"I was tracking Takeda. I had him on camera, I saw him board that train. He went dark right when I was heading toward him."
"And the train didn't stop. No platform. No chance to disembark. If those men weren't Takeda and his partner, then where the hell did he go?"
"I was so sure one of them was Takeda," Rin muttered aloud, voice tightening with frustration. "I couldn't find him anywhere on the train. The footage cut out, then I saw nothing."
Kai didn't respond immediately. He was humming softly now, tapping a tune on the wheel, lost in his own world.
Rin stared out the window. Pine trees flew by like blurred lines. Mountains loomed distant in the haze. His own reflection stared back at him in the glass, pale and pissed.
"It's like chasing ghosts with him around. Nothing ever makes sense. Everyone I meet turns into a suspect, and Kai treats it like a damn movie."
"But something isn't right. Takeda's disappearance isn't random. That attack wasn't just racism. It was too perfectly timed. Too clean."
"And now Kai's dodging again. He knows something."
Rin was staring at kai intently ...kai who was driving
"Where were you when all that happened?" Rin asked tightly, narrowing his eyes.
The headache was still simmering under his skull, a dull hammer behind his eyes, but that didn't matter now. He was chasing something more important than pain — clarity. Every missing second felt like a blank page in a critical chapter.
Kai didn't flinch. He didn't even pretend to be surprised. Instead, he tilted his head slightly, the corner of his mouth curling into that infuriating half-smile.
"Are you suspecting me?" he asked, voice full of amusement. "Or are you just whining because I wasn't around to help you?"
There it was again.
That smirking defense. The way he deflected suspicion by making it sound ridiculous. It was so casual it could almost pass for charm — but Rin knew better.
He'd seen Kai lie with that exact same grin. Under torture. At gunpoint. Even when the blood was still wet on his hands.
Rin didn't respond to the provocation. Instead, he pressed on, voice flat:
"I searched the entire train for Takeda, but I couldn't find him... or you."
Kai lifted a brow, clearly enjoying this. "Is that so? But you never appeared where I was either."
Rin's brow twitched. "What do you mean?"
"You didn't come to the driver's compartment."
That pulled Rin up short.
"The driver's compartment…?" he repeated, narrowing his eyes. "Why were you there?"
Kai leaned one elbow against the window and began explaining like a teacher reciting a bedtime story — calm, composed, and just a little patronizing.
"Unlike you, who fell asleep on the job," he said sweetly, "I was awake all night. Watching Takeda."
Rin clenched his teeth, jaw ticking. Kai always said watching like he was talking about birds or prey or porn — never with the professionalism it deserved.
Kai continued. "He left his cabin around 3 a.m. It was weird. That's usually when he's curled up with a book like a good little boy. And we weren't anywhere near Angarsk yet, so it wasn't time for him to disembark."
He gave Rin a pointed look, one that said if someone had been paying attention, they'd have seen it too.
"So I headed to his cabin," Kai went on, "and chatted up the attendant. Lovely girl. Dead asleep, but once I woke her up she was surprisingly helpful. She said Takeda had asked how to change his destination — from Angarsk... to Moscow."
"Moscow?"
That made no sense. If he planned on going to Moscow, he should've bought a damn ticket to Moscow. Why change it mid-transit? Unless—"
Kai was already answering the question before Rin could voice it.
"She told him he'd have to go meet with the train driver directly to authorize the change. So that's what he did."
Rin felt the weight of the pieces clicking together in his head — slowly, ominously, like cogs in some ancient trap.
"Wait—" he muttered, "That means…"
Kai grinned. "Yup. All this time, he was in the driver's compartment. Right under your nose."
"That's why he disappeared off the internal CCTV."
"That's why the signal was lost. The driver's area must've been cut off from the standard surveillance system — probably by design."
"We thought they'd make contact with him at Angarsk. We expected someone to board from the outside. But no— they didn't need to. The contact was already on the train."
