Crowed (Team Zero #2) - Rina Kent Page 0,1

lies. Our touch with humanity. We became fucking robots destined to kill.

Not anymore.

Now, I have a fucking choice. I will take the withdrawal symptoms and the pain, but I won’t be a slave to Omega again.

I won’t die a fucking nobody like Diablo.

Only Team Zero remember him — when we’re not drugged out of our minds. And Team Zero are fucking nobodies under Omega’s influence.

I shake my head and shove the capsule and needle back in my pocket. My head pulses as if in protest. I grit my teeth. Just a few more minutes and it will pass.

Two am sharp. My gaze roams around the empty beach. Still no target. I’m about to scurry around the beach when a rustle sounds from behind me. My senses are less sharp than when on Omega. Add the throbbing in my head, and I’m a fucking cripple. It’s as if they knew that.

I don’t turn in time.

Pain slices straight into my shoulder. I clutch the wound and stagger backwards. I attempt to pull the trigger. No bullet comes out. Instead, I fall. Darkness creeps into the corners of my eyes, and I can’t even lift my head.

I’ve been shot before, but the fucking withdrawal is making this a lot more bloody dramatic.

A shadow looms over me, but my fingers aren’t even able to pull the trigger. Someone screams in the distance.

The shadow yanks my gun away. I try to clutch their sleeve, look at them, but my hold is too weak.

No one but The Pit’s assassins and Hades know about killing contracts. The clients don’t know who will pick the contract. Since the target didn’t show up, someone set me up. Someone wants me dead.

The shadow retreats. I hear distorted sounds from two civilians. Male. Female. Their muffled French words are horrified, talking about calling an ambulance. The police.

Fucking hell. If I’m caught, in a foreign country, it’s game bloody over.

I try to get up. Escape…

The fucking darkness swallows me whole.

Eloise

Everything is empty.

The house. The garden. Me.

I drag my body out of the spacious kitchen, leaving my soup barely touched, and saunter into the gigantic sitting hall. Old wood creaks under my feet. I always wanted to fix it, but what’s the point?

The washed-out carpet barely hides the cracks in the wooden boards. The tall windows’ glass hasn’t been wiped in ages, creating ghostly memories and preventing the late afternoon light from shining inside.

My ancestral home, just like me, is trapped in endless darkness. I’m starting to wonder if there will ever be a way out.

Most of the time, I stop wondering altogether. My shrink calls it dissociation. I call it being numb.

That numbness has been lodged inside me for so long, I don’t think it will ever go away.

I don’t want it to go away. The alternative is destructive.

The alternative means to care, and I have no energy to care anymore. For long months, I’ve been a ninety-year-old woman trapped in a twenty-five-year-old body. And like any ninety years old, I’m waiting for it to simply end.

My attention falls on the framed pictures at the entrance, shadowed by the glimmer of light. My chest tightens. Invisible hands pry their way into my heart, squeezing and stealing my air supply.

My fingers reach for a frame under which is written ‘Mon trésor, Eloise’ in Maman’s French handwriting.

Her treasure. She called me her treasure.

In the picture taken seven years ago, she had a big grin on her face while hugging me on my graduation day from high school. At least back then, she could smile without looking like a corpse. She could still walk and talk and sue the hell out of those scammy insurances companies that wronged her clients.

Then, things went downhill. From failed surgeries to relapses to seizures until her frail body had no fight left.

Until her heart came to a screeching halt.

No one calls me their treasure anymore.

It’s been six months since her death, but I still wake up hoping everything was a nightmare.

All I have left of Maman are these frozen memories. And numbness. Infinite numbness.

I don’t even cry anymore. None of my tears or screams or roaming the hallways like a stray ghost managed to bring her back.

A soft whine pulls my attention to the nudging at my long summer dress. My poodle, Charlotte, stares at me with huge dark eyes, her silver hair in desperate need of a brush. Or better yet, a cut and a wash. I might have forgotten about the vet appointment. And the appointment with