"You don't have to thank me." He kissed my forehead. "I'd do anything for you."
The words should have been reassuring. Instead, they made me think of the study. Of the locks. Of the files. Of the photograph.
I'd do anything for you.
Including, perhaps, keeping me in a cage so beautiful I'd never thought to test its bars.
I smiled at Nathan and sank deeper into the bath, letting the warmth seep into my bones. Tomorrow, I'd photograph the server again. Tomorrow, I'd find someonewho could decrypt his files. Tomorrow, I'd keep digging until I found the truth buried beneath the lies.
But tonight, I'd just be his good girl. His perfect partner. His Bunny.
The performance continued. The hunt was only beginning.
6
The First Hunt of the Game
The warehouse crouched at the edge of the industrial district like a tumor, its windows painted black and its walls weeping rust. I watched it from the rooftop across the street, my breath fogging in the cold night air, my hands steady on the binoculars despite the chill that had seeped through my tactical gear.
"Six guards," I murmured. "Two at the front, two at the loading dock, two rovers. Rotating every twenty minutes."
"Cameras?" Nathan's voice came through the earpiece, calm and professional. He was positioned on theopposite rooftop, covering the north entrance with a rifle I'd never seen him use but which he handled with the familiarity of long practice.
"Four. All positioned to cover the main approaches. But there's a blind spot on the west wall—the old fire escape. The camera there is angled wrong."
"How can you tell?"
"Because the lens is cracked." I lowered the binoculars. "Someone tried to disable it a while ago. Did a half-assed job. The crack catches the light differently than the other lenses."
A pause. Then: "Good catch."
The praise shouldn't have warmed me. I was learning to be suspicious of his praise—the way he deployed it strategically, the way it made me want to perform better, the way it echoed Gabriel's conditioning with unsettling precision. But my body responded before my mind could intervene, a flush of pride spreading through my chest like whiskey.
Good girl,the warmth whispered.You're being good.
I pushed the thought away and focused on the mission.
The target was a man named Andrei Volosin, a mid-level trafficker who specialized in moving Eastern European women through a network of shell companies and fake modeling agencies. He'd been on Nathan's radar for months, he'd said, but the intel had only recentlysolidified enough for action. The warehouse was his primary processing facility—the place where new arrivals were catalogued, assessed, and distributed to buyers across the country.
"There are women inside," I said. "Current inventory. Probably twelve to fifteen, based on the transport van that arrived this morning."
"We'll get them out." Nathan's voice was steady with certainty. "We always do."
He was right. We always did. In the months we'd been hunting together, we'd freed over fifty women from facilities like this one. Fifty lives saved. Fifty families reunited. It was good work—important work—and I'd believed in it completely until the cracks had started forming in my reality.
Now I wasn't sure what I believed. But the women were still real. Their suffering was still real. And whatever else Nathan might be hiding from me, he'd never hesitated to help me rescue them.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready."
I descended the fire escape with the silence Gabriel had drilled into me, my boots finding each rusted rung with muscle memory that predated consciousness. The alley below smelled of diesel and rotting garbage, and I pressed myself against the damp brick wall, counting the seconds until the rover passed my position.
Twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten.
The guard rounded the corner, his rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder, his attention on his phone. He didn't see me. Didn't even look up before my arm wrapped around his throat and my knife found the gap between his third and fourth ribs.
He went down without a sound. I dragged his body into the shadows and kept moving.
