brutal

Chapter 37

KAI
36 hours ago

A foreboding emotion gnawed at me as an agent guided me down the dim hallway lined with nothing but doors and armed men. Each room here housed notorious criminals that fought tooth and nail not to wind up here, destroying everything and everyone in order to escape me.

Except for one.

"It all happened so fast, honestly. Our unit was patrolling headquarters and boom, some random woman walks straight through the glass doors and kills five men right in front of us point-blank."

I glanced at him sideways as the agent spoke. Alex Gallen. Qing. One of Sarah's unit members that barely made it through trials and seemingly Verena's only friend outside our group. I didn't understand what she saw in him, but I guessed it was good for her to socialize.

But did it really have to be with this... prick?

"You must've been startled," I patronized in a flat tone.

"Pretty much." He laughed awkwardly. When he turned to me and saw my empty reaction, he immediately stopped and cleared his throat, "N-not really. Verena— one of your members, I'm sure you know— actually helped me step out of my shell a little."

"Did she?" Prick. Prick. Prick. Fucking prick. "I didn't know you two were close."

"Not really close, but we hang sometimes."

Please. Jesus Christ, I wanted to hang myself. How did this kid pass the trials again? I can't, for the life of me, remember. I was on the brink of turning around just to drag him by the collar of his stupid Gap shirt and throwing him out of the building.

But, lucky for him, we reached the end of the hall where two guards instead of one stood, both of them bowing their heads in respect upon seeing me. A bit old fashioned, but it was what they would have done to my father.

"How long has she been in there?" I asked while looking through the fogged window at the center of the met door.

Alex only registered that I was asking him a direct question a few seconds later. "Oh. She's been interrogating for about six hours now."

"Not Zira. The other one."
"Oh. Zira's alias is actually–"

Holy shit. He's managed to waste a week's worth of patience and tolerance in a matter of minutes. Not even the paparazzi or irrelevant Hollywood gossip outlets could do what he did.

I scoffed and pushed through the door by its handle, Alex stammering and indefinitely silenced as I entered and waited for the metal to slam behind me, leaving him on the other side. At that point, I would have entered any other cell just to get rid of him.

"Kai?"

Sarah (enough of the stupid 'Zira' name) stepped away from the apprehended tied and covered at the center of the room. Their arms were tied to the chair with leather straps the same way their legs and ankles were, and a black bag covered their face. By the stillness of their body, they were definitely passed out.

Or dead, but the blood on the floor was far from enough to indicate anything lethal, and I doubted Sarah's stupidity to kill an apprehended criminal under my authority.