Page 210 of Fractured Allegiance

Unless someone creates one.

A crack splits the night, vicious and hot. One of Dom’s men jerks as a bullet takes him through the shoulder. He stumbles, fires blind, the shot snapping against the steel vent behind me.

Elias.

He’s here, shooting from somewhere below or across the alley. My pulse spikes, tangled in relief and dread.

Dom doesn’t flinch. He just laughs. “Of course,” he says, eyes sliding past Silas to me. “Elias always did have bad timing.”

Silas shoves me sideways, pushing me into the cover of a concrete outcrop. Gunfire erupts, harder, faster. My ears ring. The rooftop becomes bedlam of muzzle flashes, shouted orders, the grind of boots scraping tar.

I crouch low, heart pounding, the edge of fear knotted with something worse: the way Dom looks at me even while bullets crack around us, like I’m the center of his amusement.

Silas fires back. Crack-shot. Precise. He’s not reckless. He’s efficient. Too efficient. I’ve seen men fight before, but not like this. Not with training built into their bones.

Dom’s words echo against the gunfire. “You brought a date.”

My gut twists. He’s toying with us, but underneath it, I feel the knife he hasn’t swung yet.

The fight’s only beginning, but already my world is splitting. I thought I knew the shape of the danger. Drazen. Dom. Their cages and threats. But watching Silas move, covering me with every round, every glance, I realize I don’t know who I’m standing behind.

And that terrifies me more than the bullets.

The rooftop is a storm. Shouts, metal clattering, bullets sparking against the vent where I press my back.

Silas leans out, fires two shots, drops one of Dom’s men where he stands. Silas’s movements are too skilled, too fluid. Not like a hired thug. Not just another of Drazen’s dogs. This is training—and it looks like professional training. I’ve seen it before, years ago, in men who swore oaths to governments, not criminals.

Dom seems to notice too. He’s watching Silas the way a snake watches something worth biting. His smirk is tighter now, teeth bared, eyes alive with something close to delight.

“You see it, don’t you, Lydia?” he calls out. A bullet whines past his shoulder, but he doesn’t duck. He just paces a step closer, boots leaving dark prints in the tar. “Your protector isn’t what he told you. He never was.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Silas snaps, voice raw with control breaking. He doesn’t look at me. Won’t. He fires again, forcing Dom’s other guard behind cover.

I press a hand against the concrete at my side, nails digging into grit. My mind is a mess of images: Silas yesterday, bringing me dinner with that carefully neutral expression while Dom watched, the moment I whispered Elias's name and saw understanding flash in his eyes, Silas standing guard outside my door all night, so close I could feel him through the wall, his presence the only thing that kept me from breaking, Silas now, moving like a soldier, every motion too exact to be coincidence.

Dom tilts his head. “You didn’t think he just… showed up, did you?”

My pulse hammers. “Don’t—”

“Oh, come on,” he laughs. “You’ve always been smarter than this. He’s Bureau. The leash you thought you cut? He’s the one tightening it.”

Silas moves fast—too fast—breaking cover to put two more rounds toward Dom’s position. The sound shakes through me. He’s not trying to shut Dom up with words. He’s trying to silence him permanently.

But Dom slips behind the floodlight casing, alive and grinning, his voice still carrying across the rooftop.

“Tell her, Ward!” The name lands like a blade. “Tell her who you really work for before she learns it from someone who doesn’t have to lie about every breath he takes around her!"

The world tilts. Ward. Bureau. The pieces slam together with brutal force.

I whip toward Silas, searching his face for denial, for any scrap of the man who told me he couldn’t walk away from me even if he tried. But he won’t meet my eyes.

And that alone tells me everything.

Another shot screams across the rooftop. I duck, heart in my throat, but it’s not fear that eats me alive this time. It’s betrayal.

Because Dom’s words might be venom, but Silas’s silence makes them true.

The gunfire thickens, swallowing whatever space was left for denial. My ears ring, my pulse claws higher.