Page 33 of Rescuing Ally, Part 2 (CHARLIE Team: Guardian Hostage Rescue Specialists #8)

The words are designed to inflict maximum psychological damage. He’s not just reporting their deaths—he’s defiling their memory.

“You’ll need time to process this loss,” Malfor speaks as though delivering a therapeutic intervention rather than psychological torture. “Time to understand your new reality. Time to accept that resistance is not heroism—it’s suicide.”

He turns to the guards. “Return them to their cells. Double the watch. Suicide risk is elevated after events like these.”

Rebel snaps.

It’s not a scream—it’s a sound, raw and inhuman, ripped from someplace wild inside her. She lunges so fast that the guards barely register movement. The collar jerks her back mid-charge, wrenching her to her knees with a crack of electricity that lights up her spine.

But, she doesn’t stop.

Snarling, she surges up again, her arm catching Malfor’s lapel. Fingernails shred fabric, leaving angry red lines across his chest before the guards slam into her from both sides, driving her into the ground.

Malfor steps back, brushing his suit like she’s filth. Like none of it mattered.

But it did.

Because for one breathless second, she almost had him.

The beating comes fast, brutal—like they’ve rehearsed it.

A boot slams into her ribs. Once. Twice.

The third strike cracks something deep and real.

She coughs, the sound wet, sharp. One guard drops to a knee, pinning her broken arm beneath him.

Her scream splinters the air—high and raw, animalistic.

The third doesn’t move. Just stands there like a monolith, hand on her collar’s control, ready to press again if she so much as twitches.

Malfor brushes invisible dust from his lapel. Calm. Immaculate. Then he reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out something small—silver catching the light.

A blade.

“Impulsivity has consequences.” He crouches beside her, voice smooth as silk pulled tight over broken glass. “Beauty is a privilege. Easily revoked.”

Rebel snarls, lips bloodied, eyes blazing.

He slices her slowly, from temple to jaw. The blade moves with surgical care, skin parting clean, blood spilling in a crimson river down her neck. It’s not meant to kill. It’s meant to ruin.

To brand.

But she doesn’t scream this time.

She just laughs.

Not loud. Not sane. Just the whisper of something broken and burning. Her eyes lock on his, gleaming with hate so pure it feels holy.

“Gonna need a sharper knife,” she rasps, teeth red with her own blood. “If you want to cut out the fight.”

Malfor pauses, only for a second, but it’s there. A flicker of doubt.

And Rebel grins through the ruin of her face.

Unbroken.

Unbowed.

Unafraid.

“Take them back.” Malfor rises, tucking the bloodied blade into his pocket. “Miss Collins stays.”

The guards drag the others away—Malia still sobbing, raw sounds torn from her throat that echo down the corridors.

Mia moves like a sleepwalker, white-faced with shock, her body going through the motions while her mind retreats.

Stitch allows herself to be led mechanically, still dissociated, staring at nothing.

Jenna walks with military bearing despite everything, already compartmentalizing the trauma.

Rebel, they carry between them, blood dripping from her face to mark their path across the concrete, but her eyes still burn with defiant fire.

When we’re alone, Malfor positions himself directly before me. His breath smells of mint and coffee, with a hint of something rotten underneath.

“No one is coming, little bird.” His voice drops to an intimate whisper. “Not for you. Not ever.”

His finger traces my jawline, the touch raising bile in my throat. “The sooner you accept your new reality, the easier your life becomes.”

My voice emerges from some distant place, hollow and strange. “They’ll never stop looking.”

“They already have.” He straightens, satisfaction evident in every line of his body.

“By this time tomorrow, Guardian HRS will have officially listed the mission as a catastrophic failure. All hands lost. Search and rescue abandoned due to hostile conditions.” His smile widens.

“And you? You’ll be listed as collateral damage.

Presumed dead alongside your would-be rescuers. ”

The screen behind him continues its endless loop—helicopters approaching, exploding, falling. Approaching, exploding, falling. The death of hope on infinite repeat.

“I’ll leave you with your thoughts.” Malfor gestures to the guards. “One hour. Then return her to her cell.”

He pauses at the courtyard entrance, silhouetted against interior light. “Tomorrow, you return to work. With renewed focus, I trust.”

The screen plays on as he leaves. Helicopters die again and again before my eyes.

Grief has weight, has mass, has a gravitational pull that collapses lungs and crushes bone. It presses against my eyes until my vision darkens at the edges. It fills my throat until breathing becomes impossible.

They’re gone.

Everyone who might have saved us.

Everyone who loved us.

Gone.

