"Dammit," I thought.
The thought came without heat, without urgency.
I didn't move toward the stairs.
I sat.
The chair by the workbench complained under my weight, one leg shorter than the others.
The basement light swayed above me, the chain groaning in the draft, throwing long shadows across the hooks.
The smell of blood was so heavy it felt wet in my lungs.
I rested the knife on my thigh.
Not because I planned to use it, but because putting it down seemed like agreeing to something I didn't understand.
I wasn't here to kill everyone. I wasn't… whatever kind of person that was. Not a butler with gloves and a ledger of names to erase. Not a shadow sent to tidy the loose ends.I was just someone who'd eaten the wrong soup and found the wrong room.
I looked at the paper in my pocket, the one with the name.
If they came for me, they'd take it.
If they came for him, they'd still take it.
I unfolded it one last time, letting my eyes rest on the word.
The paper was dry enough to tear with my teeth. The grit of it stuck to my tongue. I chewed until it was soft, until it dissolved into something I could swallow. It went down rough, scraping the back of my throat.
The tag I still had in my other pocket: cold, sharp-edged from the chain. That I slid into my boot, pressing it flat against my ankle bone. The leather held it close, the way it might hold a blade.
Above me, the floor creaked again.
Voices now.
More than one.
One laughed: short, humorless.
A door slammed.
Boots crossed the floor with the rhythm of people who knew they belonged here.
I stayed still.
Let them come.
The first boot hit the top step, and then the sound changed: sharper, faster, more deliberate.
Shouts followed, not the rough bark of street threats but the clipped, layered commands of people trained to be obeyed.
"On the ground!"
"Hands where I can see!"
The basement door slammed fully open, flooding the stairs with a harder light. Shadows broke into pieces as figures descended, black-clad, masked, rifles bristling with mounted flashlights.
For one slow breath, their lights found the table.
The body.
The hooks.
Then they found me.
"Don't move."
I didn't.
The boots came fast now, two men at my shoulders, one taking the knife from my thigh, the other tugging my wrist into cold steel cuffs.
"Target eliminate," someone said, not about me, about him. The man upstairs.
The one who wouldn't be coming down again.
I caught fragments as they talked: suspect in multiple disappearances… connection to black-market organs… under observation for months.
It wasn't me they'd come for.
I was just another object in the basement.
A thing they would remove, catalogue, and decide later whether to keep or discard.
***
One hour later
The room they put me in was too clean in some places and too dirty in others.
The chair was metal, legs uneven, making the whole thing tremble if I shifted. My wrists were free, but I let my hands rest in my lap like I still wore the cuffs.
The air tasted faintly of boiled water and soap that had stopped working years ago.
Somewhere beyond the thin walls, voices murmured, the calm, even rhythm of people who believed they were in control.
Doors opened and closed at intervals.
A floorboard creaked under heavier boots than the rest.
They hadn't asked me anything yet.
That was the part that worked under my skin.
Silence wasn't forgetfulness.
Silence was a decision.
I leaned back and let my eyes close for a moment, my heel pressing into the inside of my boot.
The tag's cold shape was still there, biting lightly against bone.
The paper was gone from my pocket because I'd already swallowed it. And I could still feel the faint rasp it had left in my throat.
They hadn't taken everything.
The door opened.
A man stepped in — tall, shoulders filling the frame, dressed in the kind of plain dark clothes that were heavy with purpose.
No mask now.
His face was angular without being sharp, the kind you could pass in a crowd and forget, if not for the way his eyes stayed fixed on me like I'd done something I hadn't yet realized.
"You're not our target," he said. Not soft, not kind — just stating a fact.
I didn't answer.
"You were in the wrong place."
Still no reaction.
He stepped closer, stopping just short of the table's shadow.
"We pulled you out because you were in the middle of an operation. That man ... Argo was flagged a long time ago. We were closing in."
He paused. "You're lucky."
Lucky.
I thought about the hooks, the soup. the cloudy iris drifting in the spoon.
If this was luck, I wanted to know what they called the opposite.
He pulled the other chair from the corner and sat.
A file appeared on the table: thick, corners bent, paper worn from being touched too often. He set his hand on it without opening it, as if the weight alone might press answers out of me.
"What's your name?"
"I don't know."
A flicker of something passed through his eyes: not surprise, not yet... but the faint tightening of someone filing a detail away.
"How did you get to Zone Two?"
