Agent Rogue

Chapter 25

A hollowness in my chest sunk my heart into its pit as I stopped in front of Alistair's cell. He stood in the centre, shoulders back and chin raised, watching me through the glass with steel, narrow eyes.

Agent Nicholson had allowed me access to his holding cell before his move to prison, telling me that the ex-Director had remained near-silent since Derek dragged him through the office and into his cell. From what I had heard, it was the same cell Collins and Gabby had been kept in. Derek admitted he leaned into the irony, and I did not blame him.

I did not have the stomach to lock him up myself, and imagined others would have found it more satisfying than I, but his mouth had been sealed shut for four days now, and Collins suggested I questioned him myself.

I wrung my hands in apprehension, suddenly aware of the soft material wrapped around them. Through our scramble out of Blackwood Manor, Derek and I had torn our palms, not realising until we entered the helicopter. Adrenaline kept me numb to it, but the two of us were hounded by medical staff the moment we stepped back into the office. Derek snuck away, escorting a handcuffed Alistair to the top floor, and fired a grin over his shoulder at my scowling at the fussing first aiders. It was a nuisance to clean and reapply the bandages every day, but the wounds were healing fast and painlessly – a much different story to the scar on my shoulder.

He did not react whatsoever. Not to my bandaged hands. Not to my bruised cheek. And certainly not to the icy glower targeted his way.

How dare he not react.

With a shaking breath, I calmed my tone. "Are you just going to stand there, or will you accept what you have done?"
Alistair chuckled. "My own words. Need I remind you of the scenario in which I told you them?"
He heard me swallow and locked his hands behind his back, arching a brow. Even behind inches of bulletproof glass, he knew a small thread still looped around me somewhere.
"That was entirely different."
"You are repeating your own history. Again, in fact." His tone was chirping, almost amused at my suffering as if I meant nothing to him. My jaw clenched. "It'll happen again, you know?"
"It was years ago," I snipped. "It means nothing about the future."
"The past shapes who we are, Miss Knight."
"Like how you were shaped into a terrorist."

He only blinked. Once. That was all the reaction I needed.

"Oh?" I took a single step towards him, mirroring his stance of holding my hands behind my back, shoulders stretched out. "Do you not like that word, sir? Do you dislike being called a terrorist?" He flinched. Hypocrite.
"I—"
"You need to get used to that word, I'm afraid, because you will hear it again, and again, and again. You will hear it from me, then in a courtroom surrounded by those whose lives you threatened to destroy. Then in a prison far less pleasing than this – that I can promise – where you will meet your new family in the form of the hundred criminals you put in there over the past three decades."

He was the agency's greatest hero. His success rates were higher than any other Director in history, and now he had become those he promised to destroy.

Alistair sighed. "Amber—"
"No."
"Knight. You know me. You know everything I have done has always been for the benefit of this country."
"There it is again," I hissed. "I followed you blindly for years because you told me everything I did for you was for the best." I shook my head. "You can't pull that string anymore. I won't let you."
"Much would be lost, but in the end it would all be for—"
"Vengeance. It would all be for vengeance."

With Alistair silenced, I raised my gaze, looking down on him. "You once told me that tracking down Marcus would ruin me. Now look at you: choking on your own words and spitting them back out, claiming righteousness. You are a hypocrite, Alistair. You destroyed who you are, becoming Marcus's mirror image."
"I can still help you find him," his voice broke for the first time since I had met him. "Do you not wish to put an end to his suffering?"
I bit my lip and let go. My words to Scotty still stood strong: I did not need Alistair. "I do. But how can a man that has caused me so much pain help to stop another?" I was sure I saw him stiffen. "I will find Marcus without you because I never needed you in the way you convinced me I did."