Chapter 214: Safehouse Betrayal

They stumbled through the rain-slicked modern streets, two ragged shadows leaning into each other. The bridge, the smoke, the roar of Leon’s motorcycle—it all felt like a surreal, violent dream. Anton’s body was a symphony of failing parts: his shoulder a white-hot brand of agony, his legs rubbery and weak, his lungs scraping with every breath. He was running on pure adrenaline, and the tank was hitting empty.

Sabatine, burned and battered but driven by a ferocious, protective engine, kept them moving. He navigated not by sight, but by a mental map and Leon’s terse, intermittent directions in their earpieces.

“...shook two... heading north... you need to get off the street now,” Leon’s voice crackled, strained with the effort of his own evasion. “There’s a place. 14 Rue des Marronniers. Blue door. Keypad code: 0913. Belongs to a friend of a friend. Clean. Get there and bolt it shut. I’ll loop back when I can.”

A safe house. The words were a siren’s song. Shelter. A moment to breathe, to tend wounds, to think. Anton felt a desperate, almost childish longing for four walls and a locked door.

“Copy,” Sabatine rasped. “Rue des Marronniers. Blue door.”

They changed direction, moving now with a shred of purpose. The address was in a quiet, residential neighbourhood not far from the university—a place of modest apartment buildings and small townhouses, still plunged into the city-wide darkness. The rain had settled into a steady, cold drizzle.

Number 14 was a narrow, three-story townhouse squeezed between its neighbours, its facade dark. The blue door was faded, chipped. Sabatine approached warily, his body between Anton and the street. He input the code on the sleek keypad. A soft green light blinked, and the lock disengaged with a solid thunk.

He pushed the door open, revealing a dark, narrow hallway. The air inside was still, cool, smelling faintly of lemon polish and stale air. It felt empty. Quiet.

Too quiet.

Sabatine’s every instinct, honed in a hundred hostile zones, screamed a warning. The silence had a quality to it. A waiting quality. But Anton was swaying on his feet behind him, his face grey with exhaustion and pain. They had no other option. They had to risk it.

“Quickly,” Sabatine murmured, pulling Anton inside and closing the door behind them. He threw the deadbolt, the sound final in the stillness. For a second, they just stood in the pitch-black hallway, listening to the sound of their own ragged breathing and the distant hum of a generator somewhere.

Sabatine found a switch. A single, low-wattage emergency lamp by the stairs flickered on, casting a weak, jaundiced light. The hallway was tidy, nondescript. A worn runner on the floor, a small table with a fake plant.

“We need to secure the perimeter,” Sabatine said, his voice low. “Check the rooms. You stay here.”

“Like hell,” Anton whispered, but his protest lacked force. He leaned against the wall, sliding down to sit on the floor, his head in his hands. “Just… be quick.”

Sabatine moved down the hall, his senses screaming. The living room to the right was small, orderly, empty. A couch, a bookshelf, a cold fireplace. Nothing out of place. The kitchen at the end of the hall was clean, a single mug in the drying rack. He checked the back door—locked, bolted.

The wrongness persisted. It was in the air. The too-clean scent. The absence of any personal item—no mail on the table, no coat on the hook. This was a stage set, not a home.

He crept up the stairs, each step a potential announcement. The first-floor landing had two doors. A bathroom, empty. A bedroom, the bed neatly made, the wardrobe empty. Sterile.

His heart hammered against his ribs. Leon’s friend. Could he have been compromised? Or was Leon…?

He pushed the thought away. Not Leon. Couldn’t be.

He returned downstairs. Anton had his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. He looked broken. Sabatine’s need to protect him, to give him just five minutes of peace, warred violently with the shrieking alarm in his skull.

“It’s clear,” Sabatine lied, the words ash in his mouth. He needed Anton to move, to get up, to get to a more defensible position. “But let’s not stay in the hallway. There’s a small pantry under the stairs. More cover.”

Anton opened his eyes, nodded wearily. He allowed Sabatine to help him up. They moved toward the kitchen, past the staircase.

As they passed the closed door under the stairs—a simple, white-painted cupboard door—Sabatine’s hand went to the handle. A pantry would be a terrible place to get trapped, but it was better than the open hall.

He pulled the door open.

It wasn’t a pantry.

It was a shallow cleaning closet. And crammed inside, wrists and ankles bound with zip-ties, a strip of duct tape over his mouth, was a man in his fifties, his eyes wide with terror above a bruised cheek. The “friend of a friend.” The real owner of the house.

The trap was sprung.

Sabatine had a fraction of a second to process it. The man’s terrified eyes met his, screaming a silent warning.

Then the world exploded into violence.

The door to the living room, which Sabatine had seen empty, burst open. A man dressed head-to-toe in black, his face obscured by a balaclava, filled the doorway, a compact submachine gun raised. Not to kill—to capture. The muzzle was pointed at Anton.

Simultaneously, the back door Sabatine had just checked blew inward with a splintering crash, kicked open by a second operative.