"I don't know."
He leaned back, fingers tapping once against the folder. The sound was quiet, but the room seemed to hold it.
"Do you have any connection to Argo?"
"I don't know."
His head tilted slightly, the way a dog might when hearing an unfamiliar sound. "You were in his basement."
"I don't know."
The questions kept coming, slow and measured. Each one shaped like a blade testing for weak spots.
"Who sent you?"
"I don't know."
"Were you paid to be there?"
"I don't know."
The repetition became its own shield. Each answer sliding into place before I had time to think.
It wasn't even a lie.
The truth was a hollow place inside me, the kind where answers should have been.
Finally, he leaned forward, elbows on the table, voice lower. "You expect me to believe you remember nothing?"
"Yes."
It was the first word that wasn't I don't know.
For a moment, the silence between us had weight.
I could hear the hum of the bulb, the faint murmur beyond the walls.
He stood, pushing the chair back without hurry. The file stayed on the table, unopened.
"We'll see how long that lasts," he said, and left.
The door shut with the quiet finality of something locking from the outside.
The door cracked open before he could push further.
A different set of boots stepped inside: lighter, quicker, and a man in a slate-gray jacket leaned toward him, murmuring something I couldn't quite catch. Only the last word reached me.
"Poisoned."
The one questioning me didn't move right away.
His gaze stayed locked on mine, steady and unreadable, while the other man slipped out and the door clicked shut again.
"Poisoned." he repeated, not as a question, but as if he were testing the word against the shape of me.
His eyes traced my face, my hands.
Then he said, quietly but with an edge that made it feel like an order:
"Start at the beginning."
His voice was calm, but there was no softness "I'm Commander Kael. And whether you like it or not, you're now in my jurisdiction."
My mouth stayed shut.
I didn't speak.
Kael steepled his fingers. "You're in a dangerous position. Walking back into Zone Two isn't an option. The streets will eat you alive, and the people you've crossed will make sure of it." A pause. "There's one alternative."
I didn't move.
He spoke the words like they were an ordinary suggestion, but the air in the room seemed to tighten around them.
"The Hunter Academy. A training program. Government oversight. Housing, meals, protection and in return, you learn skills that will keep you alive."
I understood what he was really saying.
Not protection. Surveillance.
Not housing. Containment.
His gaze didn't waver. "Do you want in?"
Kael POV
The first thing I noticed when we breached the basement wasn't the blood.It was her eyes.
Brown.
Wide open, but not panicked.
Tracking, not darting.Someone still running calculations.
She slouched into the crooked chair, its uneven leg rocking faintly under her weight. The knife lay across her thigh like it had wandered there by accident, the tip pointing off harmlessly, but the ease of it, the way her fingers curved just close enough to grip, made it clear it was no accident at all.
Her boots were worn down to the midsole.
Urban wear.
The left one had a double knot, the right lace frayed to near breakage.
Improvised maintenance.
Her clothes didn't match the scene.
No spray up the sleeves, just flecks on the collar.
That means close range, single strike, straight to a kill point.
That kind of detail usually tells me more about a person than anything they say.
I've seen soldiers with less economy of motion.
The air in that basement was heavy enough to choke, but she sat in it without gagging, without shifting her breathing.
She wouldn't do that unless she'd been around this kind of smell before.
My team swept the room, cleared it.
She didn't resist when my men moved in. She didn't resist when we took the knife from her. She just let herself be cuffed like she'd already decided that was the only way she'd be leaving.
Argo was supposed to be upstairs when we came in.
Alive.
Three months of tracking him.
The black-market organ runs, disappearances, the kind of quiet work that never makes the news.
Now he was cooling on the floor, eyes half open.
Argo was gone, and all I had was her.
Me and my team moved her out without a word.Basement, hallway, van.
She didn't ask where we were taking her, didn't look for an opening to run.
Not because she was scared.
Because she was waiting.
I've seen the difference: panic moves quick, jittery, like a cornered animal.
She moved like a fox that had already wound itself down to the next strike.
The ride back to the facility was quiet except for the hum of the engine and the faint rattle from her boots tapping the floor.
She kept her gaze on the darkened window, but her reflection was angled so she could still watch me in the corner of her eye.
Observation.
Constant.
When we reached holding, she stepped out on her own.
No hesitation, no stalling.
Inside, I had them put her in Room 1: isolated, with a camera in the ceiling corner and table with two chairs.
