The rest of the morning and afternoon was… honestly weird.
There was blood in my hair, salt in my mouth, trauma sinking into my bones like ink on paper and yet I was sitting cross-legged on the back of a luxurious yacht, scarfing down the best damn food I'd ever tasted.
Shannon had made it for herself, apparently. Just a little personal stash tucked away in the mini kitchen downstairs. But when I started eyeing her plate like a starving raccoon, she sighed dramatically and tossed me a serving like she hadn't just witnessed a war an hour ago.
And wow.
"This is…" I blinked, holding the fork mid-air. "Did you… order this?"
Shannon rolled her eyes. "I made it, genius."
"No, like—a professional chef made this. A really rich one."
"She's got a five star rating in cooking," Phaser chimed in from the helm, where he was calmly driving the yacht like he didn't just take down two national figures with his bare hands.
I nearly choked on a bite of her herbed chicken.
"She's got what now?"
"She used to cook for royalty," he added.
Shannon shrugged. "They were nice. Paid well. Screamed too much."
I didn't even ask for clarification. I just shut up and kept eating, because whatever fairy godmother had decided to send me a warm plate of food after the second worst morning of my life clearly didn't want me questioning it.
We didn't talk much after that. I think all of us were just… processing. The boat rocked gently beneath us, smooth and quie. Just the ocean's whispers and the hum of the yacht engine slicing through bloodstained waves.
It was around nightfall when things changed again.
Phaser walked up to the front deck, arms crossed, wind tugging at his long coat, and finally reached for his mask.
I turned my head, watching curiously. I'd never seen him take it off before. Not during the ambush. Not during the fight. Not during the aftermath.
But there, under the stars and the slow encroaching silence of night, he just… removed it.
I expected scars. I expected some grotesque truth, some reason why he kept it hidden.
What I didn't expect was that he was… hot. Like, stupidly hot.
His hair wasn't orange and red like I assumed. It was a warm brown, slightly long and tousled like he hadn't bothered brushing it for a few days but in that effortless "still looks model-worthy" kind of way. And his eyes?
They were shifting like actual kaleidoscopes of color. Blue at the center, bleeding into green, then flickering hints of orange and red when the moonlight hit just right.
And then, just to top it all off, he turned and looked at me.
"Hey," he said softly. "You okay?"
No. I was not.
I had been shot in the head and shrugged it off. I'd watched dozens of people die. I dove upwards on water. And now I was sitting on a yacht, being asked about my mental state by a gorgeous man who had literally brought down world leaders earlier this afternoon.
I opened my mouth to respond and instead, I made a sound that was somewhere between a squeak and a cough.
He chuckled. God, even his laugh was good.
I cleared my throat, trying to summon dignity from the depths of whatever parts of my soul still had any left.
"Y-yeah. I mean. I think I'm okay. Physically. Mentally? That's… a work in progress."
He nodded and sat down beside me on the bench, just far enough to be polite.
"Makes sense. That was a lot."
"Understatement of the year," I muttered, hugging my knees. "You think I'll be fine?"
He thought for a second. "You're stronger than you think. You didn't panic. You moved. You survived."
"I also ran into three soldiers like a bowling ball and knocked them all out by accident."
"That's called innovation," he said with a grin. "Strategic chaos."
I snorted. "That's generous."
There was a pause.
"You didn't scream when the ship went under. You didn't freeze when the snipers shot at you. You didn't even flinch when the dead started floating."
I shrugged slowly. "Guess I'm… adapting?"
He tilted his head, eyes still flickering with those unreal colors.
"You are. Whether you realize it or not."
Another pause.
The stars were out in full above us now. The ocean was calm again, like the bloodbath earlier had been a fever dream. Shannon was below deck, probably cleaning her knives or watching reruns of some obscure chaos like nothing had happened.
I glanced sideways at Phaser.
"So… the angel. She told you to find me?"
"Yeah."
"And you listened?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
He shrugged again. "Because you matter."
I blinked. Ididn't know how to respond. So instead, I stared at the sea and whispered.
"I didn't ask for any of this."
"I know. But sometimes fate doesn't ask. It just points. And you either walk the road or get dragged down it."
I let that sit for a while.Then, under my breath, I muttered.
"You're still annoyingly handsome, by the way."
He laughed. Not mockingly, just warmly.
