I press the chipped card against the lock, breath shallow, heart a fist against my ribs. Every second stretches thin as wire. I’m doing this for me, I tell myself—because sitting in this cell untilthey break me is not an option. I’m doing it because I have to—because the silence is going to kill me if I don’t act. But the truth is a slippery animal and it claws at the back of my throat: I’m doing it to run to him. To Jon. To the place where the world still makes sense and my chest stops feeling like an empty room.
The lock clicks.
It’s a small sound, but it roars in my head like gunfire. I freeze, waiting for shouting, footsteps, some sign I’ve been caught. Nothing. Just that dying fluorescent buzz and King’s tight inhale from behind me.
I slide the door, the gap widening by careful increments that make me hold my breath like I’m swimming under ice. The corridor beyond is a smear of gray and bad light, the kind that eats color and optimism until nothing’s left but shadow. Concrete walls. Exposed pipes. A strip of flickering fluorescence that makes everything look diseased.
I move like a ghost. Quiet, careful, all the hours of practice and all the forced stillness in interrogation folding into muscle memory. My hands tremble—so do my legs—but I keep going, counting steps in my head the way I counted rotations while memorizing the guard shifts. Left, two, right, one. Breathe in, out. Don’t think about the blood on my palms. Don’t think about King’s grin. Don’t think about Jon’s voice in my head telling me to be careful in that low, pissed-off tone that always made my spine straighten.
A pair of boots scrape. A light clicks on, sudden and cruel, and my body snaps into a frozen animal. My chest caves in on itself as every instinct I have screams at me to drop back behind the door and pretend I never left, but the card is still warm in my hand, and if I go back now—if I crawl back and let them find me in the act—they’ll take worse from me. They’ll take time. They’ll take hope. They’ll take the last thing in me that still feels like mine.
I skirt the wall, breath quiet, a cat with bruises. I can hear everything—their voices beyond the next bend, Russian clipped and casual, like they’re arguing about a dog that keeps stealing boots. My stomach twists with every step. Why did I think I could do this? Because I have to. Because every second I’m here chained is a second closer to panic becoming permanent. Because if I stay, I will break, and I would rather die running than rot waiting.
I slip by a guard’s post, close enough to smell the cigarette on his breath, the stale nicotine and sour coffee clinging to the air around him. My chest threatens to explode. The corridor opens into a wider room—storage, maybe, crates stacked to the ceiling, tarps thrown over old equipment, the air colder here. My palms go slick on the wood as I duck behind an abandoned pallet. Splinters bite into my skin, grounding me.
I can see the courtyard through a narrow slat, a sliver of open sky that tastes like freedom. For one beat, I let the air hit my face. It’s cold and sharp and real. The kind of air that belongs outside prisons. I imagine running until the ground turns to nothing under my boots and Jon pulls me into some stupid, impossible embrace and tells me I’m alive and done, and all the weight goes away.
Then a shadow moves across the courtyard, and my pulse drops into my throat like a stone.
He’s standing there—tall, a silhouette that should be wrong and isn’t. His coat is long, dark, heavy, like someone carved him from storm clouds and gave him a pulse by mistake. He’s older than the men who grabbed me, something about his posture flat and deliberate, the kind of control that doesn’t need to announce itself. He is the head of this operation. He looks like a name in a history book you wish hadn’t found you.
Mikhail.
The name is immediate in my gut, though I don’t think I ever heard it aloud; it’s the way he moves, a cold, O-negative certainty that tells you what to call him without asking. He’s looking at me. Straight at me. For one second, his face is clear against the dark—angular, almost aristocratic in the way a predator can be, sharp cheekbones and a mouth too calm for a man who cages people for sport—and then he’s moving too quick, a human shadow that fills the courtyard and swallows the air out of me.
Hands grab my arm from behind with the speed of a vise. The world jerks sideways as someone shoves me back, a heavy boot plunging into my spine and folding me over. The air leaves me in a strangled sound, something animal and humiliating. I throw a hand out, trying to catch my balance, and another gloved hand clamps over my mouth, the scent of cheap vodka and iron ground into his palm. Russian words spit in my ear, hot and vicious, and the taste of leather and blood coats my tongue.
“No!” I try to yell, but it comes out muffled, like a cork pulled under water. They drag me backwards, boots scuffing, breath hot on my neck. Mikhail’s voice—a low, cultured rasp—orders them to be careful, to keep me intact. He wants me alive. That lands worse than any threat.
His hands inspect my shoulder like a connoisseur turning over a rare coin, cool and clinical, and the way he looks at me makes my skin crawl; he’s not seeing me as a person. He’s cataloging. Assessing. Pricing.
An armored shove throws me back through the cell door, and the lock slams with a sound like finality. My spine hits the edge of the threshold, pain exploding bright and hot up my back as something cracks in a way that makes the world go white at the edges. I taste copper. My vision tears at the sides with black bloom. They stuff me inside—hands rough, fingers like wedges—King’s dim shape on the far wall the only steady thing left.
“You brought trouble,” Mikhail says in English, because of course he knows. Of course he wants me to understand every word. “We should have kept you quiet with your friend.”
They shove me to the floor, and a boot comes down hard across my ribs, breath knocked out of me like someone yanked a switch. My last tether to awareness frays—pain lances bright, the room tilts, and I see King’s face as a smear of hurt and resolve, and then everything goes soft at the edges.
Movement, then shouting—sharp, urgent, something that isn’t their cadence. Another set of boots, not theirs, approaching fast like thunder from the other side of the wall. Metal clatters. A radio sputters to life that does not belong to the Russians. For a wild, ridiculous second, hope flares like a match in the dark.
Mikhail’s head turns, irritation snapping over his face like a blade. “Keep her isolated with him,” he commands, voice cracking through the room like a whip. “We will remove whoever attempts to infiltrate. No interference.”
They drag me up by the collar, shove me back against the cold concrete, and a hand presses into the soft part of my neck as if to read my pulse. My breath is shallow, syrupy, sticky with the taste of everything I am trying not to feel. A boot drives into my side to pin me down as the door slams again.
I feel the world tilt into a tunnel of pain and sound, the edges of my vision darkening as I try to focus on one thing—the sound of someone fighting, the grunt and snap of another body crashing against a guard. King groans, then roars, his voice a low, furious animal, and through the lull between impacts, I hear him shout like someone split open by courage:
“He’s here!”
The words are a rope thrown into darkness.
By the time the boot crushes my temple and the world narrows to black, that shout is the last thing I feel—King’s voice tearing through the fog and the chaos, a promise or an accusation I can’tparse, and over it, distant and impossibly clear, the sound of a door being kicked inward.
Chapter 7
Captain Jonathan
The hallway smells like blood and cordite. Every wall is breathing heat from the blast I set two turns back, and the air hums with that electric wrongness that only exists in the seconds after violence. Smoke hangs low and mean, thick enough to sting the eyes, and the alarms overhead howl like something wounded. I round the corner and the cell block opens up in front of me—light flickering off steel doors that are all half-melted from the charges we planted, shadows jerking across concrete like ghosts trying to outrun the fire.
Then I see him.