Kai said it like he was revealing a plot twist in a book Rin hadn't read yet.
"The driver was the Romanov contact. That's how they did it," Kai confirmed.
Rin exhaled sharply, hand running through his hair in disbelief. His scalp still ached from where he was struck, but he barely noticed now.
"We got played."
"I was scanning cabins, checking cameras, reviewing movement logs, while the actual damn meeting was happening in the one place I couldn't see."
He grit his teeth.
"They fooled us." he said aloud, voice low.
Kai looked almost impressed. "Yup. Like rookies. They used our assumptions against us. We thought they'd bring someone onboard to make contact. We never considered the contact was already driving the train."
Rin groaned softly, slamming his fist lightly on his thigh. "I can't believe it... all that time, I kept thinking something was off. But I was still looking in the wrong direction."
"And Takeda played it perfectly. He vanished without a trace. Got protection from the driver. Probably handed over whatever intel he was carrying and was gone by the time we caught on."
"I should've trusted my instincts. I should've checked the driver's room. Should've followed the anomaly, not the routine."
Kai reached over and gave Rin a casual pat on the shoulder — condescending and smug.
"Don't be too hard on yourself. You were busy having your head cracked open."
"So what happened? Did we lose them or what?" Rin asked sharply, his voice low, tight, a storm barely leashed.
Kai, of course, didn't flinch. His fingers danced lightly on the steering wheel, a smug smile flickering across his face like a man who enjoyed being vague.
"Well... yes and no..." Kai said with that infuriating tone.
Rin's eyes narrowed, voice sharp enough to cut glass. "Give me a proper answer, Kai."
Kai shrugged casually, gaze fixed on the road ahead. "To cut things short... Takeda didn't get off at Angarsk."
Rin's eyes flashed. "Then where the hell—"
"After meeting with the driver, he left... on a helicopter that had already been prepared." Kai glanced over, that same crooked smirk never leaving. "He vanished. On a moving train."
For a moment, Rin just stared. His brain, usually razor-sharp, staggered under the weight of what he just heard.
"Is that possible?" he asked, more out of disbelief than anything else.
"Nothing's impossible," Kai said smoothly. "Not if you don't mind risking your life."
Rin leaned back in his seat, eyes unfocused. The pieces clicked together — painfully.
Takeda must've gone to the driver's compartment under the pretense of changing his destination… that much lines up. The driver? His contact from the Romanovs' end. The moment they got word I was snooping too close, they pulled the plug.
The helicopter — it was already waiting. Coordinated. Timed to perfection. All they had to do was slow the train slightly — just enough to make the jump possible. We were nearing Angarsk anyway… no one would question a slight deceleration.
And me? I was stumbling around the corridor like a goddamn idiot, worrying about skinhead decoys by the bathroom...
Rin's jaw locked, rage simmering under his calm surface.
"You just stood back and did nothing?!" he said, turning to glare at Kai, voice thick with disbelief.
Kai raised a brow, still maddeningly unbothered. "What else was I supposed to do? Shoot down a helicopter with my charm?"
"You could've at least tried to stop it—"
"And what, Rin? Tip our hand early? I didn't think we needed to catch him right away. Sometimes it's better to let the snake think it got away. Plus—" Kai glanced over again, voice dripping with mock innocence. "—I didn't think you'd get clocked unconscious and left drooling in front of the restroom, but hey, I'm not a psychic."
Rin's fists clenched so tight his knuckles cracked. He turned back toward the window, biting down on the rising urge to throttle Kai.
He's always like this. Calculated. Dispassionate. Arrogant. But not stupid. Never stupid. He wouldn't have let Takeda go unless he had an ace up his sleeve. Which means—
"How are you so confident we'll find him again?" Rin asked coldly.
Kai didn't answer. Not with words.
Instead, he reached into his coat pocket and casually tossed something into Rin's lap. A small, black tracker. The red LED blinked slowly — alive. Active. Connected.
