Page 148 of Jax
I nodded once, recalibrating on instinct. Every false wall chipped away at our timeline. Every rerouted corridor added seconds to the sweep and subtracted confidence from our intel. This hadn’t been modified haphazardly; it was intentional. Tactical. Psychological. This wasn’t just a warehouse. It was a maze. And someone else had designed the exit.
Up ahead, two guards leaned against the wall where the corridor split. They were relaxed, mid-conversation, postures loose. One smoked lazily, a stream of gray curling toward the ceiling like he’d forgotten the smell would give him away. The other cradled his weapon in the crook of one arm, muzzle dragging towards the floor like it had never been fired. Their ease made me uneasy. Complacency didn’t mean weakness; it meant familiarity. And familiarity made them dangerous.
I raised a hand in a signal to hold, and hissed out a warning on the comms. The team froze. I let the rhythm of the stormoutside sync with my breathing, waiting for thunder to roll in. Letting it settle—the tension, the pulse, the moment that always crystallized before something broke. I caught Sully’s eye, then pointed at him and to the left, then myself and to the right. He nodded, understanding.
And then, as the sky cracked open, we fired simultaneously. The two men dropped like they’d choreographed it, one with red mist where his throat had been, the other with new chest ventilation. When the sound of thunder faded, there was no sound from deeper inside the compound.
We whispered the all-clear on the cops, then dragged the bodies behind a crate stack, keeping lines of sight clean. I dropped into a crouch, gloved hand brushing the floor. The grit told me enough. Mud still wet, smeared with force and direction. Not just one person. A group. They hadn’t lingered, but they hadn’t run either. Purposeful. Intentional.
My eyes lifted to the rusted girders above—catwalks, shadows, possible sniper nests. My gut twisted half a second before the sound confirmed it: a boot scuff on metal, just enough to fracture the silence.
“Eyes,” I said, low and flat, already reaching for the angle. The movement above shifted again, subtle but clear. I raised my sidearm, internally praying for a convenient clap of thunder to disguise the shot, but before I could squeeze the trigger, I heard Deacon’s voice whisper through the comms.
“He’s mine.” The soft whistle of steel spinning through the air followed his voice. A knife, thrown with surgical precision, just like everything Deacon did. When the thunder didn’t cooperate, you improvised.
A split-second later, gravity answered with a thud. The body hit the concrete with a brutal crunch, the sound reverberating up through the structure like a warning bell struck from below.
We paused, holding our collective breaths. No alarms. No shouts. No clamor of retreat. Just silence, but now it was the wrong kind. Not the waiting kind. The listening kind. Like someone on the other end had heard the same noise we did, and was wondering who made it.
“Something’s wrong,” I muttered, though Sully had likely reached the same conclusion. The rhythm was off. The building had teeth, but it hadn’t bitten. That meant it was waiting for the perfect mouthful.
We moved faster now, more method than momentum, sweeping side rooms in a calculated rhythm. One was lined with cots—thin, sunken pads shoved against the walls, used needles littered beneath them like offerings. Another housed surveillance gear—dozens of monitors glowing faintly, some filled with static, others looping feeds from surrounding intersections. Not abandoned. Still live.
“Tagging cameras now,” Niko’s voice crackled in my ear. “Don’t let them catch your face.”
His calm grounded me, but it didn’t settle the pressure tightening behind my ribs.
Deacon stepped from the shadow line as we turned the next corridor, blood dark across his gloves. His mouth twitched into something like satisfaction. “Guard by the storage room. Didn’t get a hand to his rifle.”
I nodded and moved forward, expecting supply crates. What I found instead was colder.
It wasn’t storage. It was a living space. Or had been.
Dozens of crates, reworked into makeshift quarters, a patchwork of dirty linens and discarded food wrappers arranged in ways that suggested permanence. Weapons tucked into corners, accessible but half-concealed. Evidence of occupation cluttered every surface. But what stopped me cold were the smaller things, the ones that didn’t belong on a battlefield. Acoloring book curled on a splintered chair. A pair of too-small shoes beside a cot.
Children. Not now, but recently. Here long enough to leave traces. Not gone long enough to forget.
“They’ve been here longer than we thought,” Sully said tightly, scanning the room with narrowed eyes. “This isn’t just a checkpoint. It’s a base.”
I didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say. The math had changed, and not in our favor. What we’d expected to be a temporary post instead had roots, and with them, the mission bent sideways. Layers we hadn’t counted on. People we hadn’t planned for. Truths we didn’t have time to unravel.
“Stack up,” I ordered, not from authority, but necessity. I needed movement. Forward progress. Even if the ground beneath us was shifting.
We regrouped at the next junction—reinforced door ahead, catwalks above, rear covered. Niko took that job. Sully watched the high angles. I checked my rifle. Then my watch. Still within the op window, but the margin had thinned to paper.
Movement flickered at the far end of the hall. Another guard. Alone. Walking without fear, without urgency. He hadn’t seen us. His posture was loose. Relaxed.
I stepped into the open, weapon raised. He hesitated, which is exactly what I intended by showing myself. He grabbed for his weapon, but way too slow. I fired once. The silenced shot snapped like punctuation. He dropped mid-motion, mouth still open, fingers still stretching.
I exhaled, counted the breath without thinking, then turned back to my team and nodded. “Move.”
The next room smelled of old tobacco and even older sweat. The kind that clings to the skin after too many hours in a chair. I signaled a halt with two fingers, pressed low. Carrick slid ahead, rifle already up. Through the sliver of an open door, we sawthem—three men around a folding table, cards in hand, bottles glistening on the floor beside their boots. Laughter, low and tired. One had his rifle leaned against the wall, too far to reach without drawing attention. The others hadn’t even bothered. Complacency had made them soft. It wouldn’t save them now.
I counted their rhythms. One lifted a drink. One rubbed his forehead. One looked down at his cards. I gave a nod.
Carrick moved first. Two clean shots before the first bottle hit the floor. The men barely twitched before they dropped. Nikolai was right behind, sweeping left and catching a fourth guard in the corner. The man had been reaching, probably for the radio on his belt. Niko didn’t give him the chance. One shot through the jaw. Instant silence.
We swept in, quick and surgical. No shouting. No hesitation. Just boots and breath and the practiced silence of men who’d done this too many times to count. I moved to the table and checked for documents, nothing worth keeping. A map, outdated and smudged with thumbprints. Crumbs. But in this kind of war, crumbs mattered. I snapped a picture of the layout, just in case.
