Previous Chapter (10) - Connor | First Chapter - Camila
The air in Jack Derringer’s office was a suffocating cocktail of fear-sweat, gun oil, and the lingering ghost of a thousand stale cigarettes. For Chloe, it was the most beautiful perfume she had ever smelled. It was the scent of safety.
The leader of the strike team, 'Keystone' was his nickname or call sign or whatever he called it, was standing sentry at the front door. Himself and his team had just escorted us all back to the detective's office.
Chloe had just sat huddled on a threadbare sofa, a rough wool blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Beside her, the other girls—Jolene, Sarah, Priya—were a silent tableau of shock, their faces pale and gaunt in the dim light of a desk lamp. The adrenaline of the escape, the raw, primal terror of the firefight, was slowly ebbing away, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion that felt heavier than any chains. Chloe’s entire body trembled with a relentless, low-grade tremor she couldn't control.
The men—their terrifying, violent angels—stood watch. The big one, Backblast, was by the door, a silent, armed sentinel. The leader, Keystone, moved away from his comrade and stood in the center of the room, a pillar of calm amidst the wreckage of their lives.
The office door creaked open, and the third man, the sniper they called Longshot, slipped inside. He moved with the quiet grace of a wraith, his narrow face grim. He gave Keystone a single, sharp nod. The team was reassembled, minus one.
Keystone turned his attention to the women. His gaze, devoid of pity but full of a calm, professional focus, swept over them before landing on the woman who had naturally assumed the role of their unspoken leader. The dark-haired one. The reporter. Camila.
"Ma'am," Keystone said, his voice a low, steady baritone that commanded attention. "Are you Elena Kowalski?"
Chloe watched as Camila, who was tending to a small cut on Jolene's arm with a piece of cloth, looked up. Her face was smudged with dirt and a streak of blood that wasn't hers, but her eyes held a spark of the old fire Chloe remembered from that first night in the cells.
"No," Camila said, her voice clear and strong. "I'm Camila Reyes."
Keystone looks to the four women huddled on the couch "are… any of you Elena Kowalski?"
They all slowly shake their heads no
A heavy silence fell over the room. Keystone's stoic expression didn't change, but Chloe saw a flicker of something in his eyes—confusion, frustration. He had pulled five women from the fire, but he hadn't found the one he’d been sent for.
Chloe felt a knot of dread tighten in her stomach. She knew. They all knew. She had to say something. She cleared her throat, but the sound that came out was a weak, pathetic croak.
"She's gone," Chloe whispered, her gaze fixed on the stained carpet.
The men, deep in their own tactical crisis, didn't seem to hear her. Their focus was entirely on the mission failure. Longshot scratched the back of his neck, his face a mask of frustrated disbelief.
"No, that's not possible," he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. "I'da seen another heat sig. The drone sweep was clean before we went in. A single hostile in the guard post, five sleeping captives. That was the count."
Chloe took a shaky breath and tried again, forcing more air into her lungs, making her voice louder, more insistent. Her throat felt raw.
"Ahem. She's gone."
Keystone held up a gloved hand to silence Longshot, but his attention was still on the tactical problem, not the witness providing the answer. He was already thinking ahead, troubleshooting.
"The drone is still up," he said, turning back to his sniper. "Get a link to my tablet. Do a full thermal sweep of the building and the immediate perimeter. We have to know for sure."
That was the final straw.
BAM!
Camila slammed her fist down on Jack Derringer's cluttered desk. The impact sent a stack of old files sliding to the floor and made a half-empty bottle of bourbon jump. Everyone in the room flinched. The rescued women gasped. The soldiers instinctively tensed.
"LIKE CHLOE JUST SAID!" Camila yelled, her voice a raw, furious roar that filled the small office. She was on her feet now, pointing a trembling finger at Keystone, her eyes blazing with the fire of a woman who had been through hell and had nothing left to lose.
"She's gone! She's no longer in the Print Works! Are you deaf?! Elena. Is. GONE!"
Another heavy, ringing silence fell in the wake of Camila’s outburst. Keystone didn’t flinch. He didn’t react to her fury. He just looked at her, his gaze sharp and analytical, processing the new information with the cold detachment of a machine.
