A Ruthless Victim by Nadia Siddiqui (best novels to read for students .txt) 📗

BESTSELLING AUTHOR

NADIA SIDDIQUI

Nathan Doe Book 3

A Ruthless Victim

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2021 Nadia Siddiqui – All Rights Reserved

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication / use of the trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

The story continues . . .

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Chapter One

D owntown Muncie, Indiana.

It looks much as he expected it to. Nathan fully expected to see tall buildings and cars parked along the street while people bustled about from shop to shop, enjoying their weekend time, no doubt. The sun is shining overhead brightly; the heat is almost dry enough to be comforting, and there’s a dull roar of conversation and traffic sounds mingling together as Nathan walks down the street. He doesn’t draw attention to himself; that’s not why he’s here. He doesn’t want people to look at him; he doesn’t want to be the object of attention. He knows that there are certainly larger populations, and while he hasn’t taken the time to look up the local schools or where typical teenagers might hang out, Nathan hopes that just by being here, he might feel a little more connected to the place. Honestly, he hoped that something would have triggered a memory, a vision of his past, anything at all. Instead, he’s wandering through the streets like a tourist in the place that he allegedly grew up. There isn’t anything to make him think that the company wouldn’t lie to him. He has to take it on faith because he simply doesn’t know anything else to go off of. They could have given him any random information at all, and he probably would have reacted the same. Nathan is conditioned to not doubt those in charge. He’s conditioned to think that this is the only way, that this is the life that he’s meant for and nothing else.

Honestly, he’s surprised that they haven’t come looking for him. Nathan has never been ‘off the grid’ for this long before. He never checked in after his last assignment, that same one where he would admit that mistakes had been made. He wasn’t going to deny that he could have done some things more efficiently, but that didn’t give them the right to go back on their end of the bargain in his opinion. Their deal was to give him pieces of information, clues about his past that would lead him down the path to his retirement, to his freedom, to no longer being a nameless creature that did their bidding. It was supposed to be the start of the end of his contract, to becoming autonomous once again. Now he’s not sure if he just pissed all of that away as well. Nathan came here because it is the only clue that he has earned so far. When he paid for his motel room and checked in, it dawned on him that perhaps he acted rashly. Perhaps he had been a touch immature to storm off looking for the place of his birth.

For all Nathan knows, he only spent a handful of days here, if in fact he had ever been here at all. Over the course of the last three days, he was bold enough to venture into a couple of antiques shops that he felt oddly drawn to, and he caught a movie and ate at every little cafe that he could find whether he was hungry or not. The movie was particularly thrilling because to his knowledge, that was the first one that he had ever seen.

Nathan drove his borrowed rental car through as many random streets and into as many suburbs as he could locate on the map in hope that something, anything, might start to feel familiar to him. Yet, the most that he has experienced is a random Deja Vu sensation that won’t leave him for anything. He’s tried to trigger a vision whenever that foggy, near familiar feeling starts to seize him. Whenever a building tempts him in even the slightest capacity, he’s pressed into buildings and runs down streets...only to come up with nothing.

It’s like he’s hovering just over the edge of something that if only he could reach his arm out just a little bit further, he would seize it.

Perhaps that’s exactly what the Company wants from him. Nathan doesn’t know how many years he’s worked for them. He doesn’t know if the Doe project is the only one that he has served on or if he has been doing this his entire life. For all he knows, his past and history are a blinding white blank in his mind, and he very well could have been employed with the company since infancy. Though he likes to think that his body knows that it was once a soldier.

Perhaps that’s just the back story that he imagines, coming to get the better of him.

Nathan gives up on his third