Page 78 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

The room was small. Two cots, barely touched.

MRE wrappers in the corner. Cigarette burns on the wall.

A photo hung crooked above one bed, three men in camo, grinning like war was a vacation.

I took it down and folded it. I didn’t know why.

Maybe because one of those faces was now missing a jaw.

Maybe because war like this wasn’t supposed to leave souvenirs.

We moved on. No words. Just the quiet language of practiced bodies—shoulder brushes, mirrored steps, the faint clicks of gloves on steel. The corridor ahead pulsed low. Dim light. Sharp angles. Shadows that seemed to think about shifting.

This wasn’t fury. Fury burns too fast. This was surgical. Cold. The kind of discipline honed by trauma and repetition. We’d already mourned what we might lose.

At the next junction, I gave Sully a tilt of my chin. He moved—steady, unhurried, like a man who’d never met a fear he couldn’t outweigh. He swept the blind corner while I covered high, every motion reminding me that subtle didn’t mean soft. I didn’t breathe until he did. Then we moved again.

Forward. Silent. I didn’t have to look to know where they were. I could feel the rhythm in my blood—the staggered fall of boots, the press of gear against vests, the brush of breath through filters no one used. There were no words. Just proximity. Purpose.

The air changed as we turned the corner.

Colder. Not from the storm, but sudden, noticeable change.

The humidity that had clung to us for hours dropped like we’d passed through some invisible barrier.

My skin prickled. It wasn’t environmental.

It was engineered. Controlled. Someone had sealed a space nearby, and pumped it with its own air. That meant power. That meant purpose.

I paused. Pressed my palm against the wall beneath a corroded conduit box.

Concrete met my glove—cracked and chipped—but beneath that, something deeper.

A tremor. Not a failing transformer hum.

Rhythmic. Clean. Machinery, built to last. Something was back there. Temperature-sensitive. Possibly alive.

My stomach twisted, not with panic, but with certainty. I kept my voice low, barely trusting the air to carry it. “It’s here.”

Carrick was beside me in seconds, eyes sweeping the seams of the structure like he could will them open by force alone. “What are you feeling?”

“Power flow. Cold air. Could be refrigeration. Maybe backup battery housing,” I murmured, fingers still pressed to the wall.

“But something’s off with the reverb. It’s not an open space.

It’s controlled. This has to be the area where Stella was held, based on her descriptions.

Violet is probably being held in the same place, somewhere on the other side of this door. ”

Niko dropped to a knee, already unrolling his pack. “Double-bolted. Electronic lock. Local access.” His tone stayed even, but I caught the set of his jaw. “No alarms. Fresh wiring. They didn’t think anyone would find it.”

He slid his bypass tool into the seam, movements clean, practiced.

For two minutes, the only sound was the quiet click of metal against metal and the faint scrape of tension rods shifting.

His shoulders stayed squared, steady as stone.

But then I saw it—the faint crease of his brow. The lock wasn’t giving.

“Come on,” he muttered under his breath, twisting the pick a fraction tighter. A soft hiss of static bled from the panel, mocking him. He pulled back, recalibrated, tried again. A click came, but not the right kind.

Sully flicked his gaze to me. I didn’t move. Not yet. Niko tried twice more, precise as ever, before he finally exhaled through his nose and cut me a look. Not defeat. Just calculation.

“Jax,” he said quietly. “Your eyes.”

I crouched beside him, peering into the guts of the panel. Fresh solder glared up at me, wires rerouted into false loops, a misdirection circuit built to waste time. It was clever—meant to trip up even trained hands. But it wasn’t flawless.

“They overcompensated,” I murmured, already reaching into his kit. My fingers sorted through the tools by instinct, pulling a micro-pick and grounding clamp. “Cross-wired the leads to stall anyone working straight. You can’t brute force it.”

Niko didn’t argue, didn’t bristle. Just leaned back enough for me to work. “Show me.”

My pulse synced to the circuitry, mapping every false junction. I eased the clamp against the frame, bridging the current, coaxing the sequence instead of fighting it. One by one, the false wires gave. The tension shifted beneath my hand, a rhythm falling into place.

Three seconds. Two. One.

The pad’s light flipped from red to green with a soft, mechanical hiss.

I sat back, letting the tools fall quiet. “Door’s open.”

Niko gave one short nod acknowledgment. “Good work.”

The cold rushed out as the seal broke, sterile and processed. Antiseptic. Bleach. Metal. And beneath it, something older—damp, rotting at the edges.

I didn’t breathe. Couldn’t. The air screamed wrong.

The space beyond wasn’t another narrow corridor.

It opened wide, cavernous, a warehouse within the warehouse.

From the outside, the building had looked like every other forgotten husk along the industrial strip.

Inside, it had been gutted, rebuilt, and sharpened into something surgical.

The ceiling arched high above with exposed steel trusses, the walls reinforced, the floor a smooth slab designed for weight.

Rows of steel racks stretched into the dark, each one stacked with crates stenciled in Cyrillic, markings too familiar to mistake.

Weapons.

Enough to supply an army.

Sully gave a slow, barely audible whistle of surprise. “What. The. Fuuuuuck…”

We were surrounded by rifles. Launchers. Ammunition stacked in neat, deadly towers. Each crate was sealed, catalogued, and ready for distribution. The Dom Krovi wasn’t just dabbling in blood money. This was way deeper than that. This was the makings of an empire.

We fanned out automatically, but no one spoke. The silence wasn’t reverence—it was shock and rage, controlled and sharpened to a point. Every weapon here was a thread of violence that would bleed out into streets, cities, families. And we were standing in the middle of their cathedral.

On the far wall, two more doors waited. Heavy. Reinforced. One wider, bolted with thick external latches and an electronic pad glowing faint green. The other smaller, locked tight, a single strip of light bleeding beneath it.

The hum of machinery deepened from behind the larger door. Steady. Rhythmic. Reassuring in the worst way.

That was no cache. That was containment.

She was in there.

And on the other side of the second door—records, maybe? Names. Ledgers. The kind of evidence that could finally nail them to the wall.

The cold pressed sharper. My grip tightened on the rifle.

We weren’t just breaking in, anymore.

We were cracking open the heart of the beast.

And we were out of time.