"What does 'gone' mean?" he asked, his voice dangerously quiet.
It was Sarah who answered. She didn’t look up from a loose thread she was pulling on the blanket. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, but it cut through the room with the chilling finality of a death sentence.
"They graduate them," she said. "When they're broken… or when they're not 'fun' anymore… they get sold."
Chloe chimed in, finding strength in their shared testimony. "When they're sold, they're ghosts," she explained, her voice gaining a bit of its old strength. "They're put on a private auction. Nobody knows who bought them or where they went. Nobody except Big Frank and the buyer."
The air in the room seemed to get colder. Keystone and Backblast exchanged a single, loaded look. They hadn't failed to find Elena. They had been too late. The primary objective hadn't just moved; it had vanished.
"Right," Keystone said, the word a clipped, final assessment of their new reality. He turned his full attention back to the women, his eyes scanning them as if they were intelligence assets, which is exactly what they had just become. "So if we want to find Elena Kowalski, we need to get back in there and get access to Romano's master computer. His client list. That's what you're telling me?"
The women, including a visibly shaken Jolene, all nodded solemnly.
The tactical pivot was immediate and absolute. The adrenaline of the escape was gone, replaced by the cold, hard focus of a new mission. This was no longer a snatch and grab. It was an intelligence raid.
Keystone turned to Longshot. "I need you back on that water tower. I need eyes. Now. We lost the element of surprise; they'll be swarming. I need to know every car, every man, every shadow that moves within a five-block radius."
"Switch to Tactical Two," Keystone commanded, his voice a low murmur. "They have Wardog's com. If they're smart they will scan the frequencies to see where we swapped to. Keep all chatter to a minimum." He looked at Backblast, who was already pulling a fresh set of schematics from his pack. "Let's find a new way in."
Longshot gave a single, sharp nod, his face grim. "Birdie's heading back to the nest," he said, turning and slipping back out the door into the night without another word.
As Keystone and Backblast huddled over the new schematics, their voices a low, intense murmur of ventilation shafts and sewer access points, Chloe felt a profound and terrifying sense of uselessness. She was a witness, a survivor, but in this room of hardened warriors, she was just another piece of baggage.
She wrapped the rough wool blanket tighter around her shoulders, the fabric a poor substitute for the safety she craved. Her gaze drifted across the small, cluttered office, a stage where two very different dramas were unfolding. In one corner, the soldiers were planning a war. In the other, a personal reckoning was about to begin.
She watched the quiet detective, the owner of this strange sanctuary, finally move. Jack Derringer looked like a man walking to his own execution. He approached Camila, who had sat back down, her body thrumming with a coiled, furious energy.
Jack didn't stand over her. He hunkered down, bringing his face level with hers, his body language a picture of utter supplication.
From across the room, Chloe couldn't hear his words. They were a low, desperate murmur. But she saw his face, earnest and pleading. She saw him gesture with his bandaged hand toward the chaotic corkboard on the wall, toward the smiling photograph of Elena Kowalski, and then back to Camila. A confession. An explanation.
The reaction was explosive.
Camila’s face, which had been a mask of grim determination, snapped up. Her eyes, which a moment ago held the cold focus of a survivor, widened in sheer, unadulterated disbelief. Then, that disbelief curdled into a murderous, white-hot rage that seemed to radiate from her in waves.
"IT WAS YOU!?"
Her shriek was so raw, so full of betrayal, that it cut through the soldiers' tactical murmuring. Keystone and Backblast looked up, their expressions annoyed by the violent outburst.
Jack scrambled to his feet, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Camila, I'm sorry. I—"
SMACK!
Camila’s right hook, thrown with the full weight of her body and five weeks of repressed fury. It connected with Jack’s jaw with a sickening, wet crack. He stumbled backward, his eyes wide with shock, and went down hard, his head hitting the corner of a filing cabinet with a dull thud. He landed in a heap, groaning.
Camila didn’t stop. She shook the pain out of her hand, a low growl of pure anguish tearing from her throat, and dove on top of him. She straddled his stomach, pinning him to the floor.