They were professional, silent, and perfectly positioned. A classic pincer ambush. Kaine hadn’t just compromised the safe house; he had pre-staged his men inside it, using the bound owner as the final, convincing piece of set-dressing to lure them into the centre of the kill box.

Sabatine didn’t think. He reacted.

He shoved Anton backwards with all his strength, sending him sprawling into the kitchen, out of the immediate line of fire from the living room. As he shoved, he pivoted, his own body now in the line of fire from the back door operative.

A staccato thwip-thwip-thwip of suppressed fire filled the narrow space. Bullets chewed into the wall where Anton had been standing. Plaster dust filled the air.

Sabatine drew his pistol in a blur of motion. He didn’t aim for centre mass. He fired at the light fixture on the ceiling above the living room doorway. The bulb exploded in a shower of glass and sparks, plunging that end of the hall into deeper shadow. The operative there flinched, his night-vision momentarily overwhelmed.

Sabatine dropped to a crouch, spinning to face the man from the back door, who was now advancing, his weapon tracking. Sabatine fired twice. The first shot went wide, pocking the doorframe. The second caught the man in the thigh. He grunted, stumbled, but didn’t go down—body armour under the tactical gear.

“ANTON! THE WINDOW!” Sabatine roared, providing noise, direction, a focal point in the chaos.

He heard the crash of crockery from the kitchen as Anton, reacting on instinct, threw something. A distraction.

The wounded operative from the back door fired again. Sabatine felt a searing line of fire across his ribs—a graze. He fired back, forcing the man to take cover in the kitchen doorway.

The operative from the living room had recovered. He moved forward, a dark shape in the gloom. Sabatine was caught in a crossfire in the narrow hallway. No cover.

He did the only thing he could. He charged the wounded man in the kitchen doorway, leading with his shoulder in a brutal tackle. They went down in a tangle of limbs in the kitchen, crashing into the table. The man’s weapon clattered away.

Sabatine drove an elbow into the man’s throat, felt cartilage give. He scrambled off him, grabbing for the fallen submachine gun.

A shadow filled the kitchen doorway—the second operative. His weapon came up.

From the floor, Anton kicked out with all his remaining strength, his foot connecting with the man’s knee from behind. There was a sickening pop. The man cried out, his shot going wild, shattering the window above the sink.

Sabatine came up with the captured weapon. He didn’t hesitate. A short, controlled burst into the chest of the man in the doorway. The body armour might stop bullets, but the kinetic force at this range was like being hit by a truck. The man was hurled back into the hallway, collapsing.

The first operative, the one with the crushed throat, was writhing, clawing at his neck. Sabatine ignored him. He hauled Anton to his feet. “Out! Now!”

The back door was destroyed, hanging on its hinges. They stumbled through it, into a small, walled backyard. The rain was falling harder now. A high brick wall surrounded them. No gate.

“Up!” Sabatine pointed to a metal downpipe on the side of the neighbouring house. Anton stared at it, despair in his eyes. He didn’t have the strength.

From inside the house, they heard a shout. Reinforcements? Or the first operative calling for backup.

Sabatine made a decision. He shoved the captured submachine gun into Anton’s hands. “Cover that door. If anything moves, fire.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. He ran at the wall, leaped, his fingers finding the top. He hauled himself up, his burns screaming in protest, and rolled over onto the other side. It was another small garden. He found a plastic garden chair, dragged it to the wall, stood on it, and reached back over.

“Anton! Now! Give me your hand!”

Anton slung the weapon over his shoulder and reached up. Their hands clasped, slick with rain and blood. Sabatine pulled, with a strength born of pure terror. Anton’s feet scrabbled against the brick, he cried out in pain, and then he was over, collapsing into a soggy flowerbed on the other side.

They lay there for a moment in the mud and crushed petunias, the sound of their panting loud in the quiet garden. From the other side of the wall, they heard the sound of boots entering the backyard, then a curse.

They were out. But they were far from safe. The safe house had been a beautifully laid trap. Leon’s source was compromised, which meant their entire network of emergency contacts was potentially poisoned.

Worse, Kaine now knew they were desperate enough to run to ground. He had anticipated their move, their need for sanctuary, and turned it into a weapon.

Sabatine crawled to Anton, checking him for new injuries. He was shivering, shock setting in. The look in his eyes was one of shattered trust. The one place they were supposed to be safe had been the most dangerous of all.

“It wasn’t Leon,” Sabatine said fiercely, gripping his face. “He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Kaine is just… better. He’s always three steps ahead.”

Anton nodded, a shuddering breath escaping him. “I know. I know.” He looked at the darkened windows of the house they’d just invaded. “Where do we go now? There’s nowhere left.”

Sabatine looked up at the weeping sky, then back at Anton. The answer was terrible in its simplicity. “We stop running. We stop reacting.” He helped Anton to his feet. “We have the prototype. He wants it. So we use it. We set the next meeting. On our terms.”

It was a move of last resort. A direct challenge to the spider in the centre of the web. But after the betrayal of the safe house’s false sanctuary, there was no other move left to make.

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