Page 34 of Buried Past (First in Line #3)

Chapter twenty-two

Dorian

T hrough the night vision headset, the compound below looked alien—green-tinged figures moving with purpose under harsh artificial floodlights. Their shadows stretched and contracted like something out of a fever dream.

Twenty-six minutes.

I adjusted the focus, watching a guard pause to light a cigarette near the main entrance. The ember flared white-hot in my enhanced vision.

Matthew's arm brushed mine as he checked his equipment. The touch grounded me. His presence was the only steady thing in a world that had been spinning off its axis for months.

Static burst through the comm unit clipped to my vest. "Alpha in position. East perimeter clear."

Danny Ho's voice followed, sharp and clean: "Copy. All teams, hold ready. T-minus twenty-two."

Marcus crouched ten feet to my left, tablet balanced on his knee as he monitored thermal readings. His face was all hard angles and focused intensity. Michael moved behind us, adjusting his tactical gear.

Everyone waited. I felt like a blade balanced on its edge—all potential energy with no particular target.

The comm unit crackled again. "Control to Overwatch. Any movement on the primary target?"

The answer, "Negative. Interior remains static."

My pulse pounded so hard against my collar that I thought Matthew could hear it.

While we waited for the raid to begin, my vision blurred momentarily, and the green-lit compound dissolved into a memory.

Vienna. Eight months ago.

Rain hammered the hotel windows in sheets, turning the city lights into watercolor smears. The room smelled of takeout containers and stale cigarettes. Farid sat cross-legged on one narrow bed, chopsticks working through cold noodles while he squinted at messages on his laptop screen.

I paced the strip of carpet between the bed and the bathroom. "We walk away." Sleep deprivation made everything feel brittle, like the world might crack if I pushed too hard. "We take what we have and disappear. New names, new lives, new everything."

Farid looked up from his screen, and the expression on his face stopped me cold. It wasn't surprise or disagreement. Only bone-deep weariness. "They'll never stop unless we end the game, Dorian. We don't have the strength to do that."

His voice had the slight accent that always got stronger when he was tired, vowels stretched just enough to remind me he'd learned English as his third language. The chopsticks clicked against a ceramic bowl as he set them down.

"You know this. I know this. We can run for years, but men like Hoyle—they don't forget. They don't forgive. They wait."

I'd wanted to argue. I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, and we could vanish completely. I wanted to insist there were places even men like Hoyle couldn't reach, but something in his eyes stopped me from speaking.

The memory shattered as Michael's voice cut through the comm chatter. " Movement on the south access road. Single vehicle, approaching fast."

I blinked hard, with the present rushing back in a flood of green light and adrenaline. Farid had been right, of course. They never stopped. Not until you made them.

The countdown timer on my watch read nineteen minutes.

The comm unit erupted in overlapping voices—too many people talking at once, half-swallowed in static.

"Hold position, hold position—"

"Contact bearing two-seven-zero, multiple subjects—"

"That's not the exit vector, repeat, not the expected—"

I swung my view away from the compound, scanning the tree line to the west. Something was wrong. Operations this clean didn't develop wrinkles fifteen minutes before execution.

Three figures broke from the forest like ghosts materializing in the real world. Even through the night vision distortion, their movement was deliberate and unhurried. No desperate scramble toward freedom. No panicked flight from an operation going sideways.

"What the hell..." Matthew whispered beside me.

Michael dropped to one knee beside Marcus, fingers flying over his tablet. The thermal overlay shifted, zoomed, and clarified. When the image stabilized, my stomach clenched.

"That's him." Michael's voice was firm and confident. "That's Hoyle."

Through the scope, I watched Magnus Hoyle walk across the uneven ground with the measured pace of someone strolling through his garden. His posture was straight, shoulders back, hands loose at his sides.

He looked like he was heading to a board meeting, with a detour through the woods, not fleeing a federal assault. He paused once to adjust a cufflink—like a man dressing for his own execution.

The two figures flanking him moved differently. Their steps dragged slightly, turning their heads back toward the compound like they'd left something behind. Their body language screamed defeat, but not the sharp-edged panic of men caught in a trap.

The lack of urgency made my skin crawl.

"Why isn't he running?"

No one answered. The comm chatter had died to isolated whispers as other teams repositioned, trying to understand what they were seeing. In my peripheral vision, Marcus's fingers paused on the tablet.

Hoyle stopped at the edge of a small clearing, his head tilted back as if he were studying the stars. He wore an immaculately tailored suit, and there was a casual arrogance in his stance.

The man who'd orchestrated years of suffering, marked me for death, and turned human lives into data points on a spreadsheet, stood fifty yards below us, looking like he owned the entire mountain.

And for one horrible moment, I wondered whether he did.

Marcus and Michael moved in a coordinated pattern. They melted between the trees with the kind of fluidity that came from trust so deep it didn't require thought.

Through my headset, I tracked their descent while keeping Hoyle centered in my crosshairs. He hadn't moved, still standing in that clearing like he was posing for a portrait.

Federal agents emerged from the forest like shadows suddenly turned substantive. In black tactical gear, with rifles raised, they moved in textbook formation toward the three figures. The red dots of laser sights danced across bark and undergrowth.

