His Untamed Prey: The Reborn Heiress

Lin kicked the rusted iron door open. Her tactical boots kicked up a thick cloud of yellow dust.

Three bullets grazed her Kevlar vest. She didn't blink. She hit the concrete floor, executing a flawless combat roll that tucked her body behind a crumbling concrete pillar.

She pulled the Glock from the drop-leg holster on her right thigh. Her breathing was slow, measured, and entirely under her control. She listened to the heavy footsteps echoing in the corridor outside.

She leaned out from cover. Her finger squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession. Three mercenaries dropped to the floor, blood pooling beneath their heads.

The earpiece crackled. Mitch's heavy breathing filled her ear. He was her second-in-command, the only man she trusted to watch her back in this hellhole. He reported that the extraction helicopter was in position on the roof.

Lin stayed low. She moved through the bullet-riddled hallway, her eyes scanning every shadow. She headed straight for the stairwell leading to the helipad.

A massive man lunged from the darkness of the landing. He swung a military-grade machete directly at her face.

Lin sidestepped. She raised her left forearm to block his wrist. Her right hand drew her combat knife and drove it upward, burying the blade deep into his carotid artery.

Hot blood sprayed across her tactical goggles. Her expression remained completely blank. She pulled the knife out with a sickening squelch and stepped over his twitching body.

She pushed open the heavy roof door. The gale-force winds and the deafening roar of the helicopter blades slammed into her.

Mitch stood by the open cabin door. He reached out his right hand, encased in a black tactical glove, offering to pull her up.

Lin reached out. She gripped his hand and used the momentum to vault onto the helicopter's metal skid. The tight muscles in her shoulders finally relaxed a fraction. The mission was over.

In the exact second their hands locked, a dark, vicious light flashed in Mitch's eyes.

Mitch twisted his left wrist. A silver syringe, hidden perfectly inside his sleeve, plunged brutally into the side of Lin's neck.

The high-pressure valve clicked. A glowing blue neurotoxin shot directly into her jugular vein.

Lin's pupils shrank to pinpricks. Her heart felt like a giant, invisible hand had crushed it.

She shoved Mitch away. She stumbled backward, her spine slamming hard against the cold metal wall of the cabin.

Mitch drew his sidearm and aimed it at her chest. He stated coldly that this was the highest directive from Commander Leland Kingston. She was too dangerous to live.

Numbness spread through Lin's limbs. Black spots danced at the edges of her vision. The neurotoxin was designed to paralyze the central nervous system within three seconds.

Mitch's finger tightened on the trigger. He prepared to deliver the final kill shot.

Lin bit down hard on the tip of her tongue. The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth. She used the sharp spike of pain to force her dying nerves to fire one last time.

One-tenth of a second before the bullet left the chamber, she twisted her torso. It was a movement that defied the physical limits of the human body.

The bullet tore through the flesh of her shoulder. She used the spinning momentum to close the distance between them.

Lin's left hand clamped down on Mitch's gun wrist. She snapped it outward with brutal force. The sharp crack of breaking bone cut through the engine noise.

Mitch screamed. The gun clattered to the floor.

Lin's right hand drew the backup dagger from her waist. She drove it upward, straight through the bottom of Mitch's jaw, pinning his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

Mitch's eyes bulged from their sockets. A wet, gurgling sound rattled in his throat. He collapsed into a pool of his own blood.

Lin's knees buckled. She crashed onto the metal floor of the cabin.

The toxin completely severed her brain's connection to her lungs. Her breathing stopped.

The world went entirely black. The helicopter lifted off into the howling wind, carrying two corpses.

The blackness stretched into infinity, then shattered to the sound of roaring thunder.

Rain poured down from the black sky over the outskirts of Washington, D. C.

Seventeen-year-old Eliza Wyatt was soaked to the bone. She pressed her trembling back against a brick wall covered in gang graffiti.

Her younger sister, Jeri Wyatt, stood at the top of the concrete stairs. Jeri held an expensive black umbrella, looking down with a cold, mocking smile.

Jeri kicked a puddle of dirty water with the tip of her designer stiletto. The muddy water splashed directly onto Eliza's pale face.

Jeri sneered. She called Eliza a useless piece of trash who brought nothing but shame to the Wyatt military family. She announced that tonight was the night Eliza would finally disappear.

Three street thugs, covered in cheap tattoos, stepped forward. Spike, the leader, flipped open a switchblade. They moved closer, trapping Eliza in the narrow stairwell.

Eliza cried out. She begged Jeri to remember they were sisters, pleading for her life.

Jeri's eyes turned venomous. She ordered Spike to take good care of the Wyatt family's eldest daughter.

Jeri turned around. Her heels clicked elegantly against the concrete as she walked away, the sound fading into the heavy rain.

Spike laughed, a disgusting, wet sound. He lunged at Eliza, his rough hands grabbing for the collar of her soaked dress.

Survival instinct flared in Eliza's chest. She shoved Spike's chest with both hands and bolted down the stairs.

The other two thugs, Cletus and Dwayne, immediately flanked her, cutting off the sides of the stairwell.

Eliza panicked. Her foot slipped on the moss-covered concrete step. Her ankle twisted with a sharp pop.

She slammed face-first onto the stairs. The rough concrete tore the skin off her knees. Blood mixed with the rain.

Spike caught up. He grabbed a handful of Eliza's long, wet hair and yanked her backward.

