MAIZE Two years ago, 3 months later

There was a notepad in front of her face from where she sat in a morning coffee shop just outside of the area her last job had been pulled off. She watched the work on the streets outside; officers in navy and blue were warding off the blocked area across the street while others were leading out a dozen or so men and women in rough condition. The news was that a call had been made on accounts of suspicious sounds having been reported in the night. By morning, the police had found several dozen members of the Morako family gang all tied up in binds prepared for arrest like a nice present on Christmas day. A spectacle as to who was responsible, as from what she could hear, no one had been able to identify the suspect.

She watched, sipping a warm coffee as the members were taken away, blazing angry, as the building they had been using to smuggle heroin and other substances was being detained by the enforcement officers.

Maize ran a line through the name and address on the notepad before her. Several already had similar lines through different places dating back three months since she had begun her solo escapade; taking out every single branch of the Morako syndicate's extended family.

Now, all that was left was one more. The centrepiece of where it had all started.

* * *

Night.

Infiltrate.

Set the explosives.

Get out.

That was the plan. Straightforward. Simple. No hesitation.

It had been a few months, but her anger was ever fresh, as if the turning point in this whole contrapted mess had happened only yesterday.

They thought they could use her. They thought she was no better than the knives she carried, a chained weapon for them to unleash as they pleased. Only for them to turn and spit her back out, try to molten her iron, snap her blade from its hilt, the moment they realized nobody could wield her but herself. Then they thought they could end her.

Well if she was no better than a blade in their eyes, they were no better than the red circled targets in hers.

A dagger was a dagger. And a target was a target.

In other words, she was about to rein hell on them. In exactly the same manner they thought they could manipulate her through; the reactors were set. It was a perfect mockery of the very mission she had refused to fulfill before they turned on her. Sweet irony seeped gleefully through her bones. She was inside the mansion, running through the large basement halls where the garage would be her exit point. She knew the layout like the back of her hand—one of the biggest risks the gang had most likely thought of knowing she was still alive and at large. The detonator was right in her pocket. She knew that the only thing left to do was get out, say sayonara, and then set the damned place ablaze with the end of a counting down clock.

Everything had gone smoothly, she had run into no problems other than the guards and what had been expected. She had thought of every scenario she might come across and how to get out of it. More guards than expected? She had knives and boots for that. A cleaning lady—though the house had never had anyone outside of the gang work anywhere near the house? Shoo her the hell away from there, tell her to get at least a few dozen hundred meters away, and then enjoy the show. Security measures? They were nothing to her, she still had all of the codes.

But then he showed up. That one mishap she had not calculated. Why? Because she had not heard anything of him since she had gone rogue. She had been able to track not a trace of him, which is why she assumed he had been sent off on another expedition out of the god damned country. He would have sought her out otherwise, she thought, he would have found her. Back then, he might have been the only one who could. Whether by choice or orders.

But then there he was. The one person she had not wanted to see anywhere near the place she was about to send in flames.

There he had stood; relaxed, poised, almost as if he were expecting to greet her like old times after one of their jobs had been completed.

But that wasn't the case tonight. The only valid thing in that thought, was that he had been expecting her.

"You're not supposed to be here," she said, her voice barely above a breathless whisper at the shock of the sight of him.

Pale eyes. Tightly thin-lined mouth. "Neither are you."

She didn't know what to think. In her mind, the timer was ticking down. 7 minutes left. She had that long to get out. Or, she had that long to do something extremely foolish.

"Z, we need to go, now, this place is going to fall apart in a matter of a few minutes and neither of us wants to be here when it does," she said urgently.

His calm demeanour was gone in an instant. What she saw then was not the face of the friend, the brother she had grown up with, but instead the mask of expression she knew him to wear only on certain occasions—only ever reserved for those he intended to become fallen targets by his hand.

Only now that it was directed at her did she truly feel the chill and see the mockery in his cold eyes for the first time.

"Neither of us are going anywhere."

She narrowed her eyes and took an uneasy step forward. "I'm not messing around Z! We need to get out of here before this place blows!"

Convince him. Leave. Together.

She had time...

A gun centred on her and made her freeze.

Down the straight line Azeal stood blocking her from the garage door out, the barrel of his own firearm stared her down the wide meter distance. She was frozen; not at the sight of the gun aimed at her chest, but because it was him who aimed it. Since she had known him, if she was more certain of anything it was that they would never turn their weapons on each other. No matter what.

So she had thought.

Her emotions must have been so clearly exposed across her face, for he had said, "I came back to the compound after a mission the day you were said to have disappeared and you know what I learned?" His voice was seething. "That you betrayed the syndicate, killed a dozen of the gang's men and then went rogue off the grid." Rogue. The simple word sounded so hurt and loathsome in his mouth—and directed at her.

Her word stumbled out in quick bursts. "Z, it's all bullshit. They twisted everything. They turned on me, that team was sent to kill me—"

He stared and then shook his head. "They wouldn't. They had no reason to..."

"They had every reason to!" She shouted, furious now at the lies the gang and sprouted. But Azeal wasn't listening.

"I don't believe you—why else would you have been busy taking out all of the syndicate's contacts and branches? Don't try and deny it, I know that was all you, Daiyu."

No, she thought. It was her—but he didn't understand. The image was wrong, the lies were twisted in the wrong way.

