INICIAR SESIÓN"Turn it up," Gianni said. "Anna, turn it up."Anna found the remote without looking away from the screen. A woman in a navy suit stood outside the Capitol with microphones jammed under her chin, and behind her a crowd was chanting something Cedric couldn't catch yet."...the documents describe kidnappings as routine," the woman said. "Experiments, disappearances, children shuffled between facilities like stock. Congress has called an emergency session.""Emergency." Alex slouched on the couch with a blanket over his knees and a bruise the colour of a plum along his jaw. "They've known for thirty years.""Some of them have." Cedric didn't turn around. "Most never asked.""Is that meant to cheer me up?""No."The picture jumped to a courthouse. Cameras, flashes popping like gunfire. Helen Vance came down the steps with her wrists held out in front of her, hair half undone, the long dark coat swapped for something grey and shapeless. She kept her chin level. She was smiling a little, at
"Move, move, left flank!" Gianni's voice cut through the smoke. "Don't let them reach the trucks!"Cedric was already on his feet. The battle did not last. The Bureau's guards had come to collect one man, and they found themselves ringed by his whole family, outnumbered and outguessed, with nowhere to put their weapons. Rifles clattered onto the tarmac. Somebody shouted surrender and somebody else took it up. Cedric barely heard it."Alex!" Jina was already there, hacking through a zip tie with her blade. "Cedric, he's here, I've got him.""Is he.""Breathing. Annoyed. Yes.""I heard that," Alex croaked from the ground.Cedric let the relief hit him for exactly one second. Then he saw movement at the edge of his vision. A long dark coat, running. Vance was halfway to the far end of the strip, where a helicopter sat with its blades already turning, and she was not looking back."Cedric, no," Gianni started.He didn't hear the rest. He ran flat out, grit stinging his palms, lungs burnin
"Play it again," Cedric said."That's four times." Anna's thumb hovered over the key."Again."She pressed it. The screen stuttered and Alex filled it, one eye swollen shut, a split along his lip already gone dark. He looked straight into the lens like a man reading a line he'd written himself. "Don't come for me. It's a trap. Save the others."The feed cut off mid breath. Cedric's hands had started to shake, so he pushed them flat against the table until the edge dug in."They're torturing him.""They're showing us they can," Gianni said. His voice was level, too level, the way a rope is level right before it takes weight. "That's different.""Is it?""We'll get him back.""You keep saying that.""Because I keep meaning it."Cedric looked away first. A chair creaked behind them. Anna cleared her throat, then again, which was how she announced things she didn't want to announce."There's more. A message came in ten minutes ago. From Vance.""What does she want?""To negotiate.""Of co
"Stairs are gone," Alex shouted over the comm. "They're coming from both sides.""How many?" Cedric didn't slow down."Too many. And Cedric, they aren't regular guards."The alarm swallowed whatever came next. It rattled up through his boots and into his teeth, and every steel door along the corridor hummed with it. He swept the children toward the stairwell with one arm, Hope's hand still gripped in the other. Jina ran at the back counting heads under her breath, losing her place, starting over."Left," she called. "Not right, that corridor floods.""Left," Cedric said, and the children turned all together, like a school of fish.The first guards met them at the landing. Ordinary ones, scared, sloppy, and Alex's people dropped them quickly enough that Cedric let himself hope. Then the doors at the far end slid open and the others walked in.They moved wrong. No shouting, no fumbling at holsters. They had the same flat face, every one of them, and they came down the hall as if the out
"There's a weakness," Cedric said. He still hadn't looked up from the blueprints."In a glacier?" Anna leaned over the table. "It's a mountain of ice with guns bolted on.""The geothermal vents. They heat the lower levels, so somebody had to cut channels through the ice, and nobody guards a pipe.""Those aren't pipes, they're wired. Every inch of that network has sensors.""Then we go slowly.""Through steam. Hot enough to cook a person.""Hot enough to hide one." He finally glanced up. "The Icebox was a military base once. Automated defenses, a few hundred guards, and one bad habit. It trusts its own walls.""I'll lead the infiltration team," Alex said from the doorway.Cedric didn't turn around. "You've never done this for real.""I've been training for it.""Training has rules.""So does the mission. You just gave them to me." Alex stepped inside. "Slowly, through the vents. I can do slowly."Cedric rubbed the bridge of his nose, which bought him a second, then two. Fine. Fine, but
Vance played her last card at six in the morning, when most of the house was still asleep.Someone in the kitchen yelled for everyone to come, and people stumbled into the main room in socks and blankets. The video was already playing on the television, on the laptops, on the phones people held up in unsteady hands.Marcus Chen sat in a white room. He was thin to the point of being hollow, his skin the color of old newspaper, and it was obvious he was dying. But his eyes were clear, and that was what made it hard to watch. The camera caught every line in his face and every wobble in his voice."My name is Marcus Chen," he said. "I am the founder of the Ouroboros Society. I am responsible for the trafficking, the murders, the clones. Cedric Santos was my victim, not my accomplice. He tried to stop me. He saved lives. The Bureau is innocent of all charges. They are heroes."He stopped to breathe, and the rattle of it came through the speakers. Then he looked straight into the lens."I a
The guy Cedric was just about to fuck ran off, leaving Cedric’s alone to scramble for an exit strategy, What the hell was he supposed to do? Talk his way out? Run? Fight? Beg?There was absolutely nowhere for him to hide, the alley had only one single exit, currently blocked by three guys who looke
“Shut the hell up, don’t take your mouth off my cock unless I say so.”Cedric huffed with annoyance, dragging his teeth along the underside of the guy’s cock so it would hurt, as payback for talking to him like he was some cheap fuck. Well, he was one, but still…“Cut that out. What kind of pornsta
"You start Monday.”Cedric blinked, dragging his attention away from the cop’s mouth, the kind of mouth that looked like it knew how to do very interesting things in bed, not focusing at all on the words being said.Brett had dropped him off at the police station twenty minutes ago with a “good luc
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened to your face?”Cedric kept his hood up and his head down, ignoring the pitying looks and questions from late-night commuters on the subway who caught sight of his busted face. He could see the full extent of the damage reflected in the scratched train window,