"YOU!" she screamed, pounding her fists into his chest.
THUMP.
"SENT!"
THUMP.
"ME!"
THUMP.
"TO!"
THUMP.
"HELL!"
Chloe watched, frozen, as the woman she had seen broken and vacant in a cell transformed into a furious, avenging valkyrie.
Suddenly, a new thought, sharp and cold, pierced through Camila's rage. She stopped hitting him, her fists raised. "Wait," she said, her voice dropping, turning analytical. "They have one of you." She looked up from the pathetic man beneath her, directly at Keystone. "The big one. The Russian. What are they doing to him?"
Keystone shrugged. "They're interrogating him." he replied, not looking up from the schematics.
"And he won't talk?" Camila asked, a desperate hope in her voice. "He won't tell them about us? About this place?"
"Wardog is the toughest son of a bitch I've ever met," Keystone said, his voice a low, confident rumble. "He spent three years in a Chechen gulag. They tried everything on him. Waterboarding, electro-shock, sleep deprivation. His file reads like a medieval torture manual. His lips are sealed."
Camila pushed herself off Jack and stood up, her entire demeanor changing. The rage was still there, but it was now focused, clinical. She walked towards Keystone.
"Did his file mention tickling?" she asked.
Keystone finally looked up, he stared at her, a flicker of confusion crossing his stoic features.
Camila didn't wait for an answer. She lifted her right foot and placed it, bare and dirty from the run through the streets, on the edge of Jack's desk.
"Look at it," she commanded.
Keystone’s eyes dropped to her foot. He saw the grime, the street dirt. But underneath it, he saw what she wanted him to see. The skin was impossibly smooth. There were no calluses. It was as soft and pristine as a child’s.
"They have a doctor down there," Camila said, her voice a low, terrifying whisper. "A man who prepares us. He uses chemicals, exfoliants. He—"
"A resident beautician? Sounds nice" Keystone said, dismissively, looking back down at the schematics
"It's not a fucking day spa, asshole!" Camila shouted at Keystone "He has special compounds, they strip away every layer of protection. He makes your skin so sensitive, you can feel the air move across it."
Keystone looked back at Camela. a little smile on his face at the way Camela addressed him.
She looked from her foot back to Keystone’s face. "The men in that room… they don't break bones. They break minds. Has your Gulag veteran ever had his feet feel like this before they start working on him?"
Keystone’s jaw tightened. He looked from Camila’s unnaturally perfect sole to the other women, who were all nodding, their eyes wide with the shared, traumatic knowledge.
"We are safe!" Keystone said, his voice firm. "Wardog has been through hell and back. He won't break from a little tickling."
Keystone looked back to the schematics spread across the desk, his movements sharp and aggressive.
"Alright," he growled, pointing at a ventilation duct on the blueprint. "The maintenance shaft on the roof is our best bet. It drops straight down to the second-floor offices. Minimal exposure."
Backblast shook his head, his expression grim. "That’s a one-way ticket, Connor. It’s a twelve-foot drop. We get in, but we don’t get out that way. We'd have to fight our way through the main floor. Too loud. Too risky."
"Then we use the sewers," Keystone countered, his finger tracing a different line. "Access point three blocks out. Comes up through a storm drain in the loading bay."
"And wade through a hundred years of industrial shit?" Backblast shot back. "We’ll be deafened by the noise of our own movement, and we’ll smell like a cesspit. They’ll know we’re coming before we even pop the manhole. It's suicide."
They went back and forth, their voices a low, intense barrage of tactical jargon, the tension between them escalating with every dismissed idea. Keystone was pushing for a fast, aggressive insertion. Backblast was arguing for a slower, more methodical approach. The argument was becoming heated, a reflection of the mission's sudden, chaotic turn.
Just as Keystone was about to override his subordinate, a sharp crackle came from their earpieces.
"Birdie's in the nest," Longshot’s calm voice announced. "I have eyes. Place is lit up. Looks like they're beefing up the perimeter."
Keystone threw his hands up in a gesture of pure frustration, cutting Backblast off mid-sentence. "Alright, alright! We wait!" he snapped, turning away from the maps and pacing the small space. "We don't move until we have a clearer picture. Fuck!"
