Chapter Text
Arlington, VA, Summer 2006
Leon’s weight slammed against his door more violently than he intended.
“Deep breath, Leon…” He steadied himself with a lungful of oxygen that burned all the way down his raw esophagus. “You just survived hell. You can survive opening your door too…”
It was almost two in the morning. Stillness wrapped the hallway like a heavy blanket. There was no other flat on Leon’s floor. The whole unit had become his lone refuge after coming back from almost dying after every mission. Yet even here, even in his supposed haven, he still let out soft, strained groans that slipped through his clenched teeth.
He didn’t want to burden the slumbering world with the trouble of his broken ribs.
Waves of pain crashed through him in a brutal pulse. He involuntarily slid down the door and collapsed onto the floor. Dust covered the tiles, a mess that desperately needed cleaning after months without human touch.
“Home sweet… goddamn home…” he scoffed, holding his breath.
He let out a rough exhale with his eyes closed. He sneered quietly, one hand clamped over his battered left arm. Spontaneous pain rose with every beat and compounded the injuries hidden beneath his torn, filthy clothes.
He was caked with sweat and blood. Some of it was his. Some of it belonged to the condemned souls who had dared to stand in his way.
“Uhh, fuck me…” Leon dragged out a guttural sound through the curse and scraped upward with all the remaining energy he could muster.
His vision felt heavy in the dim light of the hallway. He tried to punch in the code on his door keypad with his hands quivering, his nerves still on fire from the hell he had just lived through and escaped.
“Come on…” Leon released a sharp breath, tightening his fist. “Don’t make me kick my own door in… it’s been a long night.”
After what felt like an eternity of wrestling with the paranoia-filled security measures that he designed, Leon finally pushed the door open. He stepped inside and immediately crashed onto the floor beside the piles of unpaid bills littering the debris-coated ground.
His depleted body relaxed on the cold, firm surface, melting down as if it were part of the wooden floor. The serene quietness blended seamlessly with the all-consuming black that shrouded every nook and cranny of his house.
He took a deep breath and winced as surging agony radiated from the ruptured bones grinding in his chest.
“Ribs are still broken. Great work, home!” he whispered and smiled softly, as if the place owed him magical healing on arrival.
Or maybe he was just relieved to finally be here, the only place he could claim as his own where he didn’t have to answer to every order thrown at him.
Leon pried open his eyes when his body decided to shut down without his permission. The transport inside the unmarked container for twelve straight hours hadn’t been kind to his torn-apart body, and he decided not to reprimand himself for it. He gathered what little energy he had left and pushed himself onto his side. With a soft grunt, he hauled himself to his feet, dragging his rock-filled legs toward the switch that would bring his apartment to life with light.
Predictably, it did.
Unpredictably, his sixth sense caught an anomaly, something so faint it would have slipped past any untrained eyes. Leon felt a chilling shudder slither up the back of his neck and crawl down his spine. The sudden radio silence from his handler, the abrupt halt of supplies during an active solo assignment for over forty-eight hours, had already been enough to ring a silent alarm in his gut.
He had no doubt that the code to his apartment was something nobody could predict or stumble upon. And he always left his place in a very specific state. Subtle tells that only he would notice, particular markers that let him detect any oddity that might have taken place while he was away.
And he was more than certain he hadn’t left his coffee mug sitting on the kitchen counter before heading to Şile on a report of a new T-Virus variant attack, north of Istanbul.
Leon shifted into stealth mode, his footsteps quieter than a cat prowling in the dark. A shockwave of pain traveled across his heavily bruised left arm when he bent down to pick up his Silver Ghost from the tattered backpack left on the ground, a soundless moan escaping his chapped lips. He quickly checked the chamber and let out a warm breath sitting in his chest. The bullet was in there, ready to pierce the invader’s skull if needed.
He didn’t switch off the light, since any possible threat might have already heard him entering the apartment. He slowly began padding across the floor with his weapon lowered, his index finger resting against the trigger guard. His trained psyche had already compartmentalized the pain that had been flaring through every nerve ending just minutes ago. Blood clung to his dirty blond hair and dragged across his field of vision, a nuisance he barely registered.
A shadow of dread crept over his sleep-deprived mind.
