Fake Dating The Bad Boy
Chapter 121: Not Here

Chapter 121: Not Here

Justin – POV

Glass walls. Bright lights. Cold steel tables. That sterile, fucking metallic stench of bleach and medicine and death.

The minute I stepped into the upper-level corridor, I felt it.

Wrong. Cold. Clinical. And it had her name written all over it.

Then I saw her.

Or—I thought I did.

Behind a sealed glass partition, a girl was strapped to a metal examination table. Wrists bound, ankles pinned in place with steel braces. Her blouse torn open, chest rising and falling in shallow, labored gasps. A mop of dark hair. Pale skin. Blood at the corners of her mouth.

For one long, shattering moment—my heart stopped.

"June."

I didn’t remember drawing my weapon. Didn’t remember slamming the butt of it against the scanner panel beside the door. The red light blinked, denied access. I didn’t wait for a second rejection—I slammed my body through the reinforced glass, shattering it in a hailstorm of safety shards.

Alarms screamed.

Doctors shouted.

"Get a sedative—her vitals are crashing—"

"She’s flatlining—code black—code black!"

Three of them. All dressed in white. One man holding a syringe, his hand shaking. Another flipping through charts. A third frozen, staring at me like I was death himself.

And maybe I was.

I didn’t speak. Didn’t breathe. My body moved on instinct.

First man—syringe—gone. I tackled him into the tray, tools clattering to the ground. My fist met his mouth before he could scream. I grabbed the closest object—a long, slender scalpel—and jammed it into his thigh. He wailed. Good.

Second—papers—fucking idiot—I hurled him across the room. He crashed into the cabinet, spine cracking against it with a satisfying thud.

The third ran. Mistake.

I tackled him before he reached the exit, slamming his face against the floor. Blood spattered against the tile. He begged. I didn’t care. Not yet.

I turned.

The girl still lay there.

Unmoving. Eyes open. Glazed. Skin too pale. Too blue.

God. No. No.

My knees hit the tile hard as I scrambled to the table, shoving aside whatever restraints were blocking me. My fingers shook. I didn’t care. I yanked the straps loose, pressed two fingers to her throat—

No pulse.

No—

No, no, no.

"JUNE!" My voice cracked. It didn’t even sound like me.

I reached for her face. "Baby, please—no—wake up—"

But when I really looked—really looked—I saw it.

This wasn’t June.

Her hair was darker. Skin cooler. Mouth smaller. Her jaw didn’t match. She was... a replica. A decoy.

My heart broke again—but this time with a rush of relief so sharp it almost made me sick.

It’s not her.

It wasn’t June.

I sank to the floor, hands in my hair, chest heaving like I’d run for miles. My mouth opened, but nothing came out. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to scream or sob or rip someone else apart.

I thought she was dead.

"Boss—come in." Rico’s voice crackled through my earpiece.

I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t.

Not when the girl on the table was convulsing now, foaming at the mouth.

One of the downed doctors stirred. "The dose—was too strong. She wasn’t ready—"

I kicked him in the ribs, hard enough to crack something.

"Where is she?" I growled. "Where’s the real one? Where’s June?"

"I—I don’t—she’s not—here—"

I grabbed a needle off the tray and drove it straight into the soft flesh of his shoulder.

"Wrong answer."

He screamed.

**********

My knuckles bled. My boots were slick with glass and spit. The screaming had long since stopped—only groans remained.

But she wasn’t here.

June isn’t here.

I repeated it over and over again, like a fucking mantra, trying to hold onto the flicker of hope that hadn’t yet died inside me. Because if I didn’t believe that—if I even let myself think she was gone—I would unravel completely.

And I couldn’t afford to lose it.

Not yet.

Not until every single one of these bastards paid in blood.

The kids we found in the lower levels—barely alive, half-starved, some still strapped to their beds—were real. That was the only thing that steadied me.

That tip had been real.

I stood in the corridor, watching as my team guided the last of them out—ten, maybe twelve children, all under fourteen. Some were crying. Some were silent. All of them were broken.

But they were alive.

At least we got to save them.

"Take them to Haven," I ordered coldly, voice still hoarse from rage. "They’ll be safe there."

Haven. My orphanage. The one I’d built from scratch with blood money and the broken bricks of my past. It had always been meant as a place for kids like us—the ones the system forgot. The ones the world experimented on, tortured, threw away.

It was supposed to be a sanctuary.

Now, it was a graveyard of ghosts.

I stayed behind.

Because there was still work to do.

The real work.

Rico found me a few minutes later, wiping blood off his blade, face pale but determined. "You want me to escort the kids?"

