Page 273 of Fractured Allegiance

Her voice is calm. Calculated. Like she’s discussing dinner plans, not arson.

Elias nods once. “Torch it. Torch everything. No records. No cages left.”

The silence that follows is heavy, final.

Then Elias gathers the map, folds it, tucks it under his arm. “Tonight,” he says, his voice slicing clean through the air. “We end Drazen’s leash. Rest, reload, sharpen whatever edge you’ve got left. Because when we walk into Petrov, we don’t walk out until it’s over.”

He turns, Mara moving with him, her hand brushing his arm, grounding him. They disappear down the hall, leaving the rest of us in the dim light of the safehouse.

Jax busies himself with checking his weapon, though his hands shake with every magazine he loads.

Lydia doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t have to. I can feel her—the weight of her defiance, the heat of her unease, the pulse of something sharp and dangerous binding us tighter with every second.

I lean back against the wall, watching her, letting the promise settle in my chest like a fuse waiting for fire.

No Bureau. No leash. No masks. Just this.

Her.

And Petrov Station.

The hours drag but don’t settle. The safehouse hums like a wire stretched too tight, each of us vibrating with what we’re holding inside.

Jax cleans his gun three times over, muttering under his breath like the weapon might listen better than any of us. He’s young, too young for this weight, but Elias is right—either the boy learns to carry it or he breaks.

Mara stays close to Elias, her presence quieter than the rest of us, but I notice how he moves with her always within arm’s reach. His storm doesn’t settle, but it circles her like she’s the eye at its center.

Lydia is a different kind of storm. She sits at the table, dismantling a pistol piece by piece, laying it out in perfect order. Her hands don’t shake, her gaze doesn’t wander. She’s colder than any of us, the kind of calm that makes me want to rip it apart just to see what she looks like when the mask cracks again.

Elias finally gathers us at dusk. The light outside is blood-orange, sliding into shadows that stretch long across the floorboards. He spreads the map again, the paper already creased from his grip, and his voice slices through the room.

“I called for more men,” he says. “Ones I trust. They’ll run perimeter and hold our exit routes. If things go south, and they might, we won’t be boxed in. If Drazen throws more bodies at us, we’ll have the muscle to cut through.”

He looks at each of us in turn, his gaze a weight heavier than any gun he could carry. “Inside is ours. Outside is theirs. Don’t mistake which fight belongs to who.”

Jax nods too fast, clutching his gun like a lifeline. Mara folds her arms, her expression unreadable, though I see the flicker in her eyes when she glances at him. Lydia just smirks faintly, tapping one nail against the barrel of her pistol.

And me? I don’t nod. I don’t smirk. I just hold Elias’s gaze until he moves on, because I don’t follow men like him. I follow one thing only, and she’s sitting across the table, her eyes cutting toward me like she knows exactly what I’m thinking.

By the time the last light drains from the sky, the safehouse feels stripped bare, everything that mattered reduced to weapons and willpower. Clips stacked. Knives strapped to boots. Elias’s voice still echoing through the walls: tonight, we end Drazen’s leash.

The air tastes of gun oil and tension.

Elias moves first, pushing the door wide. Mara follows, a hand brushing his back as though she’s tethered to him, and maybe she is. I hear Jax mutter under his breath when he sees her, confusion heavy in his tone. “She’s coming?”

Elias doesn’t break stride. “She doesn’t leave my sight again.” The words are steel, flat and final. “If Drazen wants her as leverage, he won’t find her undefended.”

Mara says nothing, but her hand curls tighter against his arm.

Lydia steps past me, close enough that her arm grazes mine, her perfume mingling with the tang of oil and leather. Her smirk is there again, cruel and sharp, aimed only at me. “Don’t choke, Agent. I’d hate to waste my time cleaning up your corpse.”

I grin, teeth bared. “If I fall, sweetheart, I’m making sure you’re under me when I do.”

Her laugh is low, mocking, but she doesn’t deny it.

Outside, Jax slides behind the wheel, stiff as a corpse propped up in the driver’s seat. His hands grip the steering wheel like he’s afraid it might buck him off.

Elias claims the front passenger seat, his posture rigid, a gun resting across his thigh. He doesn’t look at anyone when he shuts the door, but his hand brushes Mara’s arm as she climbs into the backseat, sitting directly behind Elias, a small tether, a promise that he won’t let her out of his reach again.