"Because I never intended to lose him." Kai said simply, with a smirk that said checkmate.
Rin stared at the tiny blinking tracker now resting in his palm, the red pulse beating in perfect rhythm — too calm, too quiet for what it represented. His jaw clenched, fingers twitching as if to crush it, not out of anger but calculation.
He lifted his head, eyes narrowing into sharp slits.
"How did you even put it on him? Did you stick it on him or something?" Rin asked slowly, suspicion laced through every word.
Kai scoffed as he leaned back against the driver's seat, one hand lazily draped over the steering wheel, the other playing with a mint he flicked between his fingers like it was a coin in a bet he knew he'd already won.
"Oh, come on. That would've been too obvious," Kai said with a smirk, lips curving just a little too knowingly.
"So then… what did you do?" Rin asked, his voice flatter now, more careful — the kind of tone he used when he knew the answer wouldn't be sane but needed it anyway.
Kai didn't answer immediately. Instead, he let the silence stretch just a beat too long — deliberate. Controlled. Then, with that same sly smile curling his lips:
"I fed it to him."
"...Say what?" Rin blinked. The air inside the car suddenly felt colder, heavier.
Kai shrugged like it was obvious, still watching the road with half a glance. "He'd been nibbling on bread for days. Poor guy looked like a monk on a fast. I figured he was getting desperate for something more... familiar. Something warm. So I got in good with the snack attendant."
Rin listened without interrupting, the image beginning to build itself in his head like puzzle pieces clicking into place.
"You used instant noodles."
Kai chuckled. "Bingo. Spicy beef flavor. Not exactly gourmet, but it gets the job done. People let their guard down when they think they're doing something mundane. Eating, sleeping, shitting — those are the windows."
Rin's lips pressed into a line. He hated that Kai was right. Hated it with the kind of resentment that was born from knowing you couldn't argue against genius when it came dressed in recklessness.
'So he planted the tracker inside the noodles, probably in the seasoning packet or under the dehydrated vegetables, and asked the snack attendant to offer it directly to Takeda. And Takeda — starving, bored of bread, and probably missing home — took the bait.'
It was infuriatingly simple. And it worked.
Rin stared harder at the tracker in his palm, watching the faint glow. He could already feel the hours counting down in his mind — the average human digestive window flashing behind his eyes.
'A day. Maybe a day and a half. That's all the time we have before this thing gets flushed out with everything else. And we'll be back at zero.'
The worst part?
Kai had been the one to get them this lead.
'Had we tried to grab Takeda directly, there would've been chaos. The Romanovs would've known someone was onto them. They would've scrubbed the meeting, buried Scythe-9 even deeper, and we'd never find it again. This way… we still have a shot.'
Rin exhaled slowly through his nose. Logic always won. He had to admit — Kai had played it well. Too well.
'He always walks this tightrope between reckless and brilliant. One day he's going to slip — and take someone with him. I just hope it's not me.'
"Had to let the mouse out of the trap," Kai said casually, voice too cheerful. "Now we follow it to the nest."
"And what? Watch him long enough until he leads us to Scythe-9?" Rin muttered.
Kai grinned. "Exactly. I knew you were smart, Rin."
Rin didn't return the compliment.
Instead, he clenched the tracker tighter in his hand, the red light flashing between his fingers like a countdown.
'This mission isn't about catching Takeda. It's about Scythe-9. We're not the cops. We're not here to make arrests. The objective is intel. But that doesn't mean I have to like the way we're doing it.'
He sat back in his seat, eyes trained forward but unfocused, already running routes in his mind — flight paths, travel logs, distance to Moscow, safehouses, known Romanov assets.
'We have a day. Maybe less. Kai's chaos gave us a lead... and now it's my turn to clean up after it. we can only hope that he reaches sycthe-9 by then.'
"How's your head? The cut was stapled shut."
Rin blinked, slowly turning to look at him. Stapled. Not bandaged. Not sutured. Stapled. The pain behind his left eye flared slightly.
