You can only learn to perform something different.
I set down the tea and stared at the sleeping man beside me. Nathan Cross, my savior, my fiancé, the man whomight be Gabriel's brother. The man whose files were full of payments I couldn't explain. The man who'd found me when I was disappearing and rebuilt me into something he could use.
I'm going to find out the truth,I promised myself.No matter how much it hurts. No matter what it costs me. I'm going to find out who you really are.
The decision settled into my bones like cold steel. The hunt was changing again. The prey was closer than I'd ever imagined.
And the lullaby kept playing, a soundtrack for the war to come.
10
The Retrieval Protocol
The decryption finished at 3:47 in the morning, while Nathan slept in our bed and the city dreamed its indifferent dreams around us.
I'd been working on his files for six nights—slipping out of bed after his breathing steadied, retrieving the USB drive from its hiding place in the bathroom, and settling into the corner of the living room where the screen's glow wouldn't be visible from the hallway. The keylogger had done its work. The encryption had yielded to the password-cracking software I'd found on a dark web forum.And now, at last, the folders were opening like doors I'd been warned never to unlock.
The first file was labeled "Acquisition Records." I opened it with hands that barely trembled.
The spreadsheet was organized by date, location, and asset designation. There were forty-seven entries in total—forty-seven human beings reduced to line items in a ledger. I scrolled through them with the detached focus of a surgeon examining a wound, noting the patterns without letting myself feel their weight. Most of the entries meant nothing to me. Names I didn't recognize. Locations I'd never visited. Asset designations that followed some internal logic I couldn't decode.
Then I found myself.
*Asset 47-B. Female, 23, Caucasian. Acquisition location: Seattle, WA. Method: financial inducement, psychological profiling, voluntary contract signature. Handler: G. Mire. Status: Active.*
There was more—pages and pages of more. Psychological assessments. Conditioning progress reports. Medical records documenting the chemical adjustments that had been made to my system. A timeline that stretched from my first meeting with Mr. Winters in that coffee shop to my final days at the Institute to... to the bar. To The Lost Hours. To the moment Nathan Cross had walked through the door and taken the seat at the end of the counter and ordered a Macallan neat with a ghost of a smile on his lips.
My blood went cold.
*Asset 47-B. Retrieval status: Complete. Retrieval handler: N. Cross. Method: staged introduction, trauma bonding, chemical compliance maintenance. Current status: Active, compliant, cohabitating. Recommend continued monitoring and dosage adjustment as needed.*
The words blurred. I blinked, and the tears that fell onto the keyboard were hot as fresh blood.Staged introduction. Trauma bonding. Chemical compliance maintenance.The phrases Gabriel had used during my conditioning—the clinical language that reduced human beings to variables in an experiment—were here, in Nathan's files, applied to me with the same cold precision.
I kept reading. I had to. The nausea was rising, but I had to know.
The next folder was labeled "Monika." I opened it with fingers that had gone numb.
Monika Volkov. Female, 26, Eastern European. Acquired through Mercy Logistics, the transport company Nathan had said was "too well-protected" to target. She'd been assigned to a buyer in Miami, but something had gone wrong—the conditioning hadn't held, the compliance had fractured, and Monika had started remembering. Started fighting. Started trying to escape.
The final entry in her file was dated eighteen months ago:Asset terminated. Retrieval unsuccessful. Recommend file closure.
Terminated. A clean word for what had almost certainly been a very messy death.
I closed the laptop and sat in the dark, my hands pressed flat against my thighs, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps. The apartment was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant wail of a siren somewhere in the city. Nathan was still asleep. He had no idea that I knew. No idea that his careful construction was crumbling around him.
I made it to the bathroom before the vomit came.
I knelt on the cold tile—Gabriel's position, the posture of submission I'd never fully escaped—and emptied my stomach into the toilet. The heaves were silent, suppressed by years of training that had taught me to suffer without sound. Tears streamed down my face. My throat burned with bile. And through it all, I kept thinking:He knew. He knew what Gabriel was doing to me, and he didn't stop it. He waited. He let me break so he could be the one to put me back together.
When the heaving stopped, I rinsed my mouth at the sink and stared at my reflection. The woman in the mirror was pale, hollow-eyed, her skin blotched from crying. She looked like someone who'd just discovered that her entire life was a lie. She looked like someone who'd been unmade.
She looked like prey.
No,I thought, gripping the edges of the sink.Not prey. Not anymore. Never again.
I washed my face with cold water. I reapplied my makeup with the steady hands of someone who'd learned to perform normalcy in the face of horror. By the time I crawled back into bed beside Nathan, my expression was calm, my breathing was even, and the woman in the mirror had been replaced by the mask I'd been wearing for months.
The performance would continue. But now, at last, I understood what I was performing for.
