All Chapters of the bodyguard's secret: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Leo didn’t run. He walked. A steady, relentless pace down the sterile white corridor, the HK416 held low and ready. The hollow cold had solidified into a singularity of purpose, dense and absolute. Silas’s agonized moan still echoed in his skull, a silent scream fueling the fusion reaction in his chest. Every nerve sang with lethal intent. Dominic’s voice, his smug face on the screen – they were coordinates on a firing solution. Nothing more.**>** Winters’s voice, devoid of inflection, cracked over the comms.Ahead, a junction. Two Viper operatives rounded the corner, rifles snapping up, their movements synchronized, brutal efficiency. They saw Leo, a lone figure advancing with unnatural calm. They didn’t hesitate.Leo didn’t either.His rifle came up in a single fluid motion. *Breathe. Aim. Squeeze.* The suppressed HK coughed twice. Two precise shots. Center mass. The first Viper staggered back, a dark flower blooming on his black tactical vest. The second jerked,

The utility van screamed down the mountain road, leaving the pyre of The Aerie smudging the horizon with greasy black smoke. Inside, the air vibrated with exhaustion and unspoken dread. Leo cradled Silas, who had finally succumbed to a fitful, twitching sleep, his brow furrowed even in unconsciousness. Reynolds lay prone on the floor, his breathing shallow and ragged, a deathly pallor beneath the grime and blood. Harlan rode shotgun, eyes scanning the winding road and rearview mirrors with relentless vigilance. Winters drove with unnerving calm, the van’s engine protesting under his demanding pace.The immediate, adrenalized rush of escape was fading, replaced by the crushing weight of consequences. Dominic was ash, but his shadow stretched long.**>** Harlan finally broke the tense silence, his voice rough. **>** He jerked his head towards the back. Reynolds was fading fast. Silas needed more than just safety; he needed neurological asse

The flatline’s scream was a knife twisting in Leo’s soul. Petrova’s desperate shout – *"Charge! CLEAR!"* – echoed like a gunshot. Silas’s body arched under the defibrillator’s jolt, a marionette jerked by cruel strings. Another blip. A flicker. Then… the relentless, unwavering green line