It didn’t take long to scout the entire floor, not when he knew every bit of cover and hiding spot his place offered. When he finally checked his armory, tucked unchanged behind his office inside the bedroom, Leon forced out a heavy breath that had been lodged in his throat the whole time.
Nobody had come into his apartment. He must have left the coffee mug on the counter without thinking. He had clawed his way out of that wretched place by the skin of his teeth, and now he was just overthinking.
“Man… I really need to crash…” Leon mumbled as he gently tossed his gun and his shattered radio device onto the bed. “The world won’t explode if I don’t let HQ know I’m still breathing right away. The damn thing is broken to shit anyway,” he assured himself. Moving at a sluggish pace, he levered himself toward the sink in his bathroom, the soft light above it reminding him again that he was finally home.
No more sudden run-ins with infected locals desperate to sink their teeth into him. No more panic-stricken nights with his heart jammed in his throat while he begged the universe for three hours of sleep just to stitch himself together for the next day.
At least not until they shoved him into another hellhole as soon as he checked in.
“Besides, I’m sure Hunnigan isn’t losing sleep over me being MIA. She kinda left me hanging first,” he muttered at his reflection.
His eyes were sunken deep, even more than usual. A long scratch dragged down his left cheek, still struggling to seal shut. He let out a heavy sigh, disappointment needling straight through the thin veneer of professionalism he still pretended to have, a tired sadness threading through his dismay.
This was the job. It always had been. Something must have gone sideways at HQ, and he would get the full picture when he reported in tomorrow.
He shook off the bitterness crawling under his skin and doused his face with cold water again and again until the droplets running down the floor carried a faint pinkish hue. With a painful whimper, he peeled off his dirty clothes, frayed to hell. His body felt twice its weight now that the last traces of adrenaline had abandoned him, every movement scraping raw against his nerves.
The thought of a warm bath crossed his mind, a fleeting temptation, but his sore and drained body warned him sharply against it. He reached instead for the grey T-shirt and the black sweatpants he had cleaned the night before the assignment. They were still sitting in the dryer, forgotten there because he hadn’t had the time to fold them.
“Story of my life…” Leon scoffed in a quiet breath, filling the lowball with the expensive whiskey he kept for nights like this. Painkillers never touched his pain anyway. Whiskey, on the other hand, came closer than anything else ever did.
Taking a small sip, he drifted toward the leather armchair in the living area, the one that seemed to beckon him through the tranquil air. He knew he would probably pass out the moment he let himself slam into it, and wake up with a fresh symphony of pain running through his neck and joints alongside the pounding agony already sitting deep in his core.
But he couldn’t care less. Not tonight anyway.
Tonight, he would do whatever he wanted and deal with the consequences tomorrow.
“My hips won’t thank me tomorrow though!” he murmured when his unruly mind chimed in.
The events of the compromised assignment settled on him like a suffocating weight against his injured chest. He had completed countless missions alone since his training ended, bleeding on foreign soil with no escape in sight. But never in his eight years serving as a USSTRATCOM agent had he been abandoned like this, left to fend for himself without backup, without supplies, without a single voice on the other end of the radio.
Leon took a sip from his lowball and breathed out a heavy, constrained sigh. A gnawing sense of premonition seeped through his veins as the alcohol on his empty stomach began to show its true colors. Nothing in his life had ever gone according to plan. So why was he questioning the integrity of his trusted handler now?
Had she simply forgotten he was on an active mission?
Or had something far worse unfolded while he was away?
Should he check on her?
Should he even care?
“Sleep, you idiot…” he chastised himself suddenly with a bitter sneer, his head lolling back against the headrest as he deposited the half-empty glass on the side table. “They sure didn’t break their backs looking for you when you were bleeding to death.”
Then he heard it, just as he was about to doze off.
A muffled knock on the door.
“What the hell…?” Leon rasped faintly. He sprang to his feet despite his pummeled body protesting ferociously against the sudden movement. As he moved to match the bleak quietude, he quickly stole a peek at the clock on the wall, which quietly announced the time: 2:47 a.m.
The knock was sharp and strategic, too precise to ignore in the muted stillness of the night. It wouldn’t be a neighbor who woke from all the commotion coming from his flat. Or anyone from his agency, since they wouldn’t just visit him unannounced in the middle of the night.