"Come to think of it," Rin thought, squinting, "I was hit pretty damn hard. But there's barely any blood on me. Clothes are clean. My head isn't soaked. So someone… patched me up. But who? Please, for the love of everything sacred, let it be a professional. A medic. A doctor. Not..."
"Who bandaged it?" Rin asked flatly, dreading the answer.
Kai smiled, almost too proud. His lips curled with a flicker of arrogance.
"Mig älskling," he said in silky Swedish, tossing his hair back like a model in a shampoo commercial.
Rin stared at him, unblinking.
"What the hell did you just say to me?"
"Me, darling," Kai translated with a wink. "The cut was about seven centimeters when I found you. You had so much blood on your head, it looked like a red slushie exploded on you. I had to change your clothes. Judging by the wound, you were probably hit with something crude—wooden, flat, likely a plank. Your flesh was so soft, it was like hammering a nail into tenderized meat."
Kai let out a low whistle as if reminiscing.
Rin winced. Physically. His head actually throbbed harder just hearing that. He pressed his fingers to his temple, half in pain, half in shame.
"My cut's starting to hurt just listening to his bullshit," Rin thought bitterly. "Hammering nails into meat? Is he a sociopath or just romantically committed to metaphors no one asked for?"
"Let's change the damn subject." Rin muttered, dragging a hand down his face.
Kai grinned. "Anyway, did you say goodbye to Okailey?"
Rin raised a brow. "Who?"
Kai blinked, dramatic. "What do you mean who?"
"I don't—"
"The Ghanaian woman. Plenty hair, big personality. The one about to get married. Didn't you take a liking to her?"
Rin groaned audibly. "Did I...?" he said, dragging the words out like they physically exhausted him.
"You said you never sleep with the same person twice, yet you did with her three whole times," Rin added, rubbing his temple harder.
Kai shrugged, smug. "So that's what this is about. Technically speaking, she was your type."
Rin's jaw twitched.
"Huh?" he said, clearly not liking where this was going.
Kai kept driving, nonchalantly drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. "Didn't you say you liked women with big breasts and ass, tall? Dark skin, bold personality, dominant energy—you said alpha types make you feel safe or something."
Rin blinked at him like he'd just been slapped with a wet sponge.
"I said that once. In passing. While drunk."
Kai raised a brow. "I thought she'd satisfy you enough."
"He seduced her… for me?" Rin thought, a mix of disgust and reluctant horror twisting in his gut. "That woman had a fiancé. And he turned her into some kind of therapeutic offering? Is that what he thinks I need?"
Rin groaned, dragging his palm down his face. "You seduced her to—what—treat me?"
"You needed vitamin S," Kai said smugly.
Rin tilted his head slowly. "What the hell is that even supposed to mean?"
Kai snorted. "Sex, Rin. You needed sex. You looked like a deprived monk, all stern brows and tight lips. Honestly, I was starting to worry you'd bite someone in the middle of the night."
Rin's eye twitched. "If I bite you, it'll be because you deserve it."
He turned back toward the window, fighting the urge to bang his head against the glass.
"He thinks this is funny," Rin thought bitterly. "He thinks it's all just games and psychological manipulation. Like I'm some toy soldier he needs to 'fix' by throwing sex at me. What, does he think I'll start laughing and skipping after one night with some stranger? I'm not like him. I don't just… detach."
Rin exhaled sharply through his nose, narrowing his eyes.
"And worst of all... she didn't even seem like she was playing Kai's game. She seemed genuine. Like she was trying to reach me. And he used her like a pawn anyway."
Rin clenched his fists in his lap.
"I don't need his scraps. I don't need whatever twisted version of 'help' he thinks this is."
Kai glanced sideways at him, amused. "You're awfully quiet. Was I right? Did she work her magic on you?"
Rin didn't look at him. "Keep your eyes on the road."
Kai just laughed.