Page 3 of The Monster You Made
I wait until the door cracks and the team funnels through. Then I close the breach behind them and lock the door. Now the hunt narrows. Walls do not protect you when someone inside them is a predator.
The man in the lead has a red patch on his collar, a sigil I remember from years of complication and quiet deals. The Crown once wore it like a brand; now, under smoke and blood, the same sigil appears stitched into the fatigues of a man trying to erase me. Cadmus borrows the old prayers; the old prayers become new weapons.
He moves like a man with a clean conscience. I watch his hand, spare, precise, and when he turns, I catch the moment his face goes slack with surprise. The round takes him high in the chest. He falls like a puppet whose strings were cut. The others try to respond, but in the crush and the heat, their formation breaks. Chaos follows, deliciously exact.
I take the lead man’s sidearm when he stops moving and listen to the bunker hold its breath. Somewhere above, in the world I used to shape, things are shifting. A senator will need to fall on the right day. A ledger will leak at a timed interval. The chessboard reorders itself in my head, every move a blade sliding into position.
And in the center of the chessboard, her. Vera, an absence that rearranges gravity. I imagine her alive, in a village by the sea, her hair salted by the wind, eyes rifled wide with a need for privacy she never had. Does she think of me, or does she think only of the cold logic that led her away? Does she curse me for the thing I am? Does she sleep? I don’t know.
A shout above, the radio static resolves into a voice: “Secondary breach north, movement in the service ducts, Group B compromised.” They call them groups now, names stripped of person. It’s an efficient language for efficient killers.
I move again, sliding through the metallic corridors with a predator’s grace. My hands are steady. My breath is a metronome. The bunker is full of small deaths now, pieces of men, components, the soft fate of bodies that thought they could erase a history. This is my confession and my absolution, neither of which feels like peace.
At the east entrance, I find the smashed remnants of an operative’s tablet. Data flickers, corrupt files not yet finished exploding into nothing. In the corner of the screen, a notification blinks, a message that clearly wasn’t meant for me: an encrypted line, a transit order, a name circled. It’s a breadcrumb. I copy it, my thumb burning from the screen’s heat, and stash the memory in my vest. Whoever moves through that line is either an ally or a knife. I mean to find out which.
Fires bloom in the lower levels, little suns devouring the architecture. The smoke thickens, the taste of metal in the back of my throat grows sharp. My eyes burn, but vision without focus is a small price to pay for the world I am unmaking. There is cruelty in it, yes. There is clarity, too. When you are stripping a machine down to its husk, sometimes the blade is the only honest partner left.
Two more come around a corner, eyes wide under black visors. I didn’t aim for them because I wanted to kill. I aimed because the sound of their boots made me think of the first time I saw her fight for a case, how her fingers went white on a file folder, the way her jaw clenched when she was about to land a point that mattered. It seems ridiculous to think of a courtroom in a hallway full of smoke, but memory is not disciplined by circumstance.
I pull the man forward by the collar and feel his breath shudder in my palm. Something about him is young, not yet a man enough to be a soldier. A boy in a uniform made for grown men. Innocence shifts in a room full of blood like a marginal note.
His radio static buzzes a name, Rourke. My fingers tighten. Rourke had been a breaching axe at my back and a blade at my hip once; now his name on a soldier’s lips is a breadcrumb of betrayal.
"Tell me who sent you," I say, voice low and even. He gurgles, tries to spit words. The muzzle of my rifle presses into his throat. He looks at me with the clean, stupid wonder of someone who thought they were doing right by order.
“He said…Cadmus…Cadmus sent the order. The symbol was…. ”
The boy slumps, blood pooling where his knees meet steel. My hands are not warm. I don’t know that I ever was, except for when she was near. The paradox of wanting to keep someone safe and tearing the world to do it is a cruelty only monsters can love.
I drag him to the nearest vent and push him through. The air in the duct is violent, hot, and somewhere distant, an airlock disengages with a soft metallic sigh. The boy’s life becomes a whisper in the machine. I cover the vent and listen as the sound recedes, a small confession into the belly of my world.
When I climb back up, fat fingers leave smears across the control glass. I wipe them away and look at the monitors. They’re mostly black now, static blooming like frost. But in one feed, an auxiliary external line that I forgot to burn, there is a lingering cursor. The name beside it is one I’d hoped never to hear again: Declan St. Croix.
Declan. A man with money that smells of ancient rot. A diplomat who learned how to smile like the world should forgive him. My jaw clenches. The name draws up bitter bile. The game has a face. The opponent is now in view.
For a moment, brief and dangerous, I imagine him in his office, counting favors like beads. And I imagine Vera’s face when she reads his name on a file. She will know what it means, the way a woman understands the shape of a bruise without being told.
I press my palm hard against the console until it hurts. “So be it,” I say. Then I go looking for the rest of them.
The smell of burning insulation clings to me as I move down another corridor. The bunker’s heart beats slower now, systems failing one by one. A hum that once carried authority has thinned to a rasp. I built this place to be untouchable, a sanctuary carved from silence. Tonight it is a mausoleum, and I am both priest and executioner.
Gunfire echoes through the ducts, muffled by smoke. A single shot, then another. A scream cut short. My traps finish the work I began. I don’t linger on them; I’ve seen enough corpses to last several lifetimes. Each one is a line in the ledger, and the ledger is already inked in red.
At the control station, I glance at the purge. Ninety-three percent complete. The files cascade into oblivion, histories eaten by static. Names, dates, bloodied contracts, everything the Crown once used to bind the world to its leash. Soon, they’ll be ash. Cadmus may still hunt, but their leash will fray without these threads.
Another alarm bleeds into the smoke. A fresh squad breaches from the south entrance, using charges big enough to shake the whole bunker. I grip the rifle tighter, bones aching from recoil, muscles screaming with fatigue. It doesn’t matter. Pain has no meaning when rage holds the leash.
I wait at the choke point, shadows pressed around me like a cloak. The squad files in with rifles high, lasers cutting thin lines across the walls. They’re precise, professional. The kind of men who kill families for bonuses. My breathing slows. Heartbeat, trigger, silence. One falls. Then another. The thirdsurvives long enough to fire, bullets chewing steel inches from my face. I close the gap before he adjusts, blade flashing, throat opening in a rush of heat. He gurgles, falls, still clutching the rifle. My boots splash in his blood as I move on.
The bunker is collapsing into chaos, but through the smoke, I feel a strange stillness. A moment of clarity, almost sacred. I was born in shadow, shaped by orders and oaths I never wrote. But tonight, with every archive destroyed, with every life cut down, I feel a chain snapping link by link. The Crown made me. Cadmus tried to own me. Both will bleed for their mistake.
A feed on the far monitor crackles. An outside channel, not yet dead. Through the haze of static, I catch the outline of a man: tall, deliberate, his voice clipped, aristocratic. Declan St. Croix. His mouth shapes words I can’t hear, but the smirk is clear. He knows I’m watching. He wants me to see him.
Declan was never a field man. He thrived in marble halls and velvet chairs, pulling strings while others cut throats. If he’s appearing now, it means Cadmus wants me to know the game has shifted. The Crown was a mask; Declan is the face behind it. And he’s daring me to come for him.
I smash the screen with the butt of the rifle. Glass showers across the console, sparks spitting. His smirk lingers in my mind’s eye, etched deeper than any scar. This isn’t over. This is only the first move.
The purge chimes complete. 100%. The system is gone. Years of surveillance, blackmail, leverage, all ash. For the first time since I built this bunker, silence stretches between the walls, unbroken by data streams. I feel both naked and free.
