L*st and Death

“Ah, fuck. I could just kill you.”

The man burst into booming laughter, as if he’d just heard the funniest thing in the world. His face carried an unshakable certainty that Isaac could never harm him alone. After a long bout of wheezing mirth, he looked up at Isaac with a grin stretched wide across his face.

“Go on then—tell me in detail. I want to hear exactly how you’d do it. Compare the painful version to the less painful one for me.”

Isaac sensed the man was dragging things out on purpose, acting as though all he had to do was stall until backup arrived.

And then Isaac realized—damn it—he’d made a mistake. He’d forgotten to check whether the man was carrying any kind of tracking device. He gave a theatrical smile.

“Ah. I see now. I screwed up.”

His voice dropped.

“You’ve got a phone on you. Or at the very least, a GPS tracker.”

The man, about to scoff, caught himself, hiding his expression so as not to provoke Isaac into doing something rash.

“I don’t. Lost it when I went flying off the bike.”

“Really? Then I guess I worried for nothing. If I’d known, I could’ve switched off the signal jammer to save battery.”

“What?”

Isaac pulled the jammer from his coat pocket, making a show of checking the battery level before sliding it back inside. The ease on the man’s face began to vanish.

“That means your friends don’t know where you are. So you’d best give up any hope of someone coming for you.”

But the jammer only had about ninety minutes of battery left. Isaac hid his impatience, hoping the man would cooperate quickly, and drew his pistol from the holster on his thigh. As a precaution, he screwed on the suppressor while speaking in a warning tone.

“I’ll ask again. What orders were you given?”

He leveled the muzzle at the man’s knee. Whatever faint trace of cocky amusement had lingered in his eyes vanished in an instant.

The man now understood his life or death hinged entirely on Isaac’s whim. He answered with a defiant glare.

“I was ordered to capture three people alive.”

“Three?”

“Isaac Bazelli—and the two men who escaped the island with him.”

Isaac swallowed, the sound barely audible, and asked with cool detachment:

“The ones who escaped with me... who exactly?”

“Two Asians.”

“That’s all? Nothing else—”

Before Isaac could finish, the man sprang up like a released spring. The chain binding his ankles and wrists snapped, and he lunged forward with explosive force. Reflexively, Isaac fired—his bullet punching through the outer muscle of the man’s shin.

The man roared like a slaughtered beast but didn’t stop. Shifting his weight to his good leg, he grabbed for the gun even as he slammed into Isaac. The two grappled, rolling across the ground. Just before they stopped, Isaac hooked a leg to topple his opponent’s balance.

In an instant, their positions reversed—the man now beneath him. Isaac scrambled up and fired at his shoulder. The man twisted instinctively, but that movement proved fatal. A single, heavy shot tore through the space.

The man convulsed, froth and blood spilling from his mouth. Isaac watched, breathing hard. The bullet had hit his heart. Even an alpha with monstrous recovery couldn’t survive a stopped heart.

The location of the wound was bad for both of them—Isaac had wanted him alive. He kept his eyes on the man until the last breath left his body, then lowered the gun. There was much left he’d meant to hear, but that mouth would never open again.

Quickly, he searched the body for a tracker. Inside the lining of the man’s biker jacket, he found a phone. Unfortunately, it was locked. He snapped it in half without hesitation and tossed it into the sea below the seawall.

He disposed of the body in deeper water, stripping it and tying it to a stone so it would decay faster in the warm sea. Washing the blood from his hands in the surf, Isaac thought briefly of how tired he was of this life of killing and being killed. But there was no time for such sentiment.

Drawing a deep breath, he shut off the jammer and checked his phone. Siron’s location was still the safehouse. Though it bothered him that the pinpoint wasn’t on the parking lot, the margin of error meant he hadn’t strayed far.

Feeling both relief and a faint unease, Isaac mounted the bike. There was no more time to waste. He gunned it toward his next destination.

He reached a back alley in the city. If Hybris had spread surveillance to every place he might visit, then the office of the former MI6 agent who’d made his forged passport could be under watch as well. They weren’t friends, nor close allies, but as a link in his identity-laundering chain, it would be a natural target.

From outside the building, he saw through a small window that the office lights were off. Sighing without meaning to, he disengaged the safety on his pistol so he could fire instantly and slipped inside. He moved quickly and silently up the stairs, stopping before a paint-flaked metal door.

A faint trace of alpha pheromones seeped from the small gap where it sat slightly ajar. In that gap, a sliver of metal caught the dim light—it was a gun.

Without hesitation, he kicked the door hard.

Bang!

The door slammed inward with a dull thud. Whoever had been in its arc staggered back, losing balance. Isaac didn’t miss his chance and rushed in.

The man on the floor reached instinctively for his gun, but Isaac was faster. Two quick shots slammed into both shoulders—.22 caliber with a suppressor, the sound barely a dry click.

Howling in pain, the man lost all use of his arms. From there, it was quick work—Isaac bound his wrists and ankles. The man thrashed violently, but with his arm nerves damaged, he couldn’t mount a serious defense.

Yet he recovered from the shock with startling speed. His unfocused gaze sharpened, locking on Isaac with pure hatred.

“You disgusting traitor.”

“Traitor? You mean me?”

“Yes.”

Isaac drew a knife from his pocket.

“You’ve got the wrong idea. I’ve never sworn loyalty to anyone.”

The man let out a feeble laugh.

“You don’t understand—alphas are one giant organism.”

Isaac, about to sever his Achilles to finish disabling him, froze. The air seemed to thicken, and the man suddenly went still. Realizing what he was about to do, Isaac reached to gag him—but too late.

From deep in the man’s mouth came a muffled detonation. Heat burst out of him as his head snapped back, jaw yawning at an unnatural angle as blood and shredded flesh poured out. He’d bitten down on a hidden bomb to kill himself.

Suicide. There had been those who’d bitten their tongues in pain before, but never a pursuer who’d carried a means of killing himself in advance. Without fanatical belief that keeping secrets was more important than life, it was unthinkable.

Until now, Isaac’s pursuers had been mercenaries—men motivated by money, who put survival over ideals. But this one had not feared death. Frowning, Isaac looked down at his palm, irregular burn marks blooming across it, the sting of seared flesh scraping at his nerves. This wasn’t a simple pursuit. Something had changed.

He searched the man’s chest and found a phone—locked again. Quickly, he powered off the jammer. Unlike the man at the seawall, this one’s location needed to keep updating; otherwise, the loss of contact would immediately alert a watcher.

The moment the signal cleared, a message came through.

[Send passport photo.]

It flashed briefly at the top of the screen, just the notification preview. Isaac cursed under his breath and rummaged through the man’s chest rig, which was integrated with body armor. Unzipping it, he found a bundle of over a dozen passports—half of them belonging to Isaac, Siron, and Baekgyeong.

Luckily, the man hadn’t yet sent the data. Isaac turned his gaze to the office, his expression set and pale. Outwardly it looked fine; perhaps the pursuer had broken in while the owner was away, intending to steal his work and flee.

But the smell told a different story. A faint metallic tang brushed his nose—blurred, yet too strong to ignore, the violent scent lacing the air. He opened the door to the inner office.

The former MI6 agent sat bound to a chair, already dead. A gag hung in his mouth, dripping blood. The ropes at his wrists and ankles had bitten into flesh, leaving bruised welts. His fingers and toes were twisted at unnatural angles, signs of brutal torture before death.

A sharp headache clenched Isaac’s brain. His head felt overheated, the edges of his vision darkening. He shut his eyes tight, then opened them again. There was no time to mourn. Before Hybris realized something was wrong and came here, he had to destroy every shred of evidence.

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