The first two guards at the loading dock went almost as easily. The third—a heavyset man with prison tattoos and a cocaine habit—put up more of a fight. He got his hands around my throat before I could reach my knife, slamming me against the concrete wall hard enough to make stars explode behind my eyes.
"Little bitch," he snarled, his breath hot and sour against my face. "Think you can—"
I drove my knee into his groin. His grip loosened just enough for me to slip free, and then my knife was in my hand and his throat was opening like a second mouth, blood spraying across the loading dock in an arterial fan. He staggered backward, clutching at the wound, and I watched him fall with the detached interest of a scientist observing an experiment.
Four down,I counted.Two to go.
The interior of the warehouse was worse than I'd expected. The women were kept in cages—actual cages, the kind used for transporting livestock—stacked twohigh along the far wall. Most of them were young. Some were barely more than children. All of them had the hollow eyes of people who'd learned that hope was a luxury they couldn't afford.
I catalogued their faces as I moved through the facility, memorizing details for the report I'd file later. Brunette, early twenties, bruising on her wrists. Blonde, maybe seventeen, track marks on her arms. Redhead, mid-thirties, clutching a torn photograph of a child she probably hadn't seen in months.
Focus,I told myself.Finish the mission. Grieve later.
Volosin was in his office on the second floor, a glass-walled box that overlooked the processing floor like a king surveying his kingdom. He was on the phone when I entered, his back to the door, his voice oily with false concern.
"—told you, the shipment will arrive by Friday. My girls are the best quality, you know that. No damage, no resistance. They've been properly conditioned—"
I shot him in the leg before he could finish the sentence.
The sound was deafening in the enclosed space. Volosin screamed, dropping the phone, his hands flying to the wound in his thigh. Blood pulsed between his fingers, dark and arterial, and I felt a savage satisfaction at the sight.
"You—who areyou—"
"I'm the one who conditions things now," I said, and shot him again. This time in the shoulder. "The one you sold girls to tell me what you know about him."
Volosin's face cycled through emotions faster than I could track—pain, confusion, recognition, terror. "The Institute? You're one of Mire's products?"
"I'm not a product." I pressed the gun barrel against his other knee. "I'm a consequence. Now tell me what you know about Gabriel Mire."
He talked. They always talked, in the end. Between the pain and the fear and the careful pressure I applied—techniques Nathan had taught me, techniques that echoed Gabriel's training with unsettling precision—Volosin gave me everything. Names. Dates. Locations. A network of buyers and sellers that stretched across three continents and reached into places I hadn't imagined.
And at the center of it, a name I hadn't expected: Mercy Logistics. The transport company Nathan had mentioned in passing, the one he'd said was too well-protected to target directly. According to Volosin, Mercy wasn't just a transport company. It was the spine of the entire operation, the thing that connected the Institute's graduates to their eventual buyers.
"Who runs Mercy?" I demanded.
"I don't know—I swear I don't know—they haveintermediaries, cutouts—"
"The name."
"I only know one. Cross. Someone named Cross."
The world tilted. I felt it shift, felt the pieces of the puzzle rearrange themselves into a pattern I didn't want to see. Cross.Nathan Cross.The man who'd found me, saved me, loved me. The man who might be Gabriel's brother. The man whose study was full of encrypted files and locked drawers and photographs of a childhood I wasn't supposed to know about.
"Thank you," I said to Volosin, and then I put a bullet through his skull.
The cleanup was mechanical. I freed the women, called the anonymous tip line we always used for police notification, and met Nathan at the extraction point on the roof. The blood on my tactical gear was already drying, flaking off in dark crescents that scattered in the wind.
"Volosin?" Nathan asked.
"Dead." I handed him the USB drive where I'd copied Volosin's files. "He had more intel than we expected. Connections to Mercy Logistics."
Something flickered in Nathan's expression—too fast to name. "Mercy? That's bigger than we planned for."
"I know. But the intel is solid. We can use it."
He nodded, pocketing the drive. "Good work. Really good work."
The praise hit me like a drug, and I hated how much I craved it. Hated how my body leaned toward him,seeking more approval, more warmth, more of the validation that Gabriel had trained me to need and Nathan had learned to provide.