He glided past the kitchen counter in a silent stride and reached for the switch, flicking it off in an instant and plunging the entire vicinity into darkness. He tiptoed into his bedroom next, grabbing his gun from its exact spot by memory alone.
The obscurity didn’t take long to settle. His eyes adjusted quickly as he moved toward the peephole, even though he already knew it wouldn’t reveal anything.
Because a tight pull in his stomach had already warned him the hallway light was cut.
And he was right.
The absence of sight had heightened his other senses, the kind of edge that came with years of unforgiving training and field experience. He picked up the hushed thudding of tactical boots behind his door, the faint clicking of their comms as they coordinated with the precision of telepathy. There were no metallic clacks from heavy weapons, which meant only one thing. They were running suppressors. Their movements revealed nothing except a discipline so strict that they did not even breathe loudly.
“Possibly JSOC… definitely DoD supervised,” Leon muttered inwardly.
He held his position by the door, his head leaning toward it, his loaded weapon held fast in his sweaty palms. The grim quiet stretched thin after the second knock, the same unhurried and methodical taps that were far too flawless to belong to a civilian. His heart hammered against his ribs, his mouth dry. Every event that had led him here clashed together in his mind, and his instincts, seasoned and scarred, told him all of it was connected somehow.
It felt as if he had never escaped the nightmares that submerged him in Istanbul.
“Agent Leon Scott Kennedy, we know you are in there. Open the door.” A calm, controlled voice curved through the suffocating air and chilled Leon’s spine.
His hands trembled slightly, his body draining the final bit of strength that was still holding him on his feet. He squeezed his eyes so tightly that white spots flickered beneath his eyelids. He attempted to swallow repeatedly before letting his presence be known.
“It’s a little late for selling Girl Scout cookies, don’t you think?” Leon called out after a moment, his overburdened mind racing through every possible way this could unfold.
“We are a retrieval team. It would be in your best interest to cooperate with us. Nobody needs to get hurt tonight,” the voice answered, showing no aggression, no weariness, nothing human in its tone.
“You know my name, so you also know that messing with me will not end well in any scenario,” Leon barked back, partly to make himself heard, partly to cling to the fading confidence dissolving with his dwindling strength. “What is so urgent that you guys couldn’t wait until morning?”
“We are not at liberty to say. It’s need to know.”
“Then I am not at liberty to open the damn door either!” Leon snapped, his breathing beginning to quicken.
There was no sound from the other side afterwards, as if his warning had made them vanish into the void. Leon held his breath, his pulse thudding in his ribs.
Then the voice returned.
“You are wanted for questioning regarding the homicide of a civilian government contractor. Open the door and kneel.”
Leon felt the veins at his temples reverberate beneath his burning skin, a hot rush roaring through his ears and scorching him from the inside out. The words from the faceless man hit him like a searing iron.
Wanted for questioning?
Homicide?!
What the fuck was going on?
“I am not going anywhere without a warrant,” Leon replied at last. His voice tried to hold steady, but the cracks in it betrayed the strain of everything he had been enduring.
“All of your legal questions will be addressed once you are in custody, Agent Kennedy.”
The man’s reply was soft and composed, a tone meant to calm a dangerous animal rather than negotiate with him. “I would also advise you not to involve your neighbors. Every rooftop surrounding your condo is covered by our snipers. If you resist, the residents will be the ones who pay the price.”
Leon immediately pivoted his head toward the window facing the other buildings in the vicinity and dashed toward the wall, hiding his body in the dark while peeking through the blinds. He squinted his eyes with his heart in his hands, his parched throat searing with every throb of his temple. The moonless sky was clear of any light. After blinking several times, his blurry vision finally registered the red dots pointing toward the lower-floor windows, where the occupants were sound asleep in their homes. At least five, as far as he could see.
“Fuck…” Leon murmured in a hollow breath as somber resignation finally engulfed him whole.
He closed his eyes and slid down the wall onto the floor, his body shuddering as dread and the aftershock of the revelation pulled him into the abyss. He drew his knees closer to his chest, his gun vibrating in his adrenaline-soaked grip, pain flooding through him from every angle. With everything he had at his disposal, he realized the truth in a single, crushing moment. He had been burned, and it had been done with measured coordination.
