Sterling doesn’t care about casualties. He never has. He just wants us cornered, distracted. Bleeding. Dead, if possible.
He doesn’t understand that I don’t care about dying.
I care about taking him with me.
We hit another resistance line—three men crouched behind flipped metal tables, laying down cover fire.
I duck behind a pillar and tap twice on the concrete. Raze takes the cue. He sprints low and fast, firing from the hip. One goes down with a scream. The others lean out to return fire.
I pop up and shoot the second through the eye.
The last one tries to run. I shoot him in the spine and keep walking as he screams for help.
“Stack up,” I order.
We form up against the next set of doors, reinforced with thick steel. Raze lights the thermite and steps back, howling.
“Fire in the hole, motherfuckers.”
The doors melt inward with a hiss of burning steel. I’m already moving. Two of Sterling’s soldiers open fire. I drop one with a round to the gut and another to the temple. Arlo shoots the second in the leg. He collapses, screaming—until Raze stomps his throat in.
“Gotta work on your kill shot, stray,” he grunts, grinning as the body twitches.
Arlo glares at him, raising her rifle. “Wanna be my target practice?”
“You couldn’t hit me if?—”
“Raze.” I shove Arlo forward, shooting him a look.
He lifts his hands in mock surrender, still smirking. “Damn, can’t even bully your stray anymore.”
The room opens into a corridor of holding cells—but they’re empty. The doors swung wide, locks twisted, restraints hanging loose. Something in my gut twists.
This isn’t right.
He wants me to find this.
“Fuck. We need to backtrack.” I start to turn when a voice cuts through the static of gunfire and smoke.
“I’m in here! Priest, please!”
Dalton.
I push past Raze. The last cell door at the end of the corridor is warped but standing. Dalton’s inside, half-collapsed, clutching his arm. His face beat to shit.
“Where’s Alistair?” I shout, firing a round into the lock. It bursts open with a clang.
“They took him,” he coughs, stumbling out. “They didn’t keep us together. Just get me the fuck out of here.”
Gunfire explodes down the hall. Muzzle flashes. Raze barks orders into his comm.
“There’s no fuckingout.” I grab Dalton by the collar and drag him toward cover. “Sterling wanted you alive. He wants us all in one place. Where would he take him?”
“I—I don’t—” Dalton’s voice breaks as bullets tear into the walls around us.
“Priest!” Raze yells over the noise. “We need to move. Now!”
I ignore him, eyes scanning the corridor, mentally overlaying old Sovereign schematics. There’s one section unaccounted for—the sub-levels. The old isolation chambers. Exactly where I’d keep a man meant to suffer.
