“You don’t think I made a mistake in pushing you so far so soon?”
“If you hadn’t, would we be here? All I’m saying is give her a chance. Besides, you won’t always be there to save her. Learning to stand on your own is a part of one’s growth.”
Instead of responding, Kit glanced down at his watch. Fifteen minutes had already passed since she was escorted in. If she were to follow his instructions to the letter, she would be coming out within the next five.
But there was something that wasn’t settling well with him—and his instincts had never been wrong before.
Except, Aidra was right.
He couldn’t step in unless absolutely necessary—not if Luna expected to make it out alive. He could never guarantee, no matter how he wanted to, that he would be there to help her out of a bind.
But after these five minutes wound down, he was going in whether Aidra liked it or not. For this first assignment, he would make an exception.
Each one of those minutes passed with agonizing slowness, and by the time the fourth arrived without any sign of Luna, he set his untouched drink on the bar and started across the floor.
“You have two minutes, Nix,” Aidra called after him, the familiar warning ringing in his head.
It was a lesson he had drilled into many heads during his bout at the firm. The deviation of two minutes from the scheduled extraction time was the longest he would permit for others. And should they not make it out in time, then they were burned and left to get out on their own.
If he and Luna weren't back in the required time, Aidra was out the door—though after a distraction, Kit was sure.
For now …
Kit, very carefully, snuck up behind one of the guards that had trailed Luna and Lawrence to the empty hallway. When he was sure no one else was standing watch, he struck, snapping the man’s neck with one brutal twist of his hands.
With his phone, he opened a covert app on his home screen, sifting through other contacts before he got to the one he needed. In seconds, a red icon glowed on his screen before it grew smaller as it pinpointed Luna’s location.
The collar he had given her wasn’t just for him, but there was also a tracking chip embedded in the metal.
It didn’t take more than thirty seconds before he was in the private study, his gun now in hand as he followed the sniffles he heard coming from the other side of the room.
What he found as he stepped into the hidden room …
For years he had seen the worst life had to offer. The blood of children, lives lost in the quest for power and fame, but it was nothing compared to the sight of Luna on her knees, cradling the broken, bruised body of a woman he could only guess was the girl she often talked about.
There was blood everywhere, her skin and dress saturated in it. The metallic odor assaulted his nose even as he scanned her for the source of it all.
But besides a number of shallow cuts and newly forming bruises, there was nothing about her appearance that spoke of this much bloodshed.
At least until he got to the pathetic excuse of a man that was left of Lawrence Kendall. His eyes remained wide and unblinking, fixed on a distant spot on the wall—or had it been Luna that was his final sight?
She had made good use of the knives with the sheer number of stab wounds Kit could make out along the man's front. And one curious glance down at his open fly had him quickly looking away—she’d castrated him.
“Luna—”
She flinched, like her own name was hard to hear, but she didn’t release the hold she had on the girl, nor did she turn to look at him. “I should have cut her down sooner.”
Kit noticed then, the hooks in the girl’s back, and one glance up showed him exactly what Luna had meant.
But even at his vantage point, he could see that the girl was no longer breathing—a blessing, undoubtedly. She was sickly thin, with bruises, and her hair shorn. This girl had suffered, and at the hands of someone like Lawrence, it hadn’t ended anytime soon.
“Luna,” Kit called again, not bothering to look at his watch—it was well beyond time to go.
Never mind that the girl, though he knew she was close to her, wasn’t part of the job.
“Fifteen seconds,” she responded back, oddly.
“I don’t—”
“Now twelve,” she said, “before we’re meant to be at the door. I didn’t forget this was still an assignment.”
The way she said that, such hurt in her voice made him wish he could spare her this pain. More than anything, he wished he could take it from her.
After a shaky breath, she looked at him with watery eyes, “Do we have to leave her here?”
He knew what she wanted him to say, she didn’t bother trying to hide that. And the almost clinical side of him knew that leaving her there would be a better course of action, but the other side that was affected by her thought she had suffered enough for one day.
But it wasn’t what he felt for her personally that mattered. “We need to go.”
“We could take her with us, and I—”