The agents swarming his hallway were definitely government sanctioned, no question about it. Their phrasing had been deliberate, their tone meticulously calm. They had not broken down his door. They had cut the lights in the hallway but left the building’s power intact, because they did not want to alert the tenants. Leon had taken the longest and most covert route back to the States, yet they knew exactly where and when to find him. They had placed snipers where civilian casualties could be framed as a tragic accident if he chose to fight back. And despite all of that, they were still giving him time to think about his choices.
Because they had made sure, he did not have any.
Even though they seemed to come here to wipe him off the face of the earth, for some reason they still needed him alive, and in the best-case scenario, compliant. They were framing him for the murder of a private citizen. But no law enforcement or media was involved, which meant there wouldn’t be any public record of his conviction. This was not an arrest. This was the containment of an agent who had become a national liability overnight.
Because someone, somewhere, had decided he had outlived his purpose as their lapdog, yet still needed to stay alive just long enough to serve whatever use they had left for him.
“Agent Kennedy, this is your final warning. Unlock the door and set your weapon down, then step back into the room and kneel with your hands behind your head.” The man’s tone had tightened, his patience clearly wearing thin as he continued, “Comply and you will remain unharmed. Do it now.”
A humorless, tired breath slipped out of him as he slowly rose to his feet. Every fibre of his body screamed to fight back, to wrestle with his fate until his body finally gave out. Yet the burning sense of guilt, the idea of having innocent blood on his hands, felt more agonizing than being framed for a murder he did not commit. He survived Raccoon City. He survived being infected with Las Plagas. He would survive this too, even if it was at the expense of his freedom.
“I need to live. I need to find out why me…” Leon told himself as he forced his shaking frame to prepare for surrender, phantom invaders already waiting for him to take position.
The moment the sound of his gun hitting the floor echoed through the slightly open door, the room flooded with unimaginable brilliance that almost seared his vision to ashes. Yet he didn’t flinch, in contrast to the terror that seeped into his core. When his sight adjusted, he looked up from his knees and saw at least fifteen agents saturating his living space. All of them were hidden behind heavy tactical masks and identical black gear with no insignia or badge on sight, moving with eerie precision. Every weapon was drawn, ready to fire the instant Leon offered even the slightest resistance. Two of them moved behind him while others began to trudge around the apartment, sweeping his belongings into evidence bags.
“You are being detained pending a breach-of-integrity review under Executive Directive Omega-Seven.” The familiar voice delivered the order in the same monotonous tone.
Goosebumps prickled across his skin as the order towered over him. The executive directive sounded so classified that even Leon couldn’t decipher its meaning, but it was clearly sanctioned by a higher-level federal mandate. Whatever was happening to him was not a misunderstanding. It was painfully deliberate. Leon swallowed hard. The more he tried to control his emotions, the more his shivering body betrayed him.
“That sounds… cute and all. But really? This many bodies to bag one beaten-up agent? Someone’s overestimating me tonight.” Leon muttered, derision dripping through every word, failing to hide the disquiet edging into his tone. His hands twitched behind his head with the urge to kill every single one of them on the spot.
“You know better than anyone what you’re capable of, Agent Kennedy,” the man reasoned in a cold whisper, his veiled goggles reflecting Leon’s trepidation back at him.
As if sensing the dangerous shift in Leon’s thoughts, the agents behind him acted at once. They wrenched both hands behind his back with clinical coldness. Leon exhaled a broken groan from the strain on his splintered ribs and severely contused left arm. He visibly twitched when the cold steel circled his wrists, snapping shut like a quiet death sentence. The agents stayed muted, Leon’s pain-stifled moan sliding off them like water. His ankles were shackled next, their movements practiced and almost mechanical, the kind of precision that came from doing it a thousand times.
Before long, they lifted him to his feet just as a woman’s voice rang beside him.
“Found it,” she declared.
As soon as the masked agent stepped into his line of sight, she tilted the sheer evidence bag just enough for him to see what was inside.
His Sig Sauer P232. A backup weapon he barely used.