He stalked to the window, staring out at the rain-slicked street. He pressed the comms button at his throat, his voice regaining its professional coolness. "Roger that, Birdie. Maintain surveillance. Report any changes. Over and out."
Silence fell over the room again, thick and heavy. The only sound was the low murmur of the women comforting Jolene, who had started quietly sobbing into her blanket.
A few minutes crawled by. Then, Longshot's voice crackled through their earpieces again, a little more urgent this time.
"Update. I have a new arrival. Black sedan, just pulled into the loading bay. Same model that dropped you lot off, I reckon. I got one man exiting… wait a minute… he's not alone." A pause. "Jesus. He's got a woman. She's… she's struggling. He's carrying her inside."
Chloe's eyes went wide with a fresh wave of terror. "New girl," she whispered, the words a puff of air. The other women heard her, their heads snapping up. They shared a series of knowing, horrified glances. They knew what this meant. The machine hadn't stopped. It was already replacing them.
Longshot’s voice came again. "Also, I have a heat signature change. They've moved Wardog. He was in a small, isolated room in the north-west corner of the building. Now… now he's in the center. A larger room, very well lit."
Camila let out a sharp, shocked breath. She looked down at her own bare feet, a phantom tingling sensation crawling up her spine. "Atkins," she whispered, her voice trembling. "The north-west room… that's the clinic. They took him to Atkins."
The implication was terrifying. They weren't just beating him. They were prepping him.
Keystone turned from the window, his face a mask of stone. "Enough," he commanded, his voice a low, dangerous growl that silenced the room. "Wardog is not going to crack. His pain threshold is off the charts. They can do whatever they want to his feet; it won't work." His eyes swept over the terrified women. "And as for the new girl, their top priority right now is breaking Wardog. He's the immediate threat. Until that happens, the girl is safe."
He sighed, a long, weary sound, and pressed the comms button at his throat.
"Roger that, Birdie. Keep eyes on both situations. Over and out."
Next Chapter (12) - Marco
The air in Jack Derringer’s office was a suffocating cocktail of fear-sweat, gun oil, and the lingering ghost of a thousand stale cigarettes. For Chloe, it was the most beautiful perfume she had ever smelled. It was the scent of safety.
The leader of the strike team, 'Keystone' was his nickname or call sign or whatever he called it, was standing sentry at the front door. Himself and his team had just escorted us all back to the detective's office.
Chloe had just sat huddled on a threadbare sofa, a rough wool blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Beside her, the other girls—Jolene, Sarah, Priya—were a silent tableau of shock, their faces pale and gaunt in the dim light of a desk lamp. The adrenaline of the escape, the raw, primal terror of the firefight, was slowly ebbing away, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion that felt heavier than any chains. Chloe’s entire body trembled with a relentless, low-grade tremor she couldn't control.
The men—their terrifying, violent angels—stood watch. The big one, Backblast, was by the door, a silent, armed sentinel. The leader, Keystone, moved away from his comrade and stood in the center of the room, a pillar of calm amidst the wreckage of their lives.
The office door creaked open, and the third man, the sniper they called Longshot, slipped inside. He moved with the quiet grace of a wraith, his narrow face grim. He gave Keystone a single, sharp nod. The team was reassembled, minus one.
Keystone turned his attention to the women. His gaze, devoid of pity but full of a calm, professional focus, swept over them before landing on the woman who had naturally assumed the role of their unspoken leader. The dark-haired one. The reporter. Camila.
"Ma'am," Keystone said, his voice a low, steady baritone that commanded attention. "Are you Elena Kowalski?"
Chloe watched as Camila, who was tending to a small cut on Jolene's arm with a piece of cloth, looked up. Her face was smudged with dirt and a streak of blood that wasn't hers, but her eyes held a spark of the old fire Chloe remembered from that first night in the cells.
"No," Camila said, her voice clear and strong. "I'm Camila Reyes."
Keystone looks to the four women huddled on the couch "are… any of you Elena Kowalski?"