Eliza screamed in pain. Her hands clawed blindly at the ground, her fingernails scraping bloody lines into the cement.

She thrashed wildly. She sank her teeth into the back of Spike's hand.

Spike cursed loudly. He threw her off with a violent shove.

The shove sent Eliza reeling. Her vision exploded with white stars as she lost her balance completely.

She fell backward. She tumbled down the steep, unrailed staircase, her body hitting the edges of the steps.

Her head struck a rusted iron pipe protruding from the wall. A sickening thud echoed in the alley.

Her body hit the bottom landing like a broken doll. Blood rapidly pooled around her head, washing away in the rain.

Spike stood at the top of the stairs. He peered down into the darkness, spat into the puddle, and assumed she was dead.

Eliza's pupils dilated. Her heartbeat stopped entirely beneath the roar of the storm.

In that exact fraction of a second, a massive, freezing current of consciousness violently forced its way into the empty shell.

The dead heart contracted with a violent, explosive beat.

Shattered neurons fired wildly. Deep within her consciousness, a fragmented memory of "Project Chimera"-a disbanded black-ops military program-exploded, its residual energy beginning to forcibly reconstruct her dying brain pathways.

The girl on the ground twitched her fingers. A drop of bloody water splashed.

Eliza's eyes snapped open. The cowardly, terrified look was completely gone. In its place was a gaze of absolute, freezing depths.

Lin, the top commander of Project Chimera, had officially awakened inside this broken body.

Eliza tried to move her right arm. A sharp, stabbing pain shot through her shoulder. The bone was fractured.

A massive wave of foreign memories crashed into her brain. Jeri's fake smile, the cold stares of the Wyatt family, the humiliation at school. The images flashed like a high-speed projector.

Eliza clenched her jaw. She forced the dizziness down, compartmentalizing the memories of the original owner. She looked down at her pale, trembling hands-hands that had never held a gun or snapped a neck. For a brief, surreal second, the name 'Lin' echoed like a ghost from a past life, distant and unreal. The top commander was dead. But in this fragile, bleeding shell, Eliza Wyatt was very much alive.

At the top of the stairs, Spike lit a cigarette. He jerked his chin at Cletus, ordering him to go down and strip the corpse of anything valuable.

Cletus splashed down the wet steps, muttering curses under his breath. He stopped next to Eliza's body.

He crouched down. He reached out his dirty hand to rip the silver necklace from Eliza's throat.

The moment his fingers brushed her cold skin, the dead girl moved.

Eliza's uninjured left hand shot out like a striking viper. Her fingers locked onto Cletus's wrist, pressing perfectly on the pulse point to numb his arm. He was off-balance, crouching, expecting a corpse-not a counterattack. His body was already in the worst possible position to defend himself.

Cletus froze. Before he could even open his mouth to yell, Eliza used his arm as leverage and thrust her hips upward.

She wrapped both her legs tightly around Cletus's neck. Using the dead weight of her own body, she twisted violently to the right. It was a textbook ground-fighting submission, executed with the precision of someone who had drilled it ten thousand times.

A crisp, sickening crack echoed in the stairwell. Cletus's cervical spine snapped. He collapsed onto her, dead before he hit the ground.

Spike and Dwayne heard the noise from above. They yelled Cletus's name, their voices tight with sudden panic.

Eliza shoved the heavy corpse off her. She reached into Cletus's pocket and pulled out his switchblade. She flicked it open with her thumb.

She couldn't outrun them with a broken ankle and fractured ribs. She couldn't overpower two armed men with one working arm. So she wouldn't fight. She would ambush.

She ignored the screaming pain in her ribs and her broken arm. She pressed her back flat against the concrete load-bearing pillar beneath the stairs, merging with the shadows.

Spike drew his knife. He and Dwayne crept down the stairs, their eyes wide with fear.

They saw Cletus's body lying in the bloody water. Both men gasped, cursing and looking wildly around the empty landing.

Dwayne turned his back to the pillar. Eliza launched herself from the darkness like a hunting leopard.

She clamped her left hand over Dwayne's mouth. Her right hand drove the switchblade across his throat without a millisecond of hesitation.

Hot blood sprayed over her hand. Eliza coldly shoved Dwayne's dying body forward, sending him crashing into Spike to block his line of sight.

Spike lost his mind with terror. He swung his knife wildly in the air, screaming.

Eliza dropped into a low slide, dodging the frantic blade. She slammed the heavy handle of her switchblade directly into the side of Spike's knee joint.

Spike shrieked and dropped to his knees.

Eliza flipped her knife in a reverse grip. She slashed upward, cleanly severing the tendons in his right wrist. His knife clattered to the concrete.

Spike clutched his bleeding wrist, howling in the rain. He looked up at Eliza as if he were staring at a demon from hell.

Eliza stood up. She looked down at him. There was zero human warmth in her eyes, only the cold calculation of a soldier.

She ripped the dry jacket off Cletus's corpse. She used her teeth and her left hand to tie her fractured right arm tightly against her torso, immobilizing the shattered shoulder.

The faint wail of police sirens drifted through the storm. Someone in the nearby apartments had called the cops.

Eliza knew this weak body was failing. She had to evacuate immediately.

She stepped over Spike's trembling body. She walked out into the freezing rain without looking back.

The rain washed the blood from her pale face. She looked up at the winding mountain road in the distance. The fire of revenge burned quietly in her chest.