Page 54 of Prey

NIKOLAI

Fourteen days. Three hundred thirty-six hours. Twenty thousand one hundred and sixty minutes since I woke up to find her gone.

I’ve torn Chicago apart looking for Jenna Reeves. Every safe house, every underground network, every fucking shadow she could have crawled into. Nothing. She’s vanished like she never existed, and it’s driving me insane in ways I didn’t know were possible.

The mark I’m tracking now is Michael Torres, a contract I committed to weeks before Jenna escaped. One of the names on my list, and he earned his place on it. For eleven years he ran intake at two of the eastern facilities, the man who looked at frightened children and decided which ones showed promise and which ones were surplus. Mid-thirties now, works IT for a logistics company, building a quiet civilian life on top of everything he signed off on. Should be simple. I’ve been watching him for three days, memorizing his patterns. Coffee shop at seven-fifteen, same parking spot, same route to work. Textbook predictable.

But my focus keeps fracturing. Instead of studying Torres’s security habits, I’m scanning every woman who passes. Darkhair catches my eye. A particular walk. The set of shoulders that could be hers.

Focus, Nikolai.

Torres emerges from the Starbucks right on schedule, checking his phone while he walks. I shadow him from across the street, maintaining the forty-meter distance that’s become second nature. He turns down the alley that leads to his building’s employee entrance—the choke point I identified yesterday.

This should be routine. The same thing I’ve done to every name on my lists before him: approach from behind, syringe to the neck, drag him to the van Damon’s idling just down the alleyway. He’ll wake up somewhere he can’t talk his way out of, and he’ll answer for the children he helped move before he answers for anything else. Clean, efficient, well-earned.

But when I move, my timing’s off. Torres hears my footstep on the wet pavement and spins around just as I’m reaching for the sedative.

“What the?—”

I adapt, grabbing him by the throat instead of going for the injection site. His eyes go wide with terror as I slam him against the brick wall, but he’s fighting now, thrashing and trying to scream. Amateur hour bullshit that would have gotten me killed during training.

“Please, I have kids, I?—”

The syringe finds his neck on the second try. He goes limp in my arms, but the whole encounter took twenty seconds too long and made enough noise to wake the dead. Sloppy. Dangerous. Unacceptable.

I drag Torres to the van, where Damon’s waiting with the engine running and a raised eyebrow.

“Everything alright? You look a little?—”

“Drive.”

He doesn’t push, but I catch him watching me in the rearview mirror. Damon’s good at reading people. Right now, he’s reading someone who’s coming apart at the seams.

The Wisconsin facility processes Torres without incident. Dr.Morrison signs the intake forms, and another name gets crossed off another list. The whole operation takes four hours round trip, during which I say maybe ten words total.

By the time we get back to Chicago, it’s past midnight. I should go home, crash for a few hours, and start planning the next acquisition on the list. Instead, I tell Damon to drive to Infinity.

The club’s fifth floor is alive with activity when I arrive. Ezra’s hunched over three laptops at once, probability matrices scrolling across multiple screens. Theon’s explaining something to Dominic while gesturing with a beaker full of clear liquid that definitely isn’t water.

“—synthesis pathway creates a delayed reaction, roughly six to eight hours depending on body weight. The beauty is it mimics natural cardiac arrest, so?—”

“Evening, ladies.” I drop into my usual chair, interrupting whatever chemical horror Theon’s describing.

Lucien looks up from his tablet. “How’d the Torres acquisition go?”

“Clean. He’s processed.” The lie comes easily. No point in advertising my deteriorating focus.

“Good, because we’ve got bigger fish to fry.” Ezra swivels his chair toward me, pulling up a new display. “Remember that financial investigator Marcus flagged two weeks ago? Jennifer Walsh from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Division?”

I nod, though I barely remember the briefing. Everything from the time Jenna escaped feels like it happened to someone else.

“She’s been busy. Very busy.” Charts and spreadsheets cascade across the screen. “She’s traced seventeen shell companies back to our operations. The thread’s thin, but it’s there. If she connects the dots?—”

“She becomes a problem,” Raphael finishes, settling into the chair beside me with a whiskey in hand. “The kind of problem that requires permanent solutions.”

Theon sets down his beaker carefully, as if handling liquid death. “I could arrange something. Heart attack, stroke, aneurysm—take your pick. Natural causes are my specialty.”

“Too obvious.” Dominic’s voice carries that flat affect he gets when he’s thinking three moves ahead. “Treasury investigator dies of mysterious natural causes right when she’s closing in on financial crimes? That screams assassination.”