Page 8 of Black and Brown

Matthew gave a solid nod.

“Don’t worry about repercussions when my team and I walk you out of this building because there will be no record you were ever here. It’ll be like you never existed. There one minute and gone the next…like a mirage.”

The guy pointed to the coat lying on the mattress.

Matthew put on the brown trench with the oversized hood, allowing it to swallow him whole before he followed the stranger out the door and into the vacant hall.

Where the hell is everyone?

Never mind, he didn’t care. He only wanted to know one thing.

“Who were the men in black?” he asked.

The stranger looked him in the eye and answered, “They’re the first-generation Ravens assassins. The Blacks. Code names Ex and Meridian.”

Grace

Grace walked through the steel doors of the lab like he’d done every morning for the past six weeks.

Rows of high-tech equipment and cutting-edge machinery were concealed within sterile white walls that gleamed under harsh fluorescent lights, making the air thick with the scent of metal and chemicals.

Scientists in white lab coats with faces hidden behind masks and goggles strapped him into a chair and connected tubes and wires to his chest, back, arms, and legs that snaked across the room and fed into mysterious contraptions.

Machines hummed with energy while screens flickered with complex data and schematics Grace didn’t care to understand.

He didn’t speak, was rarely social, and never smiled because he never had a reason to.

Grace was primed to be one of the greatest marksmen to come out of the United States Marines Advanced Sniper Academy.

He was good at shooting and hitting his target every time. It was just what he did. Hunting and shooting tin cans and mason jars off a fence was how he’d passed the time as a kid.

In the Corps, he’d followed orders to the letter, had received countless medals and accolades that meant nothing to him.

His own gunnery sergeant said he had a heart of darkness and eyes that viewed the world in black and white. Right or wrong.

There were no shades of gray.

His combination of anger and morality was what had attracted the attention of the Ravens.

A man in an expensive black suit with a corporate haircut and thousand-dollar wing-tipped shoes had told him it was an organization where fates were obliterated and legends were made.

The Ravens wanted to take his already strategic mind and exceptional shooting skills and enhance them into a finely sharpened tool designed for one purpose—killing in the name of justice.

Apparently, the Ravens organization was a place where the impossible became possible and an already extraordinary man was transformed into perfection.

He’d signed on without another thought.

“How are you feeling today, Grace?”

That wasn’t his name, but that was what they’d called him since he’d entered the building and walked down the hall with soundless footsteps and inaudible breaths.

He’d never bothered to refute it…he didn’t care what they called him.

Names, titles, and ranks meant nothing to him either.

He was affected by one thing only. What was wrong in the world…and how to make it right.

It was the reason he’d killed his father and left his corpse to rot in their run-down home on a desolate country road in Grant County, Nebraska.