Chapter 145 Personally Slaying the Traitorous Villain

Chapter 145 Personally Slaying the Traitorous Villain

The motion-sensor lights flickered on as they entered the basement, flooding the wide open space with cold white light.

Isabelle had long since converted the place into a sealed fortress that served as both a lab and an interrogation room.

The walls were lined with thick soundproofed steel panels. The air carried a faint smell of chemicals mixed with the hard, cold bite of metal.

Isabelle dumped the man into a custom-built metal chair and expertly bound his arms and legs with heavy-duty tactical zip ties.

He gasped for air, staring up at her in terror, this girl with the icy composure and the ruthlessness that put professional killers to shame.

He clenched his jaw and made one last attempt at defiance. "You'd better let me go right now. You have no idea who you're dealing with."

"No idea?" Isabelle let out a short, contemptuous laugh, her eyes full of mockery.

She walked to the refrigeration unit along the wall, pulled it open, and retrieved a syringe filled with pale blue liquid.

It was her own improved version of Syndicate's internal truth serum formula, higher purity, faster acting, and far more destructive to the nervous system.

Isabelle stepped in front of the man and, without a word, drove the needle precisely into the vein on the side of his neck.

Every drop of the blue solution emptied into his bloodstream.

The man's entire body seized up with a grunt, his eyes instantly shot through with red.

The drug hit fast. The violent sensation of his nerves being stripped raw sent his pupils drifting and his breathing turned ragged and erratic.

Isabelle pulled over a swivel chair and sat down across from him.

She crossed her legs, idly turning the meteorite scalpel between her fingers, and spoke in a flat, cold voice. "Who sent you?"

The man bit down hard on the tip of his tongue, trying to use the pain to stay sharp, but the serum had already taken control of his vocal cords. "Head... headquarters..."

"Which headquarters?"

"The... Syndicate..." The two words seemed to drain the last of his strength. His head dropped forward.

Isabelle's hand stilled for just a moment. Something cold and predatory moved through her dark eyes.

Syndicate. She'd expected as much. Ever since Caius had let word slip through Europe's underground networks, the old guard back at headquarters had clearly run out of patience.

"Syndicate headquarters and its dirty little games, some things never change after all these decades." Isabelle gave a cold smile. She tapped the tip of the blade lightly under the man's chin, forcing his head up. "Let me guess. It was that paranoid old dog Beria who sent you."

At the name, the man's unfocused pupils snapped tight. Pure terror spread across his face like he'd seen a ghost.

Beria, one of the supreme powers at Syndicate headquarters. Ruthless, secretive, untraceable. His name was an absolute taboo across Europe's entire underworld.

Not even senior FBI officials would necessarily know that name, let alone some ordinary female college student from Washington.

"How do you... how could you possibly know..." The man's voice shook. The way he looked at her had shifted, like he was staring at something that shouldn't exist.

"I don't just know his name. I know he loves using disposable trash like you to test the waters." Isabelle's eyes went ice cold. Her wrist snapped forward.

The razor-sharp scalpel drove into the man's already-disabled left arm, the blade threading past the main artery with surgical precision before severing a bundle of nerves.

A raw, agonized scream rang through the soundproofed basement. The man convulsed violently against the metal chair.

"My patience has limits." Isabelle pulled the scalpel free, trailing a string of blood droplets. Her voice was suffocating in its coldness. "Tell me everything Beria sent you here to do. Every single word. Or the next cut severs your spinal nerve."

Under the combined assault of the truth serum and the searing physical pain, the man's defenses collapsed completely. Tears and snot streaked down his face as he choked out everything he knew in broken fragments.

"Lord Beria... suspects you... suspects you're connected to 'Nyx'..." He gulped for air, blood dripping steadily from his arm onto the floor. "What you did at the racing circuit, and those mercenaries seen around you, it caught headquarters' attention. His orders were to... find out who you really are, then bring you into Syndicate. If you refused... eliminate you on the spot."

The basement fell into a brief, dead silence.

Isabelle leaned back in the swivel chair, fingertips slowly tracing the scalpel handle, the contempt in her eyes deepening.

Bring her in?

She knew Beria too well.

A man consumed by paranoia, willing to betray anything and anyone for power, there was no way he would let someone with a suspected connection to Nyx stay alive in this world.

His fear of Nyx had been burned into his bones.

He would rather kill a thousand innocent people than leave a single loose end that might threaten his position.

The so-called recruitment order this man had been given was nothing but cover. A story for public consumption.

The real mission had been termination at any cost, from the very beginning.

"Fool." Isabelle stood and looked down at the barely conscious man without a trace of pity, stripping away the last of his illusions. "If Beria actually wanted to recruit me, he wouldn't have sent you in carrying lethal weapons. To him, you were never anything more than a probe, a pawn to test the path. The moment you failed, he had a dozen ways to make your death disappear without a trace."

The man flinched. His eyes went wide with a hollow, dawning despair, as if he was only now understanding that he'd been used as cannon fodder all along.

"But it doesn't matter." Isabelle leaned in slightly, her eyes as merciless as a reaper's. "You won't have to worry about any of that much longer."

The words had barely left her mouth before the scalpel in her hand became a streak of black lightning.

The blade swept across his carotid artery with perfect precision, a clean, deep cut. Blood surged out instantly, spattering across the cold steel floor.

A few wet, rattling sounds escaped the man's throat. His body shuddered a few times, then his pupils went slack and empty. He was gone.

Isabelle looked at the body with no expression on her face.

She reached for a few antiseptic wipes and cleaned the blood from the scalpel in unhurried, methodical strokes.

Syndicate's reach had extended all the way to Washington. Now that Beria had started to suspect, he wouldn't stop.

Tonight was only the beginning. The moves against her would keep coming, and they'd keep getting more reckless. But so what? She hadn't come back to this game to let the people who betrayed her sleep easy.

She tossed the bloodied wipes into the incinerator and pulled out a matte black encrypted phone from her pocket.

She pressed Sean's private number directly.

It picked up before the second ring. A low, smooth male voice came through, carrying the slight roughness that comes with late nights. "Not asleep yet?"

"Something came up." Isabelle's tone was perfectly even, like she was discussing what to have for a late-night snack. She glanced at the blood and the body on the floor. "Lend me two people. There's some trash that needs clearing out at the west villa."