Page 285 of Fractured Allegiance

He doesn’t correct me. He doesn’t have to. The city will come at us with a hundred knives, and we will catch them. For now I stand in ash and smoke, hands smelling of burned plastic, and think how the ledger’s flames have left me marked but not owned.

Dark humor pools itself in the back of my throat and I let it out like a rasp. “Well,” I say, “at least he was tidy about his servers.”

Silas exhales something soft that might be a laugh or a catch. “Tidy men often leave the mess for others.”

Elias nods once and turns to the men still shoring up the perimeter. “Let’s get moving.”

We do as he says. We move in a long line through the compound, each of us carrying shards of the night—wounds, files, promises. The ledger is gone. The fracture hums on. The city breathes unaware. And beneath my ribs, something that used to be an old, hungry thing has finally been fed enough to sleep. Or to start a new hunger. Either way, we have a next step.

We walk into it together.

Chapter 39 – Lydia - Ash and Fire

The fire eats everything that ever mattered to men like Drazen.

It hisses through the corridors, cracking steel, turning all those holy servers into melted gods. The smell of it—metal, oil, wire insulation—clings to my lungs until it feels like I’m breathing in the bones of power itself.

When the last rack folds inward, Elias steps forward, his face lit in the blaze. He doesn’t blink. His voice cuts through the roar. “Move the wounded. Strip the weapons. Burn the rest.”

No hesitation. No mourning. Just efficiency, the kind of ritual that makes chaos feel civilized.

Jax nods and starts barking orders at the perimeter teams. Boots scatter over the gravel. The bodies are sorted—ours to one side, theirs to the other. It’s clinical, almost gentle, which somehow makes it worse.

Mara moves among them, a steady axis of calm. She wipes her hands on her jeans, checks a pulse that’s already gone, and then moves on. She’s long past flinching at death.

It’s strange, the way she and Elias function like complementary weapons. She stitches, he cuts. Between them, there’s balance. Or maybe just habit.

Silas stands beside me, silent as the smoke. His knuckles are bloodied, a bruise darkening along his jawline. I should tell him to get it cleaned, but the words don’t come. He’s too still, too focused, watching Elias’s men move through the wreckage like priests dismantling an altar.

Drazen’s corpse lies in the dirt behind us, half-covered by a tarp that flutters with each gust of wind. His blood hasdried black on the gravel, a final stain that no one will bother scrubbing away.

There’s no speech for him. No mercy. Just the certainty that his empire is ash.

Elias turns toward me. The light makes his expression unreadable, all shadow and flame. “We’re finished here.”

“Almost,” I answer.

My voice sounds alien—smoked through, scraped thin.

He glances at the vault door still gaping open, heat shimmering around it. “You did what needed doing.”

“I know.”

He nods once, not as agreement, but as acknowledgment. “Leave the rest to me. My men will clean it.”

Mara steps up beside him, her hands streaked with soot. “We should go before the fire draws company.”

Elias’s gaze flicks to her, and something softer passes between them—an unspoken yes, an instinct to protect. Then he looks back at me. “You too, Lydia. Get out.”

The command lands heavier than it should. Maybe because it sounds final.

I nod and turn toward Silas. He’s still watching the blaze, the reflection of it sparking in his eyes. “Let’s go,” I say.

He doesn’t move right away. “Feels strange.”

“What does?”

“Winning.”