“Of course. That explains the coffee mug,” Leon snickered emptily, realizing just how far they had gone to make his charges ironclad.
“Commander, the transport is ready,” another agent called out.
Leon stiffened in a rush of frantic fear at how quickly the situation was spiraling before his eyes. His restrained legs wobbled beneath him with soft clinks of chains, even with their iron grip on his arms keeping him steady. He forced in a deep breath, trying to rein in his galloping heartbeat before he spoke.
“You know, hate to break it to you, but this is the worst welcome-home party I’ve ever had,” Leon quipped in a low pitch, his knuckles blanching from the taut fists straining against the handcuffs. “Let me guess… this is where you drag me to one of those off-the-books basement dungeons. Least you could do is tell me what kind of nightmare I’m signing up for.” He hurled the words with raw contempt, making no effort to hide it.
The visored leader stepped forward, closing the distance with slow certainty. His right hand held a black hood, waiting for its unfortunate wearer. Leon gulped down the rising bile clawing at his throat at the sight of it. His world would soon be drowned in darkness, possibly for the foreseeable future. And for the first time in his life, he was utterly helpless to stop it.
The man chuckled softly, a harrowing deviation from how he sounded moments ago.
“The location is need to know, Agent Kennedy. And trust me, you do not want to know.”
***********************
Undisclosed Location, Several Months Later
When you spend enough time enshrouded in darkness, it becomes an irrevocable part of your existence. It seeps into your marrow and drinks from your misery. The hollow shell becomes the husk of someone you scarcely remember ever being.
Or at least that was what Leon believed of the emptiness he still called living, a life carved out by pain and painted over with nothingness.
He was sitting in the far corner of his barren cell, a mildewed, acrid stench clouding the air inside it like a fog that never lifted. The filthy, squalid concrete beneath the soles of his feet was always ice cold, the chill sliding through his naked skin and burrowing into the flesh. One of his eyes was swollen, buried beneath trapped blood that ballooned the skin around it. But it made no difference to him, since the pitch black always swallowed his vision the moment they were done with him for the day.
And somehow, Leon didn’t mind. This was the only respite he was allowed, the only time the world around him stopped shaking long enough for him to remember he still had a body at all.
For a moment, he forgot how to breathe. His insides churned in a merciless cadence, demanding real food that his mind already knew was nothing more than a cruel fantasy. His breath hitched in his sternum, sending fire through ribs that had never truly healed. He forced himself into absolute stillness, because the slightest shift sent vicious jolts tearing through his arms, twisted and locked behind his back for what felt like an eternity. The broken skin on his wrists bled anew whenever the cold rims of his handcuffs grazed them. His ankles were rubbed raw from the permanent bite of the leg irons circling them. After months of confinement, it hardly mattered whether they kept him shackled or not. Even without them, he doubted his legs would remember how to hold him.
The momentary quiet was nothing but an illusion, a fragile lie floating in the darkness, but Leon clung to it anyway. It was the closest thing to peace he had left.
“Peace…” Leon rasped, his voice barely more than a whisper, his forehead grazing his knees. “Who am I kidding?”
He winced in a brutal twitch when his body reflexively shifted to find a better position, only to be reminded of what they had just done to him as if he were nothing more than a piece of meat. The abused ring of muscle of his anus burned with a fresh flicker of vengeance, the mixture of blood and semen still clinging to his skin and staining the concrete beneath him like a brand of ownership. His throat closed at the memory of loathsome hands pinning him to the floor while they forced their repugnant manhood inside him as he screamed, using his own blood as their only lubrication.
A searing pain throbbed around the torn edges of his entrance with a pulsing heat, a relentless reminder of his ruined dignity, wrapped in the residue of the men who violated him. Leon flinched when a tear slipped down from his good eye onto his collarbone. He scoffed when he realized that his shattered psyche was still clawing at the idea of shame, a burden he might have felt if he were not being broken apart piece by piece first.
At what moment had the universe decided this would be his fate? Leon wondered.
A decorated field agent who had neutralized countless bioweapon threats overseas before they could ever touch U.S. soil, doing it with his life on the line.
A lone operative sent on covert assignments to carry out the government’s will in places they had no lawful right to be, ensuring their shadowed presence never tangled with diplomatic consequences.
