Page 77 of Victorious

“Thank you,” he said as Helena lowered the gun. “Now please, remove these restraints.”

She complied, and Gabriel sat up, dizziness briefly washing over him again. He wanted to lie down. To sleep. Instead, he tugged the IV out of his hand, and knelt beside the doctor’s body. The bullet had gone in above one brow and taken out the back of his head. But as Gabriel dragged him back, fingers aching with cold, the wounds closed.

Pressure bloomed behind his eyes, but the room held steady as Andrews sat up.

“What did you give me?” demanded Gabriel.

The doctor blinked. “Lidocaine, magnesium sulphate, and diazepam.”

That explained the dizziness, and why the pain in his head wasn’t gone so much as barricaded, shut behind a sturdy door. But he could feel it knocking. He rubbed his temples and retrieved his glasses from the table by the bed.

“Give me something I can take myself,” he instructed.

Andrews rose obediently, and crossed to a cabinet on the wall, retrieving a bottle of naproxen. Gabriel took it, shaking two pills into his palm as he instructed the doctor to clean up the blood and carry on, before turning to Helena.

“How many guards still need to be converted?”

“Including the six in the canteen,” she said. “Thirteen.”

Gabriel sighed, the headache a dull but constant beat.

But as he often told his patients, change was rarely comfortable.

He tipped the pills into his mouth, and swallowed dry, knowing the sooner it was done, the sooner his real work could begin.

IIINOW. THEN.MEANWHILE, AT THE MERIT METRO GYM …

AGENT Rios didn’t like to run.

She found the action grueling and had never experienced what others called a runner’s high, or anything that could even be considered a flow. But it didn’t change the fact that every time she finished a mission, and had to return to EON itself, the first thing she did on leaving was drive to Merit’s largest gym, and spend an hour on the indoor track, grudgingly banging out miles with nothing but the sound of her shoes on the rubber.

Rios didn’t like to run, but she needed to—to burn off the restless energy that built up from hours of hiding in plain sight, the tension that followed her through the sterile white building.

Every moment she was there, she had to fight the primal urge to flee, had to remind herself that she wasn’t being chased. Still, the pressure built. It had to go somewhere.

As the laps fell away beneath her shoes, her thoughts turned, the way they often did, to Stell. And then, to Victor Vale. The only thing that frustrated her more than her inability to catch him was the director’s waning interest.

Helena Roy herself had assigned Rios the task, but as the months went by and mission after mission failed, the director began moving Rios and her team to other targets.

As if Stell’s killer wasn’t still out there. Mocking her. Mocking EON.

In fact, she’d gone to EON that day to ask for more resources. But from the moment she set foot inside, everything felt weird.

One of the wings, the one with the canteen, had been locked down, though no one could tell her why.

She’d scheduled a meeting with Director Roy, but when she showed up, no one was there.

She’d heard whispers that the therapist, Dr. Gray, had ended up in the medical bay. But an hour later, she saw him moving down the hall, like nothing was wrong.

And then, there’d been the moment in the locker room with Jollis and Kline.

Two guards whose voices she usually did her best to block out. Only today, she didn’t need to. They’d been standing side by side in perfect silence.

“Fucking EOs,” she’d said, a stale attempt at conversation, but Kline always took the bait. Only this time, he didn’t. He just looked at her flatly. It reminded of her that phrase—when the lights are on, but no one is home.

Alone, each incident was strange.

Together they added up to—well, she didn’t know. But it set off a warning buzz at the base of her skull.