Hunting Adeline

Addie wakes blind in a kidnapper's van, worth millions

Addie regains consciousness blindfolded in a moving vehicle, her body broken from a staged car accident.

Addie wakes blind in a kidnapper's van, worth millions

Addie regains consciousness blindfolded in a moving vehicle, her body broken from a staged car accident. Two men—Rio, a tattooed Society operative, and Rick, a grungy addict—discuss the twelve-million-dollar bounty on her head. They call her the diamond because she belongs to Z, and his enemies will pay fortunes to own her. Meanwhile, in a Seattle underground cave, Zade discovers the trap too late. A bomb detonates during a Society ritual he infiltrated, and Claire Seinburg—the senator's widow he assumed was a victim—presses a gun to his skull and reveals she orchestrated everything. She is the Society. She took Addie and intends to sell her to the sickest buyers alive. Two lives fracture simultaneously: one in a van, one in an inferno.

Hospitalized and broken, Zade learns who sold Addie to the Society

Zade snaps his guard's neck in the van and escapes with Jay, his tech expert, after one of his mercenaries rams the vehicle. Claire slips away amid civilian witnesses. At the hospital, Jay reveals that Max—a former rival—answered the bounty on Addie, hiring Rick to kidnap her. The Society had killed Max's father and framed Zade, manipulating Max into revenge. When this registers, Zade erupts. He launches equipment across the room, rips out his IV, and stands with the hospital bed still strapped to his injured back—nurses and security frozen in disbelief. A single brave nurse slaps a dinosaur Band-Aid on his arm and coaxes him to sit. Jay vows to track Addie. But the man behind those mismatched eyes has already ceased to exist. Only the beast remains.

Rio shoots the doctor through the skull to keep his captive alive

At Dr. Garrison's illegal hospital, Addie wakes to discover the gray-haired physician wants her for himself. He creeps into her room at night and urges her to flee, promising safety—his hands gentle, his eyes hollow. When she refuses, his mask cracks: he backhands her, drags her toward the exit. She slashes him with a scalpel but misses the jugular. He pins her to the floor and squeezes her throat until the world telescopes to a single point of light. Then half his head evaporates. Rio stands over them, gun smoking, more annoyed than heroic. He drops Garrison's corpse on her, drenching her in brain matter, then watches her shower afterward with clinical detachment. She is cargo. He keeps cargo breathing.