And now he sat in an undisclosed black site, stripped down to something less than human, counting the days before he drew what might be his final breath.
“Who would’ve thought… right?” he murmured into the stale air tightening around him.
When his brain finally overtook his ability to think and pushed him toward the edge of restless slumber, the cell door groaned open with a deep, splintering creak. His body snapped upright in a devastating reflex, every nerve wired to the months of torture that had conditioned him to expect agony the moment that sound scraped through the darkness.
Only this time, no unforgiving hands came to grab him and drag his lethargic shell away to break his limbs.
A dim yellow light flooded his miserable confines, illuminating the walls around him drenched in mold. Being in the dark for days on end had charred his eyesight. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the moisture anchoring his eyelids, blinking desperately so he could recognize whatever new measure of agony he would be thrust into now.
His ears caught the scrape of a chair being dragged harshly across the ground toward him. The grating noise cut through the stagnant air like an old wound reopening. Someone sat on it in silence, as if waiting for Leon to acknowledge their presence, the stillness pressing against his skin with unwelcome familiarity.
“My goodness…”
Leon heard the unmistakable voice gasp in shock, a voice he knew he would never forget even if he tried. The same voice that had asked him to join USSTRATCOM to help clean up Umbrella’s mess. The voice that trusted him enough to send him to Spain to rescue his daughter from Los Illuminados’ vile clutches.
President Graham, scanning him like a hawk.
He took note of Leon’s ragged skin, bearing patches of scabs, dirt, and half-healed wounds, each layer compounding on top of the last every day. His entire left outer thigh was marked by a large bruise in sickly shades of violet and ochre, the unmistakable imprint of severe blunt-force trauma. His hair was longer than he ever would have kept it, matted with grease and blood that bled into the coarse, uneven beard etched across his face.
“Leon, can you hear me?” the President called at last, his voice dripping with concern that felt too unnatural for a place like this.
Leon lifted his gaze in a laborious drag, his neck aching from the strain. His sight was still rippling out of focus, but clear enough to register the pristine black suit Graham was wearing, a stark contrast to the cell’s rotting decay. His hair had a few more grey strands since the last time Leon had seen him, praising him for the successful completion of yet another assignment kept hidden from the general public.
Before he could answer, however, it hit him. Humiliatingly, the President was assessing whether his mind was still intact despite his condition.
“Yes, Mr. President. I do,” Leon forced out the affirmation, his voice cracked and misshapen, a ruined echo of the man he used to be.
“You look... worse for wear,” Graham ventured after a long pause.
Leon let out a faint scoff that stayed hidden beneath the veil of his overgrown locks.
“I... had a rough couple of months, sir. Hard to believe, I know,” he jeered with all the respect he could muster through his husked tone, shuddering at his own understatement.
“I heard. That’s why I came to see you,” the President replied in a calm manner. His gentleness tugged at the frayed edge of Leon’s memory, stirring old days in the Oval Office when they had sat across from each other, discussing responsibilities, missions, and futures that now felt like remnants of a former life.
A long pause enveloped them. The air between them shifted, tense and uneasy, as if both men were wrestling with how to step into the most difficult conversation Leon had ever faced.
“They keep ‘asking’ me to confess,” Leon began at last through the deafening silence. His voice did not accuse; it simply stated a truth carved into him through repetition and pain. “They insist that I murdered someone named Troy Faulkner, a government contractor. A man I have never met in my life.”
He continued when he saw Graham’s eyes fixed on him with deep concentration, a look that sparked a faint glimmer of hope in Leon’s heart. A hope he thought had burned out a long time ago.
“I was in Istanbul, sir. The mission you sanctioned. I was cut off from comms for over forty-eight hours without any supplies. I still don’t know why that happened,” Leon concluded. His voice choked against his dry throat, the sentence breaking apart under the weight of confusion and betrayal he had no strength left to hide.
“Leon,” Graham suddenly interrupted the battered man’s train of thoughts, pulling him back from the misery that was slowly drowning him deeper. “I know. But that’s not why I am here.”