"The gang would never have tried to get rid of either of us, we are—were—both too valuable to them." He seemed so convinced. The gang ever turning on one of them was simply an impossibility.

She threw her arms out in frustration. "Open your eyes Z! They did! And now they made up all this bullshit about it! Don't you see they're just manipulating you like they tried to do me?" Her words were frantic, desperate, trying to reach him.

5 minutes and 42 seconds. She knew they were running out of time.

No. She still had time.

For a moment, a single moment, she thought she saw something beyond the icy mask of his expression; a flash in his eyes. Was he going to believe her? The gun didn't lower. But his eyes did.

"It's too late, Daiyu. What you did...I can't let you go..."

No. "Z, please, just come with me and I'll explain everything! Just come with me!" She pleaded.

Time. Time. Time. She needed more.

His shoulders went lax and his eyes closed for just a heartbeat. The grip on his weapon held tight with resolve. "You left me no choice."

That when she knew she had lost whatever battle she had been fighting to convince him.

Z...don't do this...she pleaded in thought, looking at him desperately.

She barely ducked under the first shot and had to roll away as he kept firing, never moving from his place.

4 minutes.

She needed more time.

She didn't have it.

The reluctance was written in her eyes she pulled her blades from her sides.

She didn't want to fight. Not him. It should have never come to this, they had always promised it would never come to this. She just had to take him out. If he was down, he couldn't stop her from leaving. She would drag him out unconscious if she had to. Tie him down later and force him to listen to everything on her side of the story.

After that everything was like a blur of nothing but motion to her.

She was able to duck under his gun and knock it away. Each of them were on par with one another; she knocked out his gun but he got one of her knives. They locked in a blade fight of hand-to-hand combat. She was careful not to strike anywhere fatal—he was not.

3 minutes and 7 seconds.

The blade he held dug in ripped a line across the back of her shoulder she had left open for an instant. The pain had almost been lost on her with her adrenaline and frantic heartbeat—but she would feel it later, and remember it always.

Her reaction before she could stop it; she wiped her blade arm towards his face. It was a reflex, but she wasn't sure if she meant for her blade to strike so close. She remembered the clench in her chest as it sliced a line running right through his eye, enough so he reeled back with a hand dripping blood.

The way he looked at her afterwards...A line had been crossed. There was no way he would ever listen to her now.

For the first time in his eyes, she saw hate directed at her. Hate, grief and rage.

She just wanted it to stop. The fighting to stop. The lies, the misunderstandings.

But it didn't. Not until both sides had fallen too far.

At some point, they both found themselves on the ground and fighting over the gun that had fallen between them.

That gun. That moment. The regret. That was when it had all ended and began.

Maize remembered the grit of her teeth as she fought against his strength to try and force the gun from his hands. She had twisted, trying to get it within her grasp. They had rolled. Hard grit of the concrete. Sharp pricks of loose gravelled stone.

Then she was over him, forcing his hands down. Their arms were locked in a battle for direction of the gun between their chests. He was stronger than her, but she had the advantage over top.

But she never meant for her finger to find the trigger. She never meant to have tightened on it.

Bang.

It all seemed to happen within an instant.

A single shot that felt like it had stopped time itself.

And then the first few drops of blood had stained her fingertips.

She and Azeal had fallen absolutely still then, laying on the floor with the gun between them. She had barely looked down to see where the smoking barrel had been, but when she saw she felt like something had stabbed through her chest. But hers was not the one beginning to bloom crimson from the centre.

His look of shock and pain mirrored her own, frozen, disbelieving, as red polled around him at too quick a pace. Too much. Too fast. It only added to the blood streaming down his face from his closed eye.

What had she done?

What had she done? What had she done? What had she done?

She immediately threw the gun and scrambled up. He did not get up.

"No...no..." Her words trembled as she backed up, staring down at the blood on her hands. It wasn't supposed to go like this. This wasn't supposed to happen.

No. No. No. No.

Her watch beeped. 1 minute 32 seconds.

Forget the time. Time had already run out for her.

Azeal didn't move.

What have I done?

She should have just stayed. Burned in the flames along with the one she had loved like the family she had never remembered—and then killed.

But she didn't.

Instead she ran.

She ran as far and as fast as she could from the damned building. She ran as fast as her shaken legs could carry her. She made a mad dash across the lawn.

Distance. She needed to make distance—

Then time had run out on the clock.

The explosion threw her foreword, where she struck the earth hard enough to wind her for several minutes. She didn't take note of the liquid running down the sides of her face—whether it was blood or tears, she didn't care. She didn't care. She lay there, unable to bring herself to even look behind her, while orange heat danced in the corners of her vision.

It felt like eons before she moved again. She never looked back, not once. She couldn't. She couldn't.

If she did, she might have been tempted just to run back into the flames.

Promises had burned in that fire.

She couldn't look back.

And so she did the only thing she could do; she ran. She ran. She ran. And though she buried the fact deep within her mind, the truth was that she had never really stopped.

Lol what was I even writing? I winged this so much oml XD

|Anyway - NEXT ON BOUNTY HUNTER...|

|"You wanted the truth, Detective. There you have it."|

|"If I asked you to do something stupid for me, would you?" "Of course—wait, that depends on how stupid we're talking."|