I went to review the body cam footage.
She sat in the metal chair like she'd been there before, knees apart, shoulders low, head level.
Not defensive.
Not aggressive.
Just neutral.
The kind of stillness that came from choice, not fear.
Up close, I could read her better.
Younger than I'd first thought, though not untouched by whatever she'd lived through. Her hair was dark, a little greasy, the kind of unkempt that comes from three days without a shower, not months on the street.
Her skin was pale, no signs of weather damage.
She'd been indoors recently.
Her jacket was worn, the shirt plain. A pocket had been sewn back together badly, not for looks but to stop something from falling out.
The boots were street boots, scuffed, the right one laced tighter than the left. Something was hidden inside: flat, solid.
No obvious scars except for the thin white line under her jaw.
A wound.
Old.
Healed clean.
Someone had patched her up properly back then, which meant she hadn't always been disposable.
She didn't look like a killer or assassin.
She looked like someone who could sit next to you on a bus and leave you thinking you'd never seen her before.
That was what made her dangerous.
Five minutes later I finally stepped into the room.
Her gaze tracked me from the second the door opened, but her body stayed still, balanced perfectly on the uneven chair.
I crossed the space between us slowly, boots scuffing the floor just enough to make the sound carry.
The light in here was the wrong yellow, flattening her features into muted planes. It made her eyes seem darker, deeper. Unreadable.
She didn't smell like fear.
People think that's a metaphor, but it isn't. There's a chemical tang when someone's terrified, something that hangs just under the scent of sweat.
She didn't have it.
She had something sharper.
Cleaner.
Like metal pulled from a sheath.
I stopped just outside the reach of the table's shadow.
The air between us was taut...
Not because she was tense, but because she wasn't.
She'd built a kind of stillness that made me want to move first, just to prove I could.
"You're not our target," I told her.
Nothing.
Not a blink.
"You were in the wrong place."
Her eyes didn't change, but there was a flicker somewhere else, not in her face, but in the way she shifted her heel just slightly against the floor.
Right boot.
Definitely hiding something.
I closed the distance, dragged the empty chair from the corner before I sat down. Dropped the file between us.
Thick, battered, the weight of three months of surveillance and wasted planning.
"We pulled you out because you were in the middle of an operation. That man… Argo was flagged a long time ago. We were closing in."
Still no change in her expression.
"You're lucky."
Her eyes stayed on me, but there was something behind them now.
Not disbelief, not fear, but the quiet calculation of someone deciding whether luck was an insult.
I leaned in, elbows on the table, folding my fingers under my chin. "What's your name?"
"I don't know."
Not the voice of someone confused, the voice of someone who'd decided that was the answer.
"How did you get to Zone Two?"
"I don't know,"
After the questions and sixth "I don't know," I stopped.
If she was lying, she was good at it.
If she was telling the truth, she was terrifying.
Finally, I leaned forward, lowering my voice. "You expect me to believe you remember nothing?"
"Yes."
The first break in the pattern. A deliberate change.
Which told me one thing.
She was choosing which answers to give me, even if they were all lies.
For a moment, the only sound was the hum of the bulb. I could feel her watching me just as intently as I was watching her.
I stood, leaving the file unopened."We'll see how long that lasts."
The door open behind me.
A moment later, intel stepped in slate-gray jacket, quick stride. He leaned close, murmured something I barely caught. Only the last word reached me."Poisoned."
And then my man left the room.
I looked back at her. She was still sitting exactly as before, like she hadn't moved a muscle.
"Poisoned," I repeated, testing the word against the shape of her.
Low dose.
It would explain the memory gaps.
Maybe.
I stepped back into the room."Start at the beginning," I said, my voice calm but edged.
"I'm Commander Kael. And whether you like it or not, you're now in my jurisdiction."
She said nothing.
"You're in a dangerous position," I continued. "Walking back into Zone Two isn't an option. The streets will eat you alive, and the people you've crossed will make sure of it," apause. "There's one alternative."
She didn't move.
"The Hunter Academy. Training, government oversight, housing, protection. In return, you learn the skills to stay alive."
I didn't need to tell her the other meaning.
Protection meant surveillance.
Housing meant containment.
My gaze didn't waver."Do you want in?"
The question hung in the stale air, heavier than any threat I could have made.
It wasn't an invitation.
It was a line in the sand.
And we both knew, once she stepped over it, there'd be no going back.