Leon felt a thunderous gale pierce him from the inside out. His days had bled into nights, into months he no longer bothered to count. And every day, after his captors left him to rot in his cell with days’ worth of abuse, his mind clung to the hope that President Graham might have no knowledge of his detainment. He told himself Graham couldn't possibly know. That someone higher in the hierarchy had decided to use him to make up for their mess, and until his lungs stopped drawing breath, there was still hope.
But hearing Graham confess that he knew about his predicament all along drew an unimaginable ache through Leon’s overtaxed mind.
“You… knew?” Leon implored, his voice drifting out like a soft whisper.
The President leaned back in his chair as if trying to ease the tension between them.
“Yes, I knew. Things had escalated far beyond what I imagined they would. And it’s time for me to end this, and for you to know why you are really here.”
Leon held his breath so hard that his shattered sternum screamed. His only open eye widened with a fragile anticipation, desperate to finally learn the truth of his fate.
“The victim was a longtime friend of my family. And in an unfortunate turn of events, one of the members of my family…” Graham drew a grim breath through his mouth before revealing the rest, “they murdered him, in self-defense.”
Leon felt something inside him twist his organs into knots, rearranging them in a ruthless rush. He lowered his gaze to his drawn knees, scraped and raw. His training kicked in immediately, calculating every trajectory of the events that had unfolded, every chain of decisions that had dragged him here with no room to choose otherwise.
“You are a smart man, Leon. You do understand why I want you to confess, right?” the President asked in a matter-of-fact tone, his voice steady, not oscillating in the slightest. “My administration has contributed to global progress in suppressing bioterrorism before it could reach U.S. soil. I still have a couple more years to uphold my duty as President. If this gets out, the domestic and international scrutiny my family would face, along with the national security fallout that would threaten the country’s balance, I cannot allow that to happen.”
Leon cringed when he heard the President taking credit for contributions that were never his to claim. His blood and sweat, all the lives he saved, reduced to a line in someone else’s political résumé. As the dust settled and his unruly heartbeat finally slowed enough to listen to reason, he drew a deep breath. The Pandora’s box he had been living in for months finally offered the answers that had been corroding at him since his imprisonment.
But at what cost?
“If only you had just asked me nicely…” Leon muttered sharply. His voice spilled with a condescension he didn’t bother to hide.
“Would you have complied if I did?” Graham replied at once.
“With all due respect, sir, would you?” Leon pushed back in a low pitch, his steel glare cutting straight into Graham’s gaze. The sharpness of it was so intense that it made the President look away.
“Leon,” he beckoned softly with hesitation, as if speaking to an upset child. “You have saved my family from a scandal once. You saved my Ashley, and I am forever grateful to you for that.” His polished façade of sincerity made Leon’s stomach lurch with nausea. “And now I am asking you… I need you to do it again, one more time. You understand what this means for national security, right? As far as I remember, you swore an oath to protect your country and its reputation.”
He felt his chafed wrists begin to bleed again beneath the pressure of his strained hands fighting against the unforgiving steel. His heart kicked into overdrive, anger flaring hotter than he meant to show. He panted through his nose, then forced a slow exhale to steady himself the way his training had taught him years ago.
Leon squeezed his eyes shut, the floodgates of painful memories opening their dam and submerging his heart. Just a rookie, fresh out of the police academy, traumatized by a city full of infected, manipulated into giving up his freedom to serve the country.
His mind flickered back to the punishing training that had nearly killed him long before he ever set foot on active missions. The endless drills, the exhaustion eating away at his bones, until he stopped fighting and simply obeyed.
He had been coerced into becoming an agent back then to save a little girl, shaped and cornered until he surrendered to their will.
And now, listening to the President’s unapologetic and unfair request, he felt the same pressure closing around his throat all over again. The same manipulation. The same tightening vise demanding his compliance.
Leon released a hollow, humorless breath at the cruel irony of it all.
This time, they expected him to accept being locked away as a dead man who happened to still breathe. As long as he was alive, they would suck him dry to have their ways until there would be nothing left. So, if refusing meant being crushed beneath a hydroelectric press, then so be it.
He lifted his gaze to the President’s curious eyes, brimming with expectation. He blinked once before voicing his conviction that had kept his existence in a pyre since the day he was taken.
“Pardon my honesty, sir… but I don’t think I can confess to something I did not do.”