They all slowly shake their heads no
A heavy silence fell over the room. Keystone's stoic expression didn't change, but Chloe saw a flicker of something in his eyes—confusion, frustration. He had pulled five women from the fire, but he hadn't found the one he’d been sent for.
Chloe felt a knot of dread tighten in her stomach. She knew. They all knew. She had to say something. She cleared her throat, but the sound that came out was a weak, pathetic croak.
"She's gone," Chloe whispered, her gaze fixed on the stained carpet.
The men, deep in their own tactical crisis, didn't seem to hear her. Their focus was entirely on the mission failure. Longshot scratched the back of his neck, his face a mask of frustrated disbelief.
"No, that's not possible," he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. "I'da seen another heat sig. The drone sweep was clean before we went in. A single hostile in the guard post, five sleeping captives. That was the count."
Chloe took a shaky breath and tried again, forcing more air into her lungs, making her voice louder, more insistent. Her throat felt raw.
"Ahem. She's gone."
Keystone held up a gloved hand to silence Longshot, but his attention was still on the tactical problem, not the witness providing the answer. He was already thinking ahead, troubleshooting.
"The drone is still up," he said, turning back to his sniper. "Get a link to my tablet. Do a full thermal sweep of the building and the immediate perimeter. We have to know for sure."
That was the final straw.
BAM!
Camila slammed her fist down on Jack Derringer's cluttered desk. The impact sent a stack of old files sliding to the floor and made a half-empty bottle of bourbon jump. Everyone in the room flinched. The rescued women gasped. The soldiers instinctively tensed.
"LIKE CHLOE JUST SAID!" Camila yelled, her voice a raw, furious roar that filled the small office. She was on her feet now, pointing a trembling finger at Keystone, her eyes blazing with the fire of a woman who had been through hell and had nothing left to lose.
"She's gone! She's no longer in the Print Works! Are you deaf?! Elena. Is. GONE!"
Another heavy, ringing silence fell in the wake of Camila’s outburst. Keystone didn’t flinch. He didn’t react to her fury. He just looked at her, his gaze sharp and analytical, processing the new information with the cold detachment of a machine.
"What does 'gone' mean?" he asked, his voice dangerously quiet.
It was Sarah who answered. She didn’t look up from a loose thread she was pulling on the blanket. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, but it cut through the room with the chilling finality of a death sentence.
"They graduate them," she said. "When they're broken… or when they're not 'fun' anymore… they get sold."
Chloe chimed in, finding strength in their shared testimony. "When they're sold, they're ghosts," she explained, her voice gaining a bit of its old strength. "They're put on a private auction. Nobody knows who bought them or where they went. Nobody except Big Frank and the buyer."
The air in the room seemed to get colder. Keystone and Backblast exchanged a single, loaded look. They hadn't failed to find Elena. They had been too late. The primary objective hadn't just moved; it had vanished.
"Right," Keystone said, the word a clipped, final assessment of their new reality. He turned his full attention back to the women, his eyes scanning them as if they were intelligence assets, which is exactly what they had just become. "So if we want to find Elena Kowalski, we need to get back in there and get access to Romano's master computer. His client list. That's what you're telling me?"
The women, including a visibly shaken Jolene, all nodded solemnly.
The tactical pivot was immediate and absolute. The adrenaline of the escape was gone, replaced by the cold, hard focus of a new mission. This was no longer a snatch and grab. It was an intelligence raid.
Keystone turned to Longshot. "I need you back on that water tower. I need eyes. Now. We lost the element of surprise; they'll be swarming. I need to know every car, every man, every shadow that moves within a five-block radius."
"Switch to Tactical Two," Keystone commanded, his voice a low murmur. "They have Wardog's com. If they're smart they will scan the frequencies to see where we swapped to. Keep all chatter to a minimum." He looked at Backblast, who was already pulling a fresh set of schematics from his pack. "Let's find a new way in."
Longshot gave a single, sharp nod, his face grim. "Birdie's heading back to the nest," he said, turning and slipping back out the door into the night without another word.
