Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 105709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 352(@300wpm)
My fingers clamp around my mug. “What the fuck.”
“Exactly.” She tips the bottle again, splashing more rum into her glass, then into mine. Breakfast of champs. “They called us Agents. Weapons. Some were hitmen. Some were spies. Honeytraps.” Her eyes flick to me. “That’s what I was supposed to be.”
The word sits wrong on the table between us. Honeytrap. Sounds sweet. I already know it’s not.
“They take kids no one’s gonna go looking for,” she goes on. “Runaways. Orphans. Street kids. Sometimes they just… buy them. Dump us in the mountains and tell us we’re lucky to have a purpose. Train us till we bleed. Till we forget normal exists.”
“And Hella?” I ask, even though I’m not sure I want to.
She huffs a sound that’s not quite a laugh. “He was already there when I got brought in. Sixteen. I was fifteen. He’d been Vanguard’s little monster for about two years by then. Agent class. Kurr’s favourite experiment—the boy that didn’t break.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” I mutter into my cup, wincing.
“It should.” Her gaze sharpens. “Because the shit they did to him should’ve shattered him. Instead, he went quiet. Colder. You look at the others, you see madness. You looked at Hella back then?” She shakes her head. “You saw nothing. Just this… blank space that followed orders and broke bones.”
I swallow, my tongue thick. Hella quiet is already bad enough. I try to picture him without the jokes, without the smirk, without the constant grinding against every rule in the room.
It’s fucking terrifying.
“They divided us,” she continues. “Agents went with Commanders—combat, weapons, infiltrations. Honeytraps went through the other side. Charm school with guns and chokeholds. We learned how to smile, how to cry at the right time, how to make a mark think they’re the hero while we lace them in poison and secrets. First Commander Nines would rotate us through, see what we were good at. Knives. Sex. Intel. Everyone had a gift, apparently.”
Her mouth curls around the word like it tastes bad.
I’m gripping my glass so hard that the sweat from my palm squeaks against it. “And you?”
“I was supposed to be the girl men confessed to after they came,” she says flatly. “Stare, flirt, string them along, fuck them if the mission called for it, slit their throat, go home. Easy.” Her laugh cracks. “Except I was shit at it.”
I blink. “You?”
“Don’t sound so shocked.” Her smirk is brief. “Turns out, I could flirt okay. Touch okay. But when it came down to sealing the deal? I froze. Not with training dummies. With actual marks. Real men Kurr brought in, high-value. I’d hesitate. Feel bad. Think about their kids. Their wedding rings. Nines kept telling me to detach. Kurr kept watching me like I was a broken toy he needed to fix or throw out.”
My stomach knots. “So what happens to broken toys?”
Her jaw tightens. “You get reassigned. Best case, you end up in internal service. Worst case…” She shrugs, but the movement is stiff. “You get put on the market.”
I stare. “The… market.”
Her eyes meet mine, steady. “Rich men love virgins, Melissa. Especially ones trained to obey, with government paperwork and loyalty protocols stamped in. Kurr had rules. One of them was that certain assets must remain untouched unless cleared. Virgins were investment stock. You don’t waste stock on low-level missions.”
A chill runs down my neck. “You’re saying—”
“I heard him,” she cuts in. “Talking to another commander. Saying if I couldn’t pull intel between my legs, he’d at least make back his money by auctioning off whatever was left of me. Some big shot out of Japan was already interested in a ‘mixed-blood asset.’” Her lips twist, mocking herself. “Half Japanese, half Māori. Sexy, obedient, still in the wrapper. Fucking bargain.”
My brain trips. “Jesus, Jada.”
“Jesus wasn’t in that mountain,” she says dryly. “Just Kurr.”
This rum is doing jack shit to help this conversation.
“So what did you do?” I ask.
She takes a breath, slow and controlled, then lets it leak out. “I did the only thing I could. If being a virgin was my price tag, I had to break it myself. Before Kurr could sell it.”
It hits like a slap. “You decided—you just—”
“Picked someone and got it over with?” she finishes for me, eyes dark. “Yeah.”
Pretty sure my heart is going to beat right out of my chest. “And you picked… him.”
“Hella.” His name comes out on a simple exhale. No drama. No apology. “Because by then, I’d watched him for months. I knew he didn’t take what he wasn’t ordered to. I knew he wasn’t interested in the girls thrown at him. Anything Kurr dangled, he walked right past. Fucking untouchable.”
“So you went straight to the ice cube,” I say slowly. “On purpose.”
She nods. “If I was going to lose something I never got to choose in the first place, I was at least going to pick the one person Kurr couldn’t turn into a full-blown performance. Hella didn’t pretend. He didn’t make promises. He didn’t call you pretty unless he needed to. He just got shit done. And,” she adds, looking me dead in the eye, “I figured if anyone could make it quick and clean, it would be him.”