I ran to the door and twisted the flimsy lock. It wouldn’t keep out a determined child, let alone trained operatives. I dragged the chair Reaper had vacated and wedged it under the doorknob, knowing it was equally useless but needing to do anything to create the illusion of security.
My hands trembled so badly I had to press them against my thighs. I closed my eyes and forced myself to take deep breaths, counting each one like my therapist had taught me after Xavier disappeared.
He’ll come back. He has to come back. Everything he needs is here.
But what if he doesn’t? What ifwhatever broke in his mind sent him straight to his handler? What if Brock is already on his way?
Such thoughts raced through my mind, each more terrifying than the last, until breathing became a nearly impossible task. Tears welled in my eyes, but I quickly blinked them away. I knew what I had to do—Ineededto keep myself busy somehow. Reaper needed a moment to process what he had just seen, but I couldn’t give myself that luxury.
“Stop it,” I whispered to myself. “Panic helps no one. Xavier needs you to be focused.”
I picked up my blouse from the floor where it had fallen, still slightly damp but warming from the tropical heat. Escape routes began pounding inside my head. I could call for help—but who? The local police were as likely to be corrupt as helpful. Any call could be traced. My brother was missing. My editor thought I was still working on a story about environmental activism. And my informant had been clear that his hands were tied for the moment.
Which left one option: wait and make the most of whatever time I had.
I returned to the table and pulled the laptop closer. The screen had gone to sleep, a dark mirror reflecting my worried face. I woke it up with a tap and the gruesome images from the USB drive reappeared.
If Reaper didn’t come back—and part of me hoped he wouldn’t for a little while, for his sake—I needed to learn everything I could. Something on this drive might help me find my brother. Something might help me negotiate mysurvival when they eventually found me. And understand the man who’d just walked out that door—a man who, against all reason, I was starting to care about.
I opened another folder, forcing myself to focus despite the fear gnawing at my edges. My brother was somewhere in this web of horror. Reaper was both a victim and a threat. This USB drive was the only way I could understand either of them.
The files blurred before my eyes, clinical terminology and redacted sections swimming in my vision. I blinked hard against the tears threatening to form and began to read. I wouldn’t cry. Crying was yet another luxury for people who weren’t being hunted. For people whose brothers weren’t missing. For people who hadn’t just watched a man’s humanity being systematically erased.
I couldn’t afford to be one of those people.
Chapter 9
Reaper
JD-2741. Reaper. And before that… nothing. A void where memories should be. Except now the void had edges, fracturing like ice in a spring thaw. And beneath that ice—a man I didn’t recognize but whose rage felt intimately familiar.
Mission parameters. Focus on mission parameters.
But for the first time in my memory, the familiar mental checklist yielded nothing but static. I uncurled my fist, revealing the red poker chip embedded so deeply in my palm it had drawn blood. When had I taken it from my pocket? Who had given it to me? What did it mean?
More importantly—what would remain of me without the programming so thoroughly inserted into every part of my persona?
I slipped the chip back into my pocket. My body went rigid. Muscles locked as if resisting the question itself. The programming—designed, enforced, and burned into me through cycles of agony, blood, and the echoes of distant screaming—had once been my structure, even without me knowing it. My logic. My comfort. It was the only framework I had ever operated within. The only directive I had trusted.
I had always reached for it withouthesitation. It had given me a clear objective. A role. A purpose. And now… that structure had fractured. And with it, so did the sense of what—or who—I had been.
My thoughts drifted—off pattern, unstable. I attempted to force a recollection. I searched for memory fragments, anything that existed before they took me. Before they rewrote me, remade me, and removed everything that made me human.
But nothing surfaced. Only pain.
The act of reaching backward in time was met with immediate resistance—a spike of agony behind my eyes, like an old failsafe trying to prevent access. That, too, had been part of the design. And it still worked. Too well.
I paused.
Once, I would have defaulted to speed. A fast solution. Direct action. Input, response, result. That was my process. That was how I was made.
But maybe… this wasn’t a problem to be solved with speed. Maybe this required something I wasn’t built for. Patience. Adaptation. Finesse.
Time.
And that was unfamiliar territory.
I walked with a sigh. One foot in front of the other. Simple mechanical function.
