Deliverance

Prologue

Seto Kaiba finished typing an email in the back of his limo, shut off his laptop and began to pack it away as the vehicle slowed down. Mokuba was trying to talk him into taking an actual vacation this summer, and although he hadn’t committed to anything yet, he was doing his best to stay ahead of work so he would be able to ignore Kaiba Corp. for a few weeks while his younger brother tried to persuade him that the beach was not, as Seto had always argued, evil.

There was nothing fun about being stuck in the middle of a pile of sand, which would inevitably stick to everything it touched, with nothing to distract him from the fact that he was the skinniest and palest person on the beach. Mokuba had insisted that they didn’t need to rent a private cabana this year, arguing that Seto would never meet a nice girl if he kept hiding in the shade behind a computer every time Mokuba tried to get him to do something fun. At twenty-six, Mokuba still had not quite discovered that meeting a less than nice girl in a club was usually a hell of a lot more fun than looking for a nice girl anywhere. Or he had just gotten better at hiding such excursions from the security Seto had assigned to watch him. But Seto didn’t think so. Every time he assigned someone to follow his brother when he said he was going to a friend’s house to study, they reported seeing the younger Kaiba dutifully sitting on a couch with a textbook for the whole night. No seventeen year old boy should really be that wholesome—it was starting to make Seto worry. Seto shut his briefcase with a click and shifted towards the door. His driver opened the door, as he always did, and stood at a rigid attention as Seto climbed out of the limo. He took half a step before he took in the strange building in front of him and froze. He stood before a dark two story building with no windows and utilitarian cinder block walls. A single street light down the block was the only light in the area. “What is the meaning of this?” Seto asked, glaring back at his driver. His driver was smirking. Seto couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he had been Seto’s weekend driver for the last eight months. He’d always been quiet and respectful, but calm and professionally confident. He’d also always been several inches shorter than Seto. It wasn’t likely that his driver had grown four inches overnight. Seto sidestepped away from the man, trying to keep his eyes on both the man and the shadows around them. His peripheral vision caught a swift movement to his right, but he didn’t even have time to turn his head. Pain exploded across the base of his skull and a white emptiness flooded across his vision.