"No. Stay. We need to move the staff."

He didn’t ask where.

He knew.

A prison for men too dangerous to let go, too evil to kill quickly. I had built it with monsters in mind. And now?

It was time to use it.

The Cave – Two Hours Later

The whitecoats were lined up on their knees, shackled, bruised, trembling. Their sterile coats were bloodied, their mouths gagged.

Eight of them.

All screaming behind their cloths.

I didn’t bother removing the gags. I didn’t care what they had to say yet. Not until they bled like the children they ruined.

I stood above them in the torchlit cavern, a steel table of tools behind me—everything they’d used on those kids. Needles. Straps. Knives. A saw.

And then there was me.

Bare-chested. Blood-splattered. Gloves on.

The voices were loud now. Whispering, hissing, feeding me all the words I didn’t want to admit were true.

You let her go.

You should have burned it all down.

They took her. They took her and you didn’t stop it.

All dressed in identical white coats. All with the same cowardly fear in their eyes. One flinches when I step forward. Another starts to speak—something stupid, something defensive—but I don’t let him finish.

My fist meets his jaw, sharp and clean. He yelps, tipping sideways in the chair.

"Where is she?" I snarl, voice raw. "Where’s June?"

No one answers.

I walked slowly to the first one.

He had a stethoscope still hanging around his neck. A coward. Just a paper-pusher probably. I didn’t care.

I gripped his collar, yanked him up to his knees. "Where is Number Twelve?"

His eyes widened.

Recognition.

I pulled the gag down. "Say it."

He coughed. "W-who—?"

I slammed his head into the stone floor.

"Number Twelve," I snarled. "Where is she? June. The girl you kept drugged. The one who escaped. The one you’ve been hunting ever since."

"I—I was only running data—I don’t—"

I didn’t let him finish. I took a scalpel from the table and drove it into his thigh. Deep. Twisting. He screamed, biting down on his own tongue.

Good.

I moved to the next.

An older woman. Cold eyes. She stared at me like I was beneath her.

She didn’t respond.

So I cut her.

Right across the cheek. Then the other. Thin lines. Shallow at first.

"You should feel it exactly how they did," I whispered, dragging the blade down her jaw. "Every second. Every nerve ending."

Her screams were music.

I didn’t stop.

I couldn’t stop.

"Number Twelve," I said calmly. "Where is she?"

"We’re just researchers," another pipes up—voice too high, too fast. "We were told to maintain dosages. Run baseline neural testing. We don’t pick the subjects—we just record!"

I turn on him, my vision tunneling. "Do you ever think about what you’re recording? What you’re doing to them? Did you stop when they screamed?"

He tries to stand. I kick the chair out from under him. He crashes to the floor, coughing.

"You think this is just a job? You think you’re innocent?"

I crouch beside him, grabbing the back of his neck. "You’re complicit. You injected poison into children. You dosed a girl to death just so you could write down how long it took her to stop breathing."

The next man got the needle. I injected him with one of their own mixtures. A paralytic they used on the kids to keep them from thrashing during ’tests.’ He went still—but not numb.

The horror in his eyes as I broke his fingers one by one was almost enough to satisfy me.

Almost.

"Where is she?" I growled over and over. "WHERE IS SHE?"

None of them answered.

Or maybe they truly didn’t know.

But I didn’t care.

They wore the coats. They pressed the syringes. They strapped down the wrists. They watched those kids cry.

And now, they would know exactly what it meant.

No mercy. No quick deaths. No courtroom justice.

Just pain.

I went methodical.

Rico didn’t stop me. My team didn’t interfere. They knew better. They’d seen what June meant to me. They’d seen what the labs did to us. No one flinched when the screaming echoed through the cave. No one blinked when the air turned copper thick and stifling.

Only me.

I didn’t flinch.

Didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe.

Because she wasn’t here. And every second I wasted in this blood-soaked cavern was another second she was out there, alone. Hurting. Waiting.

But the rage was the only thing keeping me from collapsing.

"Start talking," I bark to the room. "Any of you. Where’s the next facility? Who’s behind this?"

Silence.

I pace.

I see scalpels. A tray of syringes. The smell of ammonia clings to everything.

"Fine."

I drag a chair into the center of the room and toss a tray of instruments to the floor.

"You know what I learned in the facility?" I ask calmly. "How to make a human beg."

Their faces pale.

The voices didn’t quiet.

They cheered.

They sang.

"I’ll find you," I whispered later that night, staring into the blood-slicked walls, knife still dripping in my hand. "Even if I have to burn the whole fucking world down."

Because I wasn’t done yet.

This was just the beginning.