No thought. No hesitation. Pure animal reflex.
I drove my shoulder into Hector's ribs hard enough to crack bone. His rifle discharged wildly as we crashed against the rooftop HVAC unit, rusted metal edges tearing into my shoulder blade while dawn-heated gravel scraped my palms raw. The scope shattered against his face, opening his cheek to the bone. Blood sprayed across my vision, hot and metallic.
Hector recovered, training overriding pain. His knee found my sternum, driving out air. His elbow connected with my temple, stars exploding behind my eyelids.
But I wasn't fighting with technique. I was fighting with twenty-six years of compressed rage.
I caught his follow-up strike, twisted his wrist past breaking. The wet snap of bone echoed. A grunt. No scream. Hector never screamed. I drove my forehead into his nose, cartilage disintegrating under impact. My teeth found his ear, ripping through flesh.
His fist pounded my kidney. Once. Twice. Pain registered distantly, irrelevantly. He drove stiffened fingers toward my throat in a killing blow. I caught his hand, bent his fingers back until tendons popped like rubber bands.
He twisted, experience compensating for injury, and suddenly I was underneath, his weight crushing, forearm pressing my windpipe. Blood from his ruined face dripped onto mine. He bared his teeth.
"I made you," he snarled through blood-stained teeth. "I can unmake you."
Oxygen faded. Vision tunneled. Weight unbearable.
Then my fingers found the dagger in my belt. The blade punched between ribs, tissue parting as easily as water. I twisted sharply, angling up toward the heart exactly as Jane drilled into me. Hector's body locked rigid, eyes ballooning as steel found home.
No clever words. No final exchange. Just the wet, sucking sound as I twisted deeper. Blood cascaded over my knuckles, hot and copper-slick. I drove harder, tissue tearing, organs rupturing. His eyes locked with mine full of shock, rage, something almost like pride as I worked the knife deeper.
I shoved him off, rolled on top, drove the knife in again. And again. Each strike precise despite the frenzy. Each one finding vital points. Liver, kidney, lung. My training was so deeply ingrained I couldn't missif I tried.
His body convulsed beneath me. Blood bubbled from his mouth, from the six, no, seven wounds I'd opened. His hands stopped fighting, clutching reflexively at nothing.
I straddled his chest, watching light fade from his eyes. No satisfaction. No regret. Just absolute certainty of a predator who'd eliminated a threat.
When it was over, I sat covered in blood. My broken nose leaked steadily. My ribs screamed where he'd connected, and a big slash across them burned and bled. But I registered nothing except my steady heartbeat and warm stickiness drying tacky on my skin.
Then it hit me.
Holy fuck. Holy. Fucking. Fuck.
I'd just killed Hector. Prometheus's right hand. My creator.
A violent tremor ripped through my body, starting at my fingertips and spreading upward like an electrical surge. My vision blurred. Lungs seized. What the fuck had I just done? What the actual fuck?
This shouldn't have been possible. Twenty-six years of conditioning, of brutal training designed specifically to prevent this exact scenario. Ferrymen didn't turn on their superiors. Ever. The pain response alone should have stopped me. The implanted triggers, the psychological barriers.
I scrambled away from the body, my back hitting the HVAC unit. Breathing came in ragged gasps as I stared at my bloody hands. They didn't feel like my hands anymore. It felt like I was piloting a body that had suddenly gone rogue.
The Pantheon had a name for this: cascade failure. When an asset's programming collapsed entirely. I'd seen it happen once, in Madrid. They'd put that agent down like a rabid dog.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, expecting the headache to start. The blinding pain that always came when I evenconsidered defiance. The pain that had dropped me to my knees in Taipei when I'd hesitated on a contract.
But nothing came. Just silence and the weight of what I'd done.
Vincent. This was about Vincent.
My breathing slowed. The shaking in my hands subsided. Somehow, impossibly, I'd broken through decades of conditioning for a man I barely knew.
The feral thing that had taken over receded slowly, leaving me staring at my handiwork. The rifle had discharged during our struggle, shot going wide, shattering a window two floors below Vincent's apartment. That would draw attention soon.
I wiped prints from my rifle, leaving it behind. Hector's death would buy me hours at most before Prometheus realized something was wrong. I needed to move fast.
Across the street, Vincent's silhouette appeared at his window, likely drawn by gunshot. He was peering out cautiously, phone in hand. Probably calling 9-1-1.
Fuck.
