One of the soldiers—Marco, young, barely twenty-five—broke cover.
“Marco—NO!” someone shouted.
But he didn’t stop.
He sprinted straight toward it.
And then—he dropped, throwing his body over the cylinder, shielding it, sacrificing himself to absorb the blast that would have torn through all of us.
“Flee!” I screamed, already turning.
“Everyone fucking flee—NOW!”
Renzo’s hand clamped around my bicep with brutal force.
Hard enough to bruise.
He yanked me backward, dragging me toward the far side of the lot as my boots scraped against the gravel.
I stumbled.
Fighting to keep my balance.
The world compressed.
Too late.
The blast came.
A concussive crack—followed by a violent pressure wave that slammed into us like a physical wall.
Heat surged over me in an instant.
My feet left the ground, air ripped from my lungs as the force hurled me sideways.
Everything around me splintered into light, a blinding white that consumed my vision as death passed too close.
Then it vanished.
Darkness closed in, swallowing everything whole.
Chapter 10
ELENA
Pain woke me first.
Not the sharp kind that fades quickly, but something deeper, spreading through every joint like my bones had been shattered and forced back together wrong.
My ears rang with a high, metallic whine, the kind that swallowed every other sound and left only a hollow echo inside my skull.
For a moment, I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the pain began.
My back felt like it had been dragged across asphalt and then run over for good measure.
Every inhale hurt.
Every exhale hurt more.
