Page 211 of Fractured Allegiance

Silas moves closer, crouching low, body between me and the line of fire. The way he shields me isn’t instinct, it’s protocol. He doesn’t even glance my way when he reloads, fingers precise, motions drilled in long before he ever knew my name.

That’s when the second figure cuts through the chaos.

Elias.

He bursts up the access stairs, every muscle coiled, pistol raised. He fires twice, both shots surgical. A guard collapses near the east ledge, another drops his rifle halfway across the roof.

Dom curses, snapping back into cover.

And me? I can’t move. My body betrays me, caught between two men I know in entirely different ways, both spilling truths I didn’t want.

Elias’s voice rips through the noise: “You left her in this mess?” His eyes don’t leave Silas, even as he checks his corners. “This is the best the Bureau could do?”

Silas growls low, chambering another round. “This isn’t the time.”

“The time was before you let them put her in a cage,” Elias bites back.

Dom’s laugh slices over the rooftop. “Oh, this is rich. The ghost and the fed. Both crawling back for the same woman.” His voice is lethal, cruel. “Tell me, Lydia, which one hurts worse? The one who lied to you? Or the one who abandoned you altogether all this while?”

The words hit harder than the bullets. I stagger back a step, my throat raw. I want to scream at them, both of them, that I’m not a prize, not a pawn. But the air is too full of smoke and violence and the pounding realization that Silas never was what he let me believe.

Another round tears through the rooftop floodlight. Glass shatters. Elias ducks, grabs my wrist, pulls me low. His grip is familiar, unyielding.

“We move now,” he says. “Or we don’t move at all.”

Silas is already shifting, scanning the perimeter, planning two steps ahead. “South side,” he calls. “The service scaffold—”

“I know the way,” Elias cuts in.

For a heartbeat they glare at each other over my head, two predators forced into the same cage. Then they move, parallel, both dragging me with them, bullets sparking across the rooftop as Dom’s men regroup.

The rooftop tilts into chaos. I stumble between them, lungs burning, ears ringing with gunfire and betrayal, heart breaking with every step.

The south edge looms closer, rain-slick and jagged with scaffolding that looks one bad gust away from peeling off the building. Wind claws at my dress, dragging the thin fabric against my skin, reminding me just how exposed I am in this war they built.

Silas keeps to my right, Elias to my left. I feel their hands catch me, release me, catch me again, like I’m being volleyed between two walls of muscle and grit. They’re not protecting me for the same reason. I know that now. But both are committed enough to bleed for it.

A flash of movement cuts across the rooftop. Dom again. He’s closer, pistol raised, grin cut wide like he knows he owns the field.

“You think you’re getting her out?” he shouts. “You can’t even decide who she belongs to.”

Silas fires back—not words, but a spray of bullets. It clips the vent beside Dom’s head, spraying sparks. Dom ducks, laughing like this is all a game he’s rigged.

“Keep moving,” Silas growls, grabbing my arm. His eyes flick toward Elias. “Cover.”

Elias doesn’t argue. He plants himself at the rear, gun steady, his body moving with that same terrifying calm hecarried when I first met him. It’s not ferocity. It’s finality. The kind that says if anyone follows, they die.

We hit the scaffold. The steel groans under our weigh. The city sprawls below, blurred in streaks of neon and shadow. My stomach drops. My hands clutch at the railing before I force them free.

“Don’t stop,” Silas says, already ahead, scanning each platform before pulling me down the first level. His grip is iron, his movements precise, too practiced for a man who’s supposed to just be… what? A shadow in Drazen’s employ? A stray caught in the same net as me?

Elias covers the top, then swings down behind us, boots hitting metal with a clang that echoes like gunfire. He doesn’t falter. Doesn’t even look at me. His focus is split between Silas and the skyline, like he’s calculating how many more mistakes we can afford before this ends in a body bag.

Halfway down, the scaffold shakes. A bullet bites into the metal rail inches from my hand. I jolt. Silas yanks me against him, shielding me with his body as another round punches sparks from the pipe above our heads.

Dom’s voice follows, close now, almost intimate. “Run faster, Lydia. Makes the chase sweeter.”

My stomach twists. My mind races. Every instinct screams at me to freeze, to fold, to wait for someone else to choose the next move. But I know better. Survival isn’t waiting. Survival is teeth.