Sarah’s P.O.VThe dungeon hadn’t changed.The same damp chill clung to the air, thick with mold and memory. The stones were still dark with time, and the silence still wrapped around you like a noose. I thought I would never come back here. I thought the screams I left behind were buried with the past. But now, as I stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the place that once held me captive, I realized something had shifted.I wasn’t the prisoner anymore.He was.I descended slowly, boots echoing against the worn steps. Lorenzo was ahead of me, his shoulders broad, his every movement taut with controlled fury. Logan and Daniel were already below, standing on either side of the heavy iron door that led into the heart of the dungeon. The very cell where Donga had kept me caged for weeks.Where I’d been broken. But not destroyed.He sat slumped against the wall, arms chained above him. His coat was gone, shirt bloodied and torn. His face bore the marks of the fight, bruises along
Sarah’s P.O.VThe hotel was cold with silence. The air stank of chemical residue and dust, but it was the emptiness that sank into my skin, like smoke clinging to fabric long after the fire’s gone. We had him. We were so close. And then, gone. Again.I stood in the middle of the makeshift lab, heart still drumming with the aftermath of adrenaline. The clone lay slumped in the corner, breathing faintly. The resemblance to my father was chilling: skin, hair, even the shape of his mouth but there was no malice in those eyes, Just confusion. Donga didn’t create people, he crafted tools. Weapons. Distractions.I hated how well he knew us. Knew me but I knew him just as much. Lorenzo paced by the overturned desk, jaw clenched, hands tight at his sides. His eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them, tired, but burning. Daniel was sorting through the files we’d gathered, and Logan knelt in the hallway, fidgeting with something I couldn’t see.I walked up to Daniel who was very busy
Lorenzo’s P.O.VThe city pulsed with a rhythm I could no longer trust as lights glittered across the skyline, oblivious to the quiet war we were waging beneath its surface. As I stood with Daniel, Logan, and Sarah in the shadows of an abandoned parking garage, my heart thudded louder than the traffic overhead. We were close, so close to ending this. Donga had gone underground, I realized as I saw that we were at the part of the city that was quite lower that the rest, but not well enough.Daniel crouched beside me, eyes fixed on the derelict hut nestled beside the looming glass hotel. A place like that, forgotten, and so out of place should’ve been a red flag to anyone. But it was practically invisible in the shadow of the luxury monolith beside it. Only someone with nothing left to lose would hide in plain sight like that.Or rather, someone like Donga who believed that hiding in plain sight was the best and I actually could see it. No one in their right minds would come to s
Sarah’s P.O.VI felt it before Lorenzo said a word.We were in the middle of sorting books into the new shelves he’d built, his hands covered in sawdust, mine wrapped around a half-read novel I hadn’t had the heart to finish. The sunlight warmed the room like a blanket, making it hard to believe evil could still lurk out there.But I saw it the moment he froze.It was a small pause. Barely noticeable. His fingers hesitated over the edge of his phone, and something shifted in his posture, a subtle coiling, like a wolf catching a familiar scent on the wind. Then his thumb tapped the screen again, slower this time, and I watched the color in his face go taut.I set the book down quietly knowing very well the only person that could get him to react like this. “It’s him, isn’t it?” I asked as I took a step closer yh him. Lorenzo didn’t answer right away. He just stared at the screen, then finally turned it toward me. A secure message blinked in encrypted green:Subject Located. Donga. C
Lorenzo’s P.O.VI was in the garden, when I saw the black SUV crawl up the dirt road. Even before I caught the glint of sunlight off the side mirror, I knew it was Grayson, and his car that makes his baby die to how much he cherished it.Why he came through the back today was a surprise. As if he knew I was here.I stood, brushing soil off my hands. I’d been tending the hydrangeas Sarah planted just last week. She said watching something grow made her feel alive again. I understood. That’s why I’d let my hands get dirty for the first time in a long time.The door of the SUV opened, and Grayson stepped out, his shoulders tense and his jaw locked. He didn’t move with his usual ease. There was a weight to him, something dragging behind his eyes like smoke that refused to clear.“It’s gone,” he said before I even asked.I didn’t flinch. I didn’t need to.“The cabin?” I asked, already knowing the answer.He nodded. “Burned to ash. Nothing left but stone and cinders. Happened yesterday whi
The rain hadn’t let up all day. It battered the roof of the house like a million tiny fists pounding out an impatient warning. The storm was loud, but not louder than the silence inside me, the kind that takes root when you’ve already made a decision and now all that’s left is the execution.I stood by the window, watching the sheets of water slice through the night. The glass was cold beneath my fingers. So cold that I could imagined the fire that would soon replace this cold. It would come in bursts, in flames that devoured steel and concrete. Donga’s last refuge would become his tomb. Every time I mentioned that it would his tomb, Sarah would always remind me that he always had an escape plan and route.He had built himself a new base. Bigger. More fortified. Hidden deep in the southern hills, surrounded by forests, mines, and paranoia. A place he thought no one would ever find.But I found it.Not by brute force or by satellites or drones. I found it by trusting the men I’d pla