"Thanks," he said, nudging my shoulder with his. "You're not too bad yourself. Believe me, you are more beautiful than you think."
And somehow, even with everything that had happened, my body sore, my mind racing, and the world still on fire behind us, I smiled.
For the first time in what felt like years, I actually smiled.
---
Shannon called us upstairs with a bored voice.
"They're awake."
I blinked, sitting up from the makeshift lounge bench on the deck. Phaser stood with that usual ease, as if nothing ever caught him off guard. Me? I was still reeling from the fact that I was part of whatever this was.
When we got to the lower deck, the president and the Marimus Faction Master were both shackled, hands behind their backs, ankles chained, eyes groggy but burning with fury. The yacht had an actual holding area, like Shannon was ready for this sort of thing. Which, now that I think about it… of course she was.
"Ugh," the president grunted, blinking rapidly. "You psychopaths. You kidnapped—"
"Oh please," Shannon cut him off with a hand wave, crouching next to them with a tablet and her laptop open on the table beside her. "You're lucky you're breathing. Shut it, both of you. I'm busy."
The Faction Master growled lowly. "You're going to pay for this."
She didn't even look up.
"With what? The 480 million dollars we just took from your joint accounts? Oh wait, you're paying."
My eyes widened. "Wait, you did what?"
Shannon snorted. "I expected billionaires, honestly. Y'all barely crossed the half-billion mark combined. You're lucky I'm not doing real hacking, because this? This is me respecting the art of restraint."
They both shouted something—I think the Faction Master was cursing in six different languages—but Phaser just leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, calm as ever.
"Is this part of the mission?" I asked.
Shannon shrugged. "We're international criminals now, darling. Might as well get paid. Rogue living isn't cheap."
"I second that," Phaser added casually. "Besides, we didn't keep them alive just because we felt like it."
He pushed off the wall, stepping closer to them.
"You two aren't worth keeping, but your memories? That's another story."
The president stilled. "What do you mean?"
"We don't need you. Just your minds."
I felt a chill crawl up my spine. Phaser's voice was low and too calm. It was the kind were you were sitting next to someone who could kill you and not blink twice.
"W-we have rights—" the Faction Master started, but Phaser interrupted.
"You lost those when you gave the order to kill me."
The tension in the room turned nuclear. Phaser's eyes locked onto the Faction Master, glowing just faintly with his shifting hues.
"Who told you to do it?"
The silence that followed was heavy.
Then, the Master cracked. "We… we didn't want to, but someone paid for it. We don't know what they were. They weren't human. They—it—just appeared. Gave us names. Instructions. Then it disappeared."
Shannon straightened up from her crouch. Her eyes went dead cold.
"What did they look like?"
He swallowed. "Tall. Silver veins. No eyes. Wore a mask. Sounded like… I can't describe it."
"What did they want?" she asked, stepping forward. Her voice had dropped, deeper, laced with something dangerous.
"I—I don't know—"
Shannon moved so fast I barely registered it. She slammed her laptop closed, grabbed the Faction Master by the collar, and lifted him with one hand like she wasn't even straining.
"I'm not here for your confusion," she hissed, her eyes glowing faintly red around the edges. "Tell. Me. What. It. Wanted."
Even Phaser looked a little cautious now, like this wasn't the part of Shannon you messed with.
"I don't know!" the Master whimpered. "It just said to kill Phaser! That's all!"
Shannon dropped him like trash and turned to the president.
"You too. Did it give you anything else?"
"I—I just saw the message. A voice. It gave a time and a location. Nothing else!"
Shannon let out a quiet exhale and stepped back. Her expression calmed, but I wasn't buying it. That rage was still simmering right under the surface.
I was scared.
No, I was actually scared for those two. Because Shannon looked like she would rip out their memories with her bare hands if they didn't cough them up soon.
"She's…" I whispered to Phaser. "She's terrifying."
He nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's why she's my favorite."
Shannon was already back to typing, her laptop humming with soft electric pulses.
"We'll extract what we can. Then decide what to do with them."
"Kill them?" I said before I could stop myself.
"They already died the moment they agreed to the hit," she said without even looking at me.
Phaser sighed, rubbing his temples. "We'll see. The memories matter more. After that? No one's gonna come looking for them anyway."
I watched those two once-powerful men, chained and powerless now, reduced to meatbags of data and disposable pawns.
And for the first time, I didn't feel bad for them.
Not even a little.