All Chapters of Guardian of Ruin: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The sea was black.Not dark blue. Not deep green. Just black. Like oil stretching endlessly in every direction. Eden sat in the motor skiff beside Cassel, her hands clenched tight on the edge, the salt spray biting against her cheeks as wind whipped through her hair.“Still want to turn back?” Cassel asked, voice low under the roar of the motor.She shook her head.Arkenmoor rose on the horizon like a monolith—gray, jagged, and wreathed in fog. It didn’t look like a facility. It looked like something abandoned, something that should’ve stayed that way.“No lights,” Eden murmured.“Automated defense grid’s likely dormant until triggered,” Cassel replied. “And no radio activity. He’s keeping it silent. Smart.”Eden glanced at him. “And we’re just going to walk in?”Cassel gave a thin smile. “No, Eden. We’re going to crawl in through a forgotten maintenance duct half a kilometer off the southern ridge, swim through a submerged access tunnel designed for engineers, and then—maybe—get insi

The city of Braxley was no longer safe.Eden knew that the moment they stepped out of the tunnel and saw the skyline—darker than usual, stripped of power grids, buzzing with surveillance drones that didn’t belong to any government she recognized. The news channels had gone static. The internet was fractured. Everything felt like it had shifted… just slightly off-axis.Lucien had begun.“We need a new base,” Roman said as they moved through back alleys, keeping low. “We regroup. Find what’s left of the old network. If any of them are alive.”“They will be,” Eden said, too quickly.Roman glanced at her.She didn’t look away.They took refuge in a half-buried storage facility beneath an abandoned metro station. Cassel managed to reroute power through an old emergency grid, and Kieran began scanning for safe communication frequencies. The space was small, barely habitable, but it had one advantage: it was off the map. Forgotten.Roman paced in silence. He hadn’t spoken much since they esc

The entrance was buried beneath years of silence.What remained of Ravelock’s old tunnel system was concealed behind an overgrown fuel station on the outskirts of a crumbling industrial zone. To most, it was just rusted fence and faded signage. But to those who knew better, the ground itself whispered secrets.Eden pressed her palm against the rusted steel door embedded in the earth. It hummed faintly—still powered. Still listening.Roman keyed in a sequence Cassel had dug from ancient files, and with a sharp hiss, the door split open, revealing a black stairwell swallowed in dust.“No turning back now,” Eden muttered, gripping her flashlight.Roman drew his sidearm. “Stay close.”The air inside was metallic. Dry. Thick with the memory of forgotten things.They descended slowly, steps echoing into the dark like soft war drums.Ravelock had once been a research facility—experimental, dangerous, and deeply off-grid. It was here, years ago, that Lucien and Eden’s father had built the fir

They arrived at the perimeter of the Core site just before dawn.It looked like nothing—an abandoned water treatment plant covered in moss and rot. But underground, it was something else entirely.Eden stood at the edge of the overgrowth, her breath steaming in the morning air, eyes locked on the satellite map Cassel projected on his portable screen.“This is it,” he said. “Two levels down. Reinforced walls. No way to breach without alerting the entire grid.”“We’re not breaching,” Eden said. “We’re going through the tunnel Lucien used. The one Dad marked in his notes.”Roman glanced at her. “It’s probably rigged.”“I don’t care,” she replied. “It’s the fastest way in.”Cassel and Kieran exchanged a look.“No turning back,” Kieran muttered.“Was there ever?” Roman said.---The tunnel was tight and dripping with water. Rusted pipes lined the curved stone like ribs, and the darkness was absolute but for their flashlights.Eden walked ahead, one hand on the wall, one on her weapon.She

Ten days later, Eden stood in a government safe house, overlooking a city that didn’t yet know it had almost died.Lucien Kade was gone—buried behind reinforced steel and classified silence. The official story painted him as a rogue agent captured abroad. The real story never made it past the sealed files.And that was the point.Roman had survived surgery, but the cost was high—his lung collapsed, his ribs fractured, his body a patchwork of bruises and scars. But his eyes, when they opened, still found Eden first.“You stayed,” he’d rasped.She’d nodded, blinking away tears. “Always.”Now, as she sipped stale coffee and scanned the case board plastered across the room, she felt the ache of what had been lost—but more than that, she felt the call of something new.Her father entered quietly, arm in a sling, lines around his eyes deeper than before.“They want to offer you a position,” he said.Eden raised a brow. “A job?”“Private intelligence. Freelance division. The kind of work I d