Page 55 of Beyond Reason

“She’s down. We’ll check her recording device once we handle the situation.” I hadn’t even realized the second man was on a phone until he hung it up and moved to draw a gun.

Well, double shit. Axel wasn’t going to let me live it down if I made a mess in his hallway and his living room, was he?

I slammed the door in their faces, but I knew that wasn’t going to buy me much time.

“Axel, two men coming in. Armed!” It was the best I could do, and I just had to hope that he’d heard me. Since my guns were in the bedroom, I was going to have to make due with what I could find. My eyes searched the room—a bunch of expensive art pieces scattered here and there, and an urn above the fireplace.

Axel would probably lose his mind if I let something happen to… well… myself.

The thought was weird enough to give me pause, but I didn’t actually have time for that. I darted into the kitchen instead, just as the door splintered open and the men barged inside.

Inside was better. If I killed them in here, maybe no one would realize what was going on. I’d really hate for Axel’s entire operation that he’d gotten away with for years to burn to the ground because there were people after me.

“Don’t you two know you’re supposed to call before you come over uninvited?” I scolded them while grabbing a few knives from the block on the counter. It wasn’t perfect, and they weren’t actually suited for this kind of work, but I was nothing if not a problem solver.

“If you’re cooperative, you don’t have to get hurt, Mr. Lister.”

There was that name again—the man whose good intentions I was being punished for. They still didn’t know who I really was, they had no idea that the man they were looking for was nothing more than a few base instincts and fleeting memories trapped somewhere in the back of my mind.

And maybe this was finally a chance for me to figure out at least a little bit of what they wanted. Unless Axel came charging out and half-decapitated them. If he did, he seriously had no place giving me shit about the dead woman in his hallway.

“What exactly do you want from me? I don’t know what’s going on.” Was that too over the top innocent? I wasn’t sure how Marshall sounded before, though I had a feeling these guys didn’t actually know him, so my overcompensation of innocence would probably be fine.

Probably.

“Nathaniel West just wants to have a few words with you, that’s all. You were an extremely valuable asset to the team, Mr. Lister. Don’t you think it’s time you stepped back to your responsibilities?” He sounded just a little too sincere to trust, and I could hear his partner trying to sneak around so they could corner me in the kitchen—thankfully, they didn’t know the layout of the house. There was no back way for them to cut me off. That did mean there was no back way for me to slip out unless I climbed out a window, but hopefully my backup would be here by then.

He’d heard me when I yelled for him, right?

“I never meant to step out of them. I just… I was hurt before, when the old building burned down. I barely got out of there with my life, let alone any information.” Could I play this to my advantage? If I made it seem like I’d intentionally taken that flash drive in some attempt to salvage what was obviously burning to the ground…

I heard one of them flip open a cellphone again, though they weren’t speaking this time.

A text?

The corner of my mouth pulled up in a grin. Were they actually idiots, or was it simply that they had no idea what kind of experiments the company they were working for had been running?

Either way, I had more information now than I’d had since I woke up.It was definitely Nathaniel after me and not some competitor.

“Do you think—” My words cut off abruptly when I heard a body suddenly fall to the ground. I didn’t think about it, I just rounded the corner and took the few steps necessary to stick the kitchen knife into the other man’s torso. He’d turned from me toward Axel, who’d hit our other little problem over the head with a weight.

As much as I wanted to tell him we could have kept them alive to question further, I didn’t really have room to speak. The man in front of me pulled a gun up, even though I had a knife in his gut, and I knew what Axel had said earlier was true.

They weren’t going to let us easily capture them, were they? His finger was on the trigger, and I had a split second to react.

I could have very easily incapacitated him.

I could have lifted my hand and strangled him until he fainted.

But that would take time, and I didn’t have time when there was a gun pointed at Axel. I jerked the knife up and pulled it out. It was jarring when I brought it down again, feeling the blade scrape against bone, but I found what I was looking for with a violent twist that shredded his heart.

Yeah… I probably couldn’t scold Axel for being too hasty. I did look up at him with an exasperated expression, though.

“You got brains on the floor, so I don’t want to hear a word about the viscera.”

My mess was definitely worse, but the joking tone in my voice and the obvious lack of blood anywhere but my hands seemed to soothe the worry that I’d caught trying to form in his eyes.

He really would burn the world down for me, wouldn’t he?

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