As Keystone and Backblast huddled over the new schematics, their voices a low, intense murmur of ventilation shafts and sewer access points, Chloe felt a profound and terrifying sense of uselessness. She was a witness, a survivor, but in this room of hardened warriors, she was just another piece of baggage.
She wrapped the rough wool blanket tighter around her shoulders, the fabric a poor substitute for the safety she craved. Her gaze drifted across the small, cluttered office, a stage where two very different dramas were unfolding. In one corner, the soldiers were planning a war. In the other, a personal reckoning was about to begin.
She watched the quiet detective, the owner of this strange sanctuary, finally move. Jack Derringer looked like a man walking to his own execution. He approached Camila, who had sat back down, her body thrumming with a coiled, furious energy.
Jack didn't stand over her. He hunkered down, bringing his face level with hers, his body language a picture of utter supplication.
From across the room, Chloe couldn't hear his words. They were a low, desperate murmur. But she saw his face, earnest and pleading. She saw him gesture with his bandaged hand toward the chaotic corkboard on the wall, toward the smiling photograph of Elena Kowalski, and then back to Camila. A confession. An explanation.
The reaction was explosive.
Camila’s face, which had been a mask of grim determination, snapped up. Her eyes, which a moment ago held the cold focus of a survivor, widened in sheer, unadulterated disbelief. Then, that disbelief curdled into a murderous, white-hot rage that seemed to radiate from her in waves.
"IT WAS YOU!?"
Her shriek was so raw, so full of betrayal, that it cut through the soldiers' tactical murmuring. Keystone and Backblast looked up, their expressions annoyed by the violent outburst.
Jack scrambled to his feet, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Camila, I'm sorry. I—"
SMACK!
Camila’s right hook, thrown with the full weight of her body and five weeks of repressed fury. It connected with Jack’s jaw with a sickening, wet crack. He stumbled backward, his eyes wide with shock, and went down hard, his head hitting the corner of a filing cabinet with a dull thud. He landed in a heap, groaning.
Camila didn’t stop. She shook the pain out of her hand, a low growl of pure anguish tearing from her throat, and dove on top of him. She straddled his stomach, pinning him to the floor.
"YOU!" she screamed, pounding her fists into his chest.
THUMP.
"SENT!"
THUMP.
"ME!"
THUMP.
"TO!"
THUMP.
"HELL!"
Chloe watched, frozen, as the woman she had seen broken and vacant in a cell transformed into a furious, avenging valkyrie.
Suddenly, a new thought, sharp and cold, pierced through Camila's rage. She stopped hitting him, her fists raised. "Wait," she said, her voice dropping, turning analytical. "They have one of you." She looked up from the pathetic man beneath her, directly at Keystone. "The big one. The Russian. What are they doing to him?"
Keystone shrugged. "They're interrogating him." he replied, not looking up from the schematics.
"And he won't talk?" Camila asked, a desperate hope in her voice. "He won't tell them about us? About this place?"
"Wardog is the toughest son of a bitch I've ever met," Keystone said, his voice a low, confident rumble. "He spent three years in a Chechen gulag. They tried everything on him. Waterboarding, electro-shock, sleep deprivation. His file reads like a medieval torture manual. His lips are sealed."
Camila pushed herself off Jack and stood up, her entire demeanor changing. The rage was still there, but it was now focused, clinical. She walked towards Keystone.
"Did his file mention tickling?" she asked.
Keystone finally looked up, he stared at her, a flicker of confusion crossing his stoic features.
Camila didn't wait for an answer. She lifted her right foot and placed it, bare and dirty from the run through the streets, on the edge of Jack's desk.
"Look at it," she commanded.
Keystone’s eyes dropped to her foot. He saw the grime, the street dirt. But underneath it, he saw what she wanted him to see. The skin was impossibly smooth. There were no calluses. It was as soft and pristine as a child’s.
"They have a doctor down there," Camila said, her voice a low, terrifying whisper. "A man who prepares us. He uses chemicals, exfoliants. He—"
"A resident beautician? Sounds nice" Keystone said, dismissively, looking back down at the schematics
"It's not a fucking day spa, asshole!" Camila shouted at Keystone "He has special compounds, they strip away every layer of protection. He makes your skin so sensitive, you can feel the air move across it."