I held my breath.

Hoyle's mouth moved—too distant to hear, but his posture remained unchanged. He didn't look at the agents surrounding him. He looked directly up at our position on the ridge.

Like he knew exactly where we were.

The first assistant dropped to his knees so suddenly that I thought someone shot him. The movement was graceless in defeat. The second followed, slower and resigned, hands already behind his head before anyone issued an order.

Michael's commentary drifted through an open comm channel. "The tunnel didn't go far enough."

I closed my eyes briefly while the pieces clicked into place. They'd been running. Not toward some grand final confrontation or a glorious last stand—they'd been trying to escape through an underground route that had probably collapsed, flooded, or simply ended fifty yards short of freedom.

Hoyle had been caught like a rat in a trap and was still standing there like he ruled the situation.

When I opened my eyes, he was turning toward one of the kneeling assistants. He spat words that didn't reach us, but the assistant flinched like he'd been struck. Then Hoyle turned toward Michael—now visible among the federal agents—and his mouth curved into a bitter smile.

The sound emerging from Michael's directional mic was too faint to make out individual words, but the tone was unmistakable. Arrogant. Mocking. The voice of a man who thought he was still holding cards no one else could see.

I touched the comm switch to enable my voice. "Control, this is Overwatch. Subject appears non-compliant. Recommend immediate restraint."

It had all happened so fast that it felt like I was watching someone else's memories.

No gunfire. No desperate last stand. No final gambit that would justify the months of fear that had carved hollows under my ribs. Only federal agents moving with practiced efficiency, zip ties appearing in gloved hands, and Hoyle's wrists pulled behind his back.

He fell to his knees from the firm pressure of a tactical boot behind his legs. And then he started shouting.

"You think this matters?" His voice cracked. "You think you're done? I made kings, you fucking amateurs! I'm not the only one—you've clipped a branch, but the root runs deeper than you will ever reach. I built empires while you were—"

The rest dissolved into white noise. Hoyle's mouth kept moving, and his face twisted with rage and disbelief, but the words might as well have been in a language I'd never learned.

I expected to feel something. Satisfaction, maybe. Relief. Rage. I'd imagined a dozen different endings—Hoyle bleeding, begging, broken.

Instead, I had a hollow sensation. Scraped clean. Like someone had reached inside my chest and removed everything that mattered, leaving behind an echoing, empty cavity.

The man who'd marked me for death, turned my life into a series of safehouses and false names, and orchestrated suffering on a scale I still couldn't quite comprehend was now merely a well-dressed figure bound by zip ties. I watched as agents loaded him into the back of a federal vehicle.

Anticlimactic failed to describe the situation fully.

"He's done."

Matthew's voice cut through the static in my head, quiet and certain. A statement of fact delivered in the same tone he might use to announce that the coffee was ready.

I didn't respond immediately. Couldn't. My mouth was dry, and my hands trembled just enough to shake the headset's image.

Finally, I found my voice. "I'll believe it when I stop looking over my shoulder."

Somehow, watching Hoyle disappear into federal custody didn't feel like an ending. It was like the moment between lightning and thunder—the pause before you find out how close the strike had been.

I pulled off the night vision headset and immediately regretted it. The sudden return of natural darkness left me blinking, pupils struggling to adjust. The world was too quiet without the headset's electronic hum.

Michael and Marcus climbed back up the slope with the same fluid coordination they'd used going down, but something had changed in their posture.

The sharp edge of operational focus had softened into something more familiar—brothers again, rather than tactical assets.

Michael's gear hung looser on his frame, and Marcus had his tablet tucked under one arm instead of clutched in both hands.

"Clean op," Michael announced as he reached our position. No pride in his voice. It was merely a professional assessment delivered with the flat tone of someone checking items off a list. "No shots fired. All subjects in custody."

Danny Ho's voice crackled through the comm units, coordinating extraction and evidence collection. James still hunched over his equipment, fingers dancing across multiple keyboards as he tracked the digital evidence of Hoyle's empire crumbling in real time.

Matthew's hand settled on my shoulder and stayed there. Not gripping or squeezing—present and warm through the layers of tactical gear. "You can stop holding your breath now," he said quietly. "You're allowed to breathe."

For the first time in months, I exhaled fully. The breath that came out felt like I'd held it trapped in my lungs since Vienna, or possibly further back. Maybe I hadn't truly exhaled since the first time I'd heard Hoyle's name.

I turned toward Matthew. "We ended the game." A beat of silence. "Or at least flipped the board."

The latter was more honest. Hoyle was done, his network dismantled, and his assets would soon scatter or be captured.

There would be others. Men like him didn't operate in isolation, and power vacuums had a way of attracting the worst kinds of ambition.

The game, where human lives became currency and information became weapons, would continue with new players and different rules.

For now, though, for tonight, we'd won.

Matthew's thumb brushed against my collarbone through the fabric of my jacket, and I leaned into the contact without thinking about it.

Below us, the compound continued its transformation from fortress to crime scene, but up here on the ridge, surrounded by people who'd chosen to stand with us when standing alone would have been safer, I knew we could stop running.

At least for a while.