Chapter 3

Chloe's POV

"I don't know," Linda said.

"Ten years," he said. "You worked with that woman for ten years. Don't tell me you don't know anything."

"I organized data. I ran experiments. I ordered supplies." Linda's voice was flat. "I'm not a scientist."

He looked at her for a moment without speaking, then gave a small nod to the man beside him.

The man walked over. No warning. He brought his foot down.

The crack of bone was sharp and clean — the kind of sound that carries in a small room. Linda made a noise deep in her throat, compressed to almost nothing. Her jaw locked. Her whole body slammed back against the chair, and then she dropped her head forward, hair falling across her face, shoulders shaking. She didn't scream.

I stared at the sole of that man's shoe and felt my fingers curl into fists behind my back. I kept my breathing even. I told myself to keep my breathing even.

Linda had worked beside my mother for ten years — had eaten lunch with her, had stayed late in the lab with her, had driven me home from school once when my mother couldn't get away. And right now she was sitting two feet in front of me with a broken leg, and there was nothing I could do about it, and I needed to not think about that.

"Say it again," the man in charge said, his tone unchanged. "Where's the formula?"

Linda lifted her head and looked at him through the curtain of her hair. "I don't know."

He nodded to the man again.

The other leg this time. Linda couldn't hold it — a short, choked sound tore out of her throat before she bit it back. Her wrists yanked against the zip ties, and the chair legs scraped across the floor in a sound that went straight through my teeth.

Something lurched in my chest. I recognized it and pressed it down hard, the way you press down on a wound to stop the bleeding — not because it doesn't hurt, but because the alternative is worse.

"Linda —" I started.

"Don't talk," the man in charge said, not bothering to turn around. "It's not your turn."

He crouched back down in front of her, tilting his head up to look at her face, his voice as level as a conversation. "We can keep going, you know that. Hands next, then arms. We're not in a hurry tonight."

Linda was breathing hard. Sweat had broken out across her forehead. But her eyes were still straight. She looked at him and said nothing.

I watched her hold that eye contact and felt something I didn't have a clean name for — not quite admiration, not quite grief. Something that sat between the two and didn't move.

He stood, let out a short breath through his nose — the mild exhale of someone mildly bored — and shook his head.

"Fine," he said. "Forget it."

Then he pulled the gun from his hip, pressed it to Linda's temple, and pulled the trigger.

The shot detonated inside that small room and left my ears ringing. Linda's body tipped sideways, the chair going with her, and hit the floor, and then there was nothing.

I didn't move. I didn't make a sound. I sat in that chair and felt the world go very quiet and very small, narrowing down to the patch of floor in front of me and the sound of my own pulse, steady and stupid and continuing like it didn't know it was supposed to stop.

My mother was already gone. Now Linda. The two people who had been closest to whatever my mother was trying to protect — and I was the last one left in this room who was still breathing, which meant I was either the least useful or the most.

I was pretty sure I knew which one.

The blood moved across the floor in a slow crawl and soaked into the hem of my jeans.

He holstered the gun, turned, and walked straight to me. He crouched down, level with my eyes.

"You," he said. "Where's the formula?"

I didn't say anything. He wasn't impatient about it — just crouched there, waiting. The lamp carved his face into deep shadow. Behind him, Linda lay on the floor without moving. The blood was still reaching me, warm and tacky against my ankle.

I pulled in a slow breath and opened my mouth —

Gunshots outside.

Not one. Multiple — short, tight, professional. Nothing like a street fight. More like a trained, coordinated clearing operation. The man in charge was on his feet instantly. The one at the door already had his gun up. The third moved to the window. The whole room went rigid in under a second.

The front door came off its frame.

The frame and a chunk of drywall blew inward together, debris hitting the floor, the lamp swinging hard on its cord, light and shadow thrashing across the walls. The dust hadn't settled before the figures came through — more than one, moving faster than I could track.

Gunfire inside the room. Short bursts. Clean. Precise in a way that was deeply unsettling.

The man at the door went down. The other one was already motionless before I'd worked out what happened. The man in charge stepped back until he hit the wall, hands going up, his phone dropping from his grip and shattering face-down on the floor.

Then a man walked in and stood in the light.

Tall. Dark clothing. Nothing on his face. His eyes moved across the room — passed over Linda where she'd fallen, passed over the two men on the floor — and landed on me for one second. Then moved to the man in charge. Those eyes were silver-gray, and in the dim yellow light from the lamp they looked cold. Like polished metal.

He looked at the man in charge for about three seconds.

Just three seconds.

Then the man beside him moved. Fast. Quiet. Professional in a way I didn't want to think too hard about. The man in charge went down without making much sound at all.

The room went still.

I sat in that chair with the zip ties still biting into my wrists. Linda was on the floor two meters to my left, and the blood had gone cold. My jeans were wet. The ringing in my ears hadn't stopped — low, constant, like an alarm stuck on a frequency no one else could hear.

He walked over.

He stopped in front of me and looked down. Up close, the silver-gray was colder than it had looked from across the room. Assessing. Confirming. Running some calculation I didn't have the result to.

He leaned down, reached behind me, and pinched the zip tie between two fingers.

One pull.

It snapped.

My wrists had been numb for too long. When the blood came back it felt like something burning under the skin. I looked down at my hands — two deep red grooves around the bones, skin scraped raw in a couple of places. Nothing serious.

I looked back up and met those silver-gray eyes.

His temperature was wrong — I hadn't expected that. When his fingers brushed my wrist pulling the tie loose, the contact was like touching polished metal left out in the cold. Ice.

"You're Dr. Harper's daughter," he said. Not a question.

I didn't get the chance to speak.

His hand was already at my throat.

Five fingers closed in, palm crushing down on my windpipe with a precision that left no room for accident. The cold hit me first. Not the cold of a draft or a surface but something deeper, structural, like the man himself ran at a temperature the rest of the world hadn't agreed to.

My toes left the ground.

"Where's the formula."

The formula.

Always the formula.