Keystone looked back at Camela. a little smile on his face at the way Camela addressed him.
She looked from her foot back to Keystone’s face. "The men in that room… they don't break bones. They break minds. Has your Gulag veteran ever had his feet feel like this before they start working on him?"
Keystone’s jaw tightened. He looked from Camila’s unnaturally perfect sole to the other women, who were all nodding, their eyes wide with the shared, traumatic knowledge.
"We are safe!" Keystone said, his voice firm. "Wardog has been through hell and back. He won't break from a little tickling."
Keystone looked back to the schematics spread across the desk, his movements sharp and aggressive.
"Alright," he growled, pointing at a ventilation duct on the blueprint. "The maintenance shaft on the roof is our best bet. It drops straight down to the second-floor offices. Minimal exposure."
Backblast shook his head, his expression grim. "That’s a one-way ticket, Connor. It’s a twelve-foot drop. We get in, but we don’t get out that way. We'd have to fight our way through the main floor. Too loud. Too risky."
"Then we use the sewers," Keystone countered, his finger tracing a different line. "Access point three blocks out. Comes up through a storm drain in the loading bay."
"And wade through a hundred years of industrial shit?" Backblast shot back. "We’ll be deafened by the noise of our own movement, and we’ll smell like a cesspit. They’ll know we’re coming before we even pop the manhole. It's suicide."
They went back and forth, their voices a low, intense barrage of tactical jargon, the tension between them escalating with every dismissed idea. Keystone was pushing for a fast, aggressive insertion. Backblast was arguing for a slower, more methodical approach. The argument was becoming heated, a reflection of the mission's sudden, chaotic turn.
Just as Keystone was about to override his subordinate, a sharp crackle came from their earpieces.
"Birdie's in the nest," Longshot’s calm voice announced. "I have eyes. Place is lit up. Looks like they're beefing up the perimeter."
Keystone threw his hands up in a gesture of pure frustration, cutting Backblast off mid-sentence. "Alright, alright! We wait!" he snapped, turning away from the maps and pacing the small space. "We don't move until we have a clearer picture. Fuck!"
He stalked to the window, staring out at the rain-slicked street. He pressed the comms button at his throat, his voice regaining its professional coolness. "Roger that, Birdie. Maintain surveillance. Report any changes. Over and out."
Silence fell over the room again, thick and heavy. The only sound was the low murmur of the women comforting Jolene, who had started quietly sobbing into her blanket.
A few minutes crawled by. Then, Longshot's voice crackled through their earpieces again, a little more urgent this time.
"Update. I have a new arrival. Black sedan, just pulled into the loading bay. Same model that dropped you lot off, I reckon. I got one man exiting… wait a minute… he's not alone." A pause. "Jesus. He's got a woman. She's… she's struggling. He's carrying her inside."
Chloe's eyes went wide with a fresh wave of terror. "New girl," she whispered, the words a puff of air. The other women heard her, their heads snapping up. They shared a series of knowing, horrified glances. They knew what this meant. The machine hadn't stopped. It was already replacing them.
Longshot’s voice came again. "Also, I have a heat signature change. They've moved Wardog. He was in a small, isolated room in the north-west corner of the building. Now… now he's in the center. A larger room, very well lit."
Camila let out a sharp, shocked breath. She looked down at her own bare feet, a phantom tingling sensation crawling up her spine. "Atkins," she whispered, her voice trembling. "The north-west room… that's the clinic. They took him to Atkins."
The implication was terrifying. They weren't just beating him. They were prepping him.
Keystone turned from the window, his face a mask of stone. "Enough," he commanded, his voice a low, dangerous growl that silenced the room. "Wardog is not going to crack. His pain threshold is off the charts. They can do whatever they want to his feet; it won't work." His eyes swept over the terrified women. "And as for the new girl, their top priority right now is breaking Wardog. He's the immediate threat. Until that happens, the girl is safe."
He sighed, a long, weary sound, and pressed the comms button at his throat.
"Roger that, Birdie. Keep eyes on both situations. Over and out."
Next Chapter (12) - Marco
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