Chapter 25_The Hidden Contractor

​The blinding white light of the flashbang tore through the subterranean gloom, accompanied by a concussive boom that sucked the oxygen straight out of my lungs.

​I didn't think so. I couldn't see. I just moved.

​Before the blast could fully disorient me, I reached into the narrow, rusted mouth of the maintenance tunnel and grabbed a handful of Jarosława’s jacket. I hauled backward with every ounce of strength left in my battered body, ripping her out of the confined space just as the deafening roar of a shotgun blasted from the dark.

​The heavy buckshot chewed through the concrete lip of the tunnel where her head had been a fraction of a second before, showering us in razor-sharp stone splinters.

​We crashed hard onto the freezing floor of the bunker. I rolled, putting my body over hers to shield her from the debris, my ears ringing with a high-pitched whine that drowned out everything else in the room. The fresh tearing sensation in my side told me my stitches had finally given way, the grazing gunshot wound I'd taken earlier now bleeding freely against my ribs. I ignored the blinding flash of pain. Pain was just data. It meant I was still breathing.

​Through the thick, swirling smoke and the fading white spots in my vision, I saw the silhouette emerging from the tunnel. He was wearing heavy tactical gear, racking the pump of his shotgun for a second shot.

​I didn't have time to aim. I didn't have time to think. Drawing my combat knife from my thigh sheath in one fluid motion, I lunged upward from the floor.

​I drove the six-inch steel blade up under the rim of his Kevlar vest, burying it to the hilt in the soft tissue beneath his ribs. The man let out a wet, breathless gasp, his finger twitching on the trigger. The shotgun discharged into the ceiling, raining pulverized drywall down on our heads. I twisted the blade and shoved him backward. He collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, hitting the concrete with a heavy, lifeless thud.

​Silence slammed back into the room, broken only by the harsh, ragged sound of our breathing and the hiss of a broken steam pipe somewhere in the walls.

​I dropped to one knee, bracing my hand against the cold steel of the server rack to keep from tipping over. The adrenaline was beginning to crash, leaving a sickening, hollow exhaustion in its wake. I looked down at my left side. My dark shirt was completely saturated, the blood dripping steadily from my hem onto the gray concrete.

​"Magnus."

​Her voice was a fragile whisper in the dark, cutting through the ringing in my ears.

​I looked up. Jarosława was sitting up against the far wall, her knees pulled to her chest. Her face was pale, smeared with soot and dirt, her dark hair wildly tangled around her shoulders. She was trembling violently, staring at the blood pooling around my boot. Yet, when she looked up at my face, her eyes weren't filled with the terrified hatred I was used to seeing. There was something else there. A desperate, raw reliance. A terrifying kind of trust.

​It felt heavier than a bullet in the chest.

​"I'm fine," I lied, my voice a gravelly rasp. I forced myself to stand, swaying for a fraction of a second before locking my knees. "Are you hit?"

​She shook her head slowly. "No. But... They knew about the tunnel. They were waiting for us."

​Her words hung in the acrid air, cold and sharp. She was right. The tunnel was an off-the-books escape route, built into the original architectural blueprints of the estate before the syndicate even purchased the land. Only a handful of people knew it existed.

​A cold, creeping dread began to coil in the pit of my stomach, settling beneath the throbbing pain of my ribs.

​"Stay there," I ordered softly. "Don't move from the shadows."

​I stepped away from her, my boots crunching over shattered concrete and spent brass as I walked toward the heavy iron doorway. The red emergency lights flickered, casting long, bloody shadows across the floor.

​The assault team that had breached the basement was dead. The man I had double-tapped in the chest was lying flat on his back, his heavy boots tangled in the ruined doorframe. Two others lay further up the stairwell, taken out in the crossfire. The estate was eerily quiet above us. The initial sweep was over, but reinforcements would be coming. We had minutes, maybe less.

​I crouched beside the lead infiltrator. He was a mountain of a man, clad in sterilized, unmarked black tactical gear. No unit patches. No syndicate insignia. Nothing but matte-black ceramic armor and top-tier, suppressed weaponry. If I didn't know better, I would have assumed they were ghost mercenaries hired from the dark web by a rival family looking to eliminate Jarosława before I could extract her codes.

