We moved fast—the Team a single blade. I led the charge down the center lane, teeth bared, every step calibrated, every breath a metronome. Elara matched me step for step. Her pistol barked in short, precise bursts; she was calm on the edge of the storm, a machine that still held the human thing I’d come to need.
Hydra hit back harder than I’d expected. Grand had banked on their patience; he’d hoped to squeeze us until we strangled onhis terms. But patience doesn’t help when your men are bleeding and your trucks are ash. They fell back, reformed, tried to corral us into dead ends. That’s where we made them pay.
“Oliver—left flank!” I snapped. “River, you with me on the push!” Gage answered with a cuss and a grin you could hear through the smoke; he was loving every second of it. And then we were a thing of motion—sprinting through debris, sliding behind cover, ripping chunks out of Hydra’s plans.
A rooftop erupted above us. Machine-gun tracers stitched the air too close for comfort. I felt a sting in my shoulder where a round nicked my vest, the punch of it making me taste copper. Didn’t slow me. Didn’t slow her. Elara slid forward, snagged a handhold on a rusted ladder and hauled herself up; she should’ve been the one watching my flank, not leading a vertical assault. The sight of her up there, narrow and lethal against the skyline, knocked the breath out of something I didn’t know I was holding.
“Beckett, you got a line on Grand?” Cyclone crackled. “Heat signature at main—high intensity. Confirmed command unit. He’s not here, but his lieutenant is in the main block—dropped a beacon.”
That mattered. If Grand wasn’t present, this was still his chessboard. If his lieutenant was pinned down, we had an opening to break their nerve.
“Make the line noisy,” I said. “Oliver, Gage—ignite the eastern compound. River, take the trucks. I’m moving to the main block with Elara.” My voice was hard and dry; there was no room for doubt.
We carved through them. The main block’s doors were welded shut, but Gage and Oliver brought a roar that unbolted everything—explosives, a practiced hand, and then a raging funnel of fire and smoke behind them that forced Hydra tochoose. They chose poorly. Men bolted from rooftop to alley, and we were waiting.
Inside the main block it was worse—hotter, smell of oil and old blood, the echo of gunfire under metal rafters. We moved low, rifles sweeping in arcs that erased faces before they could scream. Elara and I ducked a string of shots that chewed a chunk from a metal beam overhead. Sparks rained like obscene fireworks.
At the heart of the compound their lieutenant was trying to marshal a defense, voice barking orders into a scratchy radio. Cyclone’s drone told me where he stood—right beside a reinforced crate marked with Grand’s sigil. He was trying to keep something—someone—safe behind that crate. I didn’t wait for proof.
“On me!” I roared, and we surged.
I don’t make speeches. I don’t need to. The Team knows what the job is. We burst into their line of sight and the effect was surgical shock. The lieutenant’s eyes widened—he’d thought he had the advantage, thought we were herded into the killzone. He didn’t see the knife sliding into his side until River’s hand was already on his shoulder, wrenching him down.
They called for reinforcements. The call was the sound of a man admitting he was drowning.
We took the crate at the lieutenant’s feet. It wasn’t a person—thank God—but a bank of comms and a draw of files: maps, manifest lists, and a yellowed tablet someone had tried to destroy. Cyclone snatched it up, cursing and grinning. “Hydra’s routing codes. Grand’s mobile unit locations. He’s consolidating to the south-west safehouse, moving at 0200.”
That was the window. That was also the trap waiting to be lit if we didn’t move now.
“Burn the block,” I said. “Make it look like we tried to take them head-on. We want them thinking they lost a battle, not their commander.”
We did it fast. Oliver and Gage turned the compound into an inferno that would keep smoke in the breath of the city for hours. We pulled out through the south breach, bodies and boots carrying us back into alleys we’d already been through. Hydra was scattered, disoriented, licking wounds. The roar behind us told me we’d done what we came to do—shatter their hold, take the intel, and leave them scrambling.
But Hydra had one last card. A squad moved like a blade across a rooftop, attempting to sever our exit. I saw it before they did—River marking them, Cyclone calling the angles. I stepped forward and ran—no cover, just movement and the blind faith that the guys behind me would hold.
An explosion ripped the air where my head had been. Concrete shattered, the smoke folded over like a blanket. I felt heat on my back, a flare of pain that wasn’t immediate but real. Elara’s hand found me, fingers digging into my forearm, yanking me down behind a slab of concrete that used to be a loading dock.
“You idiot,” she hissed, but there was no scold in it. Only the fierce relief of someone who’d almost lost something, that mattered to them.
We moved. We took the alleys that Cyclone fed us, the ones where the shadows were our friends. We were not silent—Hydra was still calling back—but we were faster, crueler, a living fracture sweeping through their teeth. By the time we reached the planned extraction point, the first tendrils of dawn were ghosting the horizon.
No victory felt clean. No victory felt whole after what we’d burned. But we had the intel, the edge we needed, and—most important—we were whole enough to keep fighting.
Cyclone humped the tablet into his pack like it was a trophy. “Grand’s retreating to a secondary compound. He’ll be pissed. He’ll regroup. But he’s bleeding.”
“Good,” River muttered. “Let him be a wound.”
We didn’t celebrate. There was no time for celebration. We had a window and we took it. We moved on the route Cyclone patched through the static—old service tunnels, a half-buried freight corridor that smelled of oil and rat piss, a path no Hydra patrol would think to check at daylight.
When we drove to the safehouse, it wasn’t the warm world I once imagined. It was brick and wood, a place the Team had already turned into a museum of our survival: bunks, hot water that sputtered, a table scarred with strategy plans and coffee rings. For the first time since the alleys, my knees found a chair and I let the weight of the night go with a sound like the exhale of a man who’d finally realized he could breathe again.
Elara sat opposite me, grime traced in the hollows of her cheekbones, the line of a bruise already darkening along her jaw. She reached across the scarred table and covered my hand with both of hers, fingers interlaced the way they’d been on the street—steady, irrevocable.
“You’re an idiot,” she said softly, the anger gone now, worn away by adrenaline and the kind of exhaustion that keeps you honest.
“And you keep letting me be one,” I replied.
Her laugh was a dry thing that somehow sounded like a promise.
