[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 504 - A Secret Sorrow

Ada stood beneath the showerhead.

Hot water, full blast.

Scalding water hammered her shoulders and traced down her spine, sluicing away that perpetual formalin reek the Spencer Mansion's underground facilities had worked into her skin over the years.

She closed her eyes and let the water pound against her face, trying to flush the tangled mess of thoughts out of her head along with it.

Useless.

The more she scrubbed, the sharper she felt.

She turned off the faucet, pulled a wide towel around herself, and walked barefoot out of the bathroom.

The encrypted communicator on the table was blinking.

Red light. Steady pulse.

Wesker's private channel.

She didn't need to answer to know what that perpetually sunglasses-wearing snake wanted to hiss at her. Aside from pushing her for progress, nothing else ever came out of his mouth.

Son of a bitch.

Ada left the red light blinking.

She crossed to the liquor cabinet and poured two fingers of whiskey over ice. The cold, biting liquid slid down her throat and left a brief line of fire behind it. Marginally better.

John.

The name alone made irritation crawl across her skin.

Honestly, set against the full gallery of lunatics, degenerates, and paranoids Umbrella Corporation had on the payroll, John was practically an alien. A lab rat who cared about nothing but microscopes and gene maps. Awkward, guileless, the kind of man who would stammer just trying to talk to a woman.

Getting to him had been almost embarrassingly easy.

Two well-timed dinners. A handful of hollow compliments about his research. A little carefully calculated physical contact.

That was all it took. John lost his bearings completely.

The way he looked at her was the way he looked at the most perfect cell sample he'd ever put under a lens. Fanatical. Infatuated. Utterly defenseless. He even changed his lab's core computer password to "Ada."

It should have been a flawless operation.

Get the hard drive, slip something into John's coffee, and by the time he woke up, both his goddess and his research data would have vanished off the face of the earth. She'd bring the goods back to Wesker, collect her fee, and walk out of the Spencer Mansion for good, already thinking about the next job.

But she couldn't play that script out anymore.

Ada stood at the window, glass in hand, looking out at the dark.

The glass threw her own face back at her.

Beautiful. Dangerous. Full of lies.

Everything that had gone wrong traced back 2 months.

An emergency tasking from Wesker. An informant at the Atlanta CDC had flagged an uncontrolled new virus variant. The old men on the board, smoking cigars in their safe rooms, panicked and issued a hard order to investigate.

She went.

And then she met the bastard named Leon.

Just thinking about him made her breathing stutter.

She still didn't know what had gotten into her. Walking away from a senior Umbrella Corporation agent posting to follow some man back to a falling-apart prison.

2 whole months.

Canned food. A hard iron-framed cot. The walkers screaming outside every night.

She cleared wire fencing alongside the prison survivors. Went out on supply runs with them. Watched Leon carve through the dead with a blade, watched him walk back soaked in blood, watched his throat move as he drank water in long, ragged gulps.

She was an agent. Not some disaster tourist signed up for an end-of-the-world experience.

And yet she had left every last dose of the restorative vaccine with Leon.

When they found those three Hellhounds at Leon's place, animals carrying the original T-Virus, she had looked at them and said nothing. Those dogs were critical Umbrella Corporation assets. She never mentioned them to Wesker. Not once.

The mission failed. The dogs never came back. The consequences were exactly what she should have expected.

Agent clearance downgraded.

Bonus zeroed out.

Internal review initiated.

Umbrella Corporation didn't get sentimental. The fact that she hadn't been thrown into a Tyrant's feeding trough was already a concession to her service record.

She genuinely did not care.

Clearance downgraded? Fine.

No money? She had ways.

And in this world, outside of Fort Benning and a handful of other holdouts, money didn't buy anything worth having anyway.

What actually left her restless, what she couldn't shake, was something else entirely.

It was the way she reacted now whenever she was in a room with John.

➤ Next: Mission Deadline — What Was Lost