​But rival families didn't have access to my blueprints.

​I gripped the edge of the dead man's heavy tactical vest and yanked hard, popping the Velcro and Kevlar apart to expose his chest. I dug my bloody fingers beneath his black undershirt, searching for something, anything, that would give me a name.

​My fingers brushed against cold metal. A thin, beaded chain.

​I pulled it free, snapping the chain from his neck.

​Two tarnished metal dog tags fell into my palm. I wiped the smeared blood off the flat surface with my thumb and angled the metal toward the flickering red emergency light.

​My heart completely stopped. The air in my lungs turned to ice.

​They weren't standard military tags. There was no name, no blood type, no religious preference. There was only a single, deeply engraved insignia: a cracked skull enveloped in a wreath of razor wire, with the roman numeral IX stamped beneath it.

​Wraith-Nine.

​My vision narrowed until the only thing in the world was that piece of bloody metal in my hand.

​Wraith-Nine wasn't a mercenary group. They weren't a rival syndicate's hit squad. They were an elite, highly classified black-ops network team. They were the bogeymen of the underworld, a specialized unit engineered to erase high-level liabilities without a trace.

​But the most terrifying thing about Wraith-Nine wasn't their reputation. It was their employer.

​They had been officially disbanded and scrubbed from the records five years ago. But I knew the truth. I knew they were still active, kept in the shadows on a very short leash. I knew it because I was the one who used to train them.

​They belonged to my syndicate. They belonged to my boss.

​A sickening jolt hit my chest, so violent I physically swayed on my feet. The narrative I had been operating under for the past forty-eight hours shattered into a million pieces. The rival families weren't the ones hunting us.

​We were the loose ends.

​My own syndicate had contracted this hit. They didn't just want the access codes in Jarosława's head anymore. They wanted her dead, and they wanted me dead for bringing her in. I had dragged this innocent woman out of her life, held her hostage, and promised I was the only thing keeping her safe and the entire time, I was leading her straight into the slaughterhouse of my own employers.

​"Magnus?"

​Jarosława's voice was small, laced with a new edge of panic. She was watching me from the shadows, her eyes wide as she registered the total shift in my posture. "What is it? What did you find?"

​I slowly stood up, my bloody fist closing tight around the dog tags until the metal edges bit into my palm. I turned to look at her. The exhaustion, the pain, the cold indifference I usually wore like a second skin all of it was gone, replaced by a terrifying, burning clarity.

​"We have to leave. Right now," I said, my voice dangerously flat.

​"I thought you said it was safer to hold the bunker until your people.

​"My people aren't coming to help us, Jarosława," I cut her off, the brutal truth tasting like ash in my mouth. I closed the distance between us, grabbing her arm and pulling her firmly to her feet. "My people are the ones who just tried to put a bullet in your head."

​She stared at me, the color draining entirely from her face. Her lips parted, but no sound came out.

​Before she could process the betrayal, a sharp, static crackle echoed through the freezing room.

​It was coming from the dead soldier's tactical radio, clipped to his shoulder harness a few feet away. The green light on the device blinked rhythmically in the dark.

​I froze, stepping in front of Jarosława, my hand instinctively dropping to my empty holster before I remembered I was out of ammo.

​The static cleared, replaced by a smooth, cultured, and terrifyingly familiar voice that echoed off the blood-stained concrete walls.

​"Team actually, this is Control. Sitrep requested. Do we have confirmation on the asset's termination?"

​It was him. Arthur. My mentor. The man who had raised me in this violent life, the man who had ordered me to bring Jarosława in.

​I stared at the radio, a cold sweat breaking out across the back of my neck.

​"Control to Team Actual," Arthur's voice came through again, colder this time, lacking the polished veneer he usually wore. "If Magnus is proving difficult, stop trying to take him alive. Burn the estate to the ground. Leave nothing but ash."

​A heavy, metallic thud echoed from the ventilation shaft directly above our heads.

​Then came the unmistakable, rhythmic hissing sound of pressurized gas being pumped into the room.