Yet we remain.

Collared. Imprisoned. Forgotten.

The hour passes in a haze of static and white noise. Guards return and drag me back through corridors that stretch forever. My feet move automatically. My body remembers how to walk even as my mind fractures around a loss too vast to process.

They throw me back into my cell. The door locks with that same magnetic thunk that once seemed like the worst sound in the world. Now it barely registers through the roaring in my ears.

Night deepens. Darkness wraps around the cellblock like a shroud. But we’re not silent now. We’re broken in different ways, each processing the loss according to our nature.

From Malia’s cell comes the sound of quiet sobbing—not the raw keening from the courtyard, but steady tears that speak to profound grief. She loved Walt with everything she had, and now that love has nowhere to go except into the void where he used to exist.

Jenna’s voice cuts through the darkness, barely above a whisper but carrying authority. “Stitch. Can you hear me?”

A long silence. Then, tentatively: “I’m here.”

“Good. Stay with us. Don’t go anywhere we can’t follow.”

Jenna’s doing triage on our emotional casualties, making sure no one gets completely lost in their grief. Her pain is locked away, somewhere she can access later, when the immediate crisis passes.

“Mia?” Jenna calls softly.

“Present.” The response comes shakily but promptly.

“Rebel?”

A bitter laugh echoes from her cell. “Still breathing. Still planning how to kill that bastard with my bare hands.”

“Ally?”

I try to speak, but the words stick in my throat. Everything feels distant, unreal. The future Hank, Gabe, and I planned—lazy Sunday mornings, his coffee getting cold while we talked about everything and nothing, all of it gone in a streak of light across a night-vision screen.

“Ally.” Jenna’s voice carries gentle insistence. “I need you to answer.”

“Here,” I finally manage. “I’m here.”

But I’m not. Not really. Part of me died with that helicopter, sank into the ocean with the men I loved. The part that believed in rescue. In happy endings. In love conquering all.

“We need to talk about what comes next,” Jenna says quietly.

“What comes next?” Rebel’s voice carries bitter amusement. “We’re lab rats in a maze. The only thing that comes next is whatever experiment he wants to run.”

“No.” Jenna’s response is firm. “We decide what comes next. Not him.”

“How?” Malia’s voice breaks on the word. “How do we decide anything when we’re locked in cages?”

“Because we’re still alive,” Jenna replies with a conviction that cuts through the despair. “Because they died trying to save us, and giving up now makes their sacrifice meaningless.”

Silence falls again, but it’s different now. Not the silence of defeat, but of consideration. Of minds working through grief toward something resembling purpose.

“He’ll expect us to be broken,” I say finally, surprising myself with the steadiness of my voice. “Completely compliant.”

“Then that’s what we give him,” Jenna agrees. “We show him broken women who’ve accepted their fate.”

“While we plan,” Mia adds, understanding creeping into her tone.

“While we survive,” Stitch says quietly, her voice more present than it’s been since the courtyard.

“While we prepare,” Rebel finishes, dark promise in her words.

From my bunk, I stare at the ceiling and let grief settle into my bones alongside something colder. Malfor believes he’s won. Believes he’s broken us completely. He thinks we’ll work obediently now, build his weapons, further his plans, and accept our captivity as inevitable.

Somewhere in the compound, Malfor sleeps easily, satisfied with his victory. Somewhere in the ocean, the bodies of our men drift with the currents. Somewhere in Guardian HRS headquarters, reports are being filed, missions aborted, and their losses tallied.

Here, in this concrete box, something dies inside me that will never live again, but something else takes its place.

Something cold. Something patient. Something that doesn’t need hope, rescue, or salvation.

Hank and Gabe taught me many things during our time together. How to defend myself. How to think tactically. How to survive when survival seems impossible.

And one lesson above all others: how to wait for the perfect moment to strike.

Tomorrow I’ll return to the lab. I’ll build his quantum network. I’ll be the model of submission and defeat.

Beneath that mask, I’ll become the weapon Hank and Gabe trained me to be.

Because monsters like Malfor never look closely at shattered things. They never notice the edge—until it slips beneath their skin.

Grief and fury braid together in my chest. I never got to say goodbye. But I swear on Hank and Gabe’s memory— I’ll make sure you pay for every second of love you stole from us.

The vow settles into my soul like armor. Tomorrow, I begin the long game.

Tonight, I mourn the future that died with Hank and Gabe, and forge a new one from grief and rage and the unbreakable bonds between women who refuse to be broken.

Even when everything else is taken from us, we still have each other.

And we still have the will to make Malfor pay.