serious, already tall enough to suggest the man he'd become. The other was younger—eight or nine—with lighter hair and a smile that hadn't yet learned to hide secrets.
The younger boy looked like Gabriel.
I stared at the photograph for a long moment, my mind racing through possibilities. Brothers? Gabriel had never mentioned a brother. But then, Gabriel had never mentioned anything about his life before the Institute. He'd been a closed book, a locked door, a mystery I'd been too focused on surviving to solve.
But if the older boy was Nathan—and he was, I could see it now, in the line of his jaw and the way he held his shoulders—then Nathan had lied to me about more than vitamins. He'd lied about who he was. Where he came from. Who he was connected to.
I was still holding the photograph when I heard the front door open.
"Bunny? I'm back early—meeting got cancelled."
