Page 279 of Fractured Allegiance

He doesn’t need to explain why.

Jax nods, then moves with Mara down the left corridor. The metal door slams behind them, echoing down the spine of the compound.

We take the right.

The deeper we go, the worse it smells: there’s too much gunpowder, rust, blood baked into the floor. The air hums faintly, electricity crawling behind the walls. Lydia moves beside me, her knife still in her hand, knuckles pale. She’s too quiet, even for her.

“You good?” I whisper.

Her mouth curves faintly. “Define good.”

“You’re not bleeding out, you’re still moving, and you’re not dead yet. That’s good.”

She gives a breath of a laugh—short, humorless, but real. “You have a way of lowering standards, Silas.”

“I aim for realistic expectations.”

The corner of her mouth twitches, but her eyes stay forward. She’s scanning everything: the lights, the shadows, the sound of dripping water down the hall. The way she moves reminds me of what she told me once. Control is just another word for survival.

Elias stops at the next junction, crouches, and brushes his fingers over the floor. Blood—thin, recent, smeared in a trail leading deeper into the dark.

“He’s pulling back,” he mutters. “He wants us inside.”

I tighten my grip on my gun. “Then let’s not disappoint him.”

We move again, slower now. Each step feels like we’re walking into a heartbeat—steady, inevitable.

The corridor opens into a wide chamber. Concrete walls, metal catwalks overhead, stacks of crates shoved against the far end. A large window spans one wall, overlooking what looks like an old control room full of shattered monitors, a bank of security feeds still flickering with static.

Lydia stops first. Her eyes flick toward the far corner. “Trip wires.”

I follow her gaze. Thin threads strung between the crates, nearly invisible in the red light. Clever. Old-fashioned, but clever.

“Can you disarm them?” Elias asks.

She crouches, fingers moving deftly. Her calmness in this is unnerving, like the chaos outside never happened. She pinches one wire between her nails, cuts it with a flick of her blade, then another. Her movements are surgical. No hesitation.

When she straightens, she meets Elias’s eyes. “Clear.”

He nods. “Move.”

We step over the wires, guns raised. The chamber opens into another narrow hall, this one lined with offices—glass walls smeared with grime and streaked with something darker. Inside one, a desk is overturned, papers scattered. Another holds a flickering fluorescent light that keeps flashing like a dying heartbeat.

“Feels like a trap,” I mutter.

Elias’s mouth hardens. “It is a trap.”

The sound comes before the movement: metal boots on the catwalk above. I spin, gun raised. Two men lean over the railings, rifles drawn. Before they can fire, Elias takes one cleanthrough the neck. I hit the second. Their bodies tumble from the catwalk, slamming into the floor in a wet thud.

The noise wakes up the rest.

From the far end of the hall, a door bursts open and more of Drazen’s men pour in—five, maybe six, all armored, firing as they move. Bullets rip through glass and plaster, shredding walls into powder.

Lydia drops to one knee beside a doorway, firing through the broken glass. Two men go down. Elias advances like a machine, calm and relentless. I cover the flank, taking out one who tries to circle us from behind.

The smell of blood thickens again. The air hums with static and heat.

When the gunfire finally dies, only the hum of electricity remains. The hallway is a graveyard of noise.