A shape moves in the darkness. Massive. At least seven feet tall.
Moonlight catches something and I see?—
Green skin. The outline of horns rising from his forehead. A rifle in his hands, but pointed down, not threatening. Dark eyes that find me in the darkness, because orcs can see in the dark. I know that because I wrote about that in my articles. And he’s looking right at me, even though I’m pressed against this tree trying to be invisible with an expression of pure, overwhelming relief.
My brain refuses to process what I’m seeing. A face I’ve only ever seen through a laptop screen, pixelated by bad wifi at two in the morning. A face I’ve never seen in person, never touched, never been in the same room with. That face is here in a Colombian jungle, covered in sweat and jungle grime, standing in front of me like something out of a fever dream.
“Sloane,” he says again, and his voice cracks on my name.
The rock falls from my fingers.
“Jonus?”
Chapter Four
Jonus
The breach goes sideways almost immediately.
Intel said six to eight hostiles. Intel was wrong.
We move on Kelt’s signal, sliding through the perimeter like shadows. The first two guards go down before they even know we’re here. Then a door opens in the hillside, a door the drone never saw, and hostiles pour out like hornets from a kicked nest.
“Contact! More hostiles, northwest!” Cole’s voice crackles through comms.
Suddenly we’re not extracting. We’re fighting for our lives.
Training takes over, muscle memory I haven’t used since basic training on the commune, the part of orc education that prepares us for exactly this kind of violence. Every second we’re pinned behind this crumbling structure is another second Sloane is in that pit.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Aldar’s voice in my ear, strained. “New signatures are emerging from somekind of underground structure. Bunker, maybe. Their thermal signatures were masked by the hillside.”
Hidden barracks. Great. The intel we paid good money for missed an entire building full of armed humans.
Something explodes to my left, a grenade or gas tank, I can’t tell. The compound is chaos now, flames licking up the side of a storage building, smoke everywhere, muzzle flashes in the darkness.
And somewhere in that chaos, fifty meters away, is the pit. I can’t see it from here. Too much smoke. And all these armed humans are between me and my female. A growl rumbles in my chest. What if these criminals are moving her right now? They could decide she’s a liability and put a bullet in her head. Or they could be dragging her out to use as a human shield and I’m stuck behind this fucking wall.
“Jonus. Stay focused.” Kelt snarls.
“Iamfocused.” The words come out cold and flat, nothing like my usual tone.
Another hostile pops up and I drop him without thinking. Then another. Our team attacks the mercenaries with precision. There are more of them than us, with lots of weapons. But three orcs in our team still makes us infinitely stronger than a group of humans.
“Bunker’s clear,” Aldar finally reports. “We’ve got maybe ten minutes before someone calls for backup. If they haven’t already.”
I’m already moving I tell the others. “I’m going for her.”
“Go,” Kelt responds. “We’ll secure the rest, do a sweep to make sure they don’t have additional hostages, and meet at the pit.”
I run across the compound, boots pounding dirt, weaving between burning structures and bodies. The smoke burns my eyes but I don’t slow down. The wooden slats come into viewand my heart stops. One board is pushed aside, hanging from a single corner.
No.
I drop to my knees at the edge and look down.
Empty.
Just dirt, dead grass and a filthy bucket in the corner. Scratches on the wall which I realize are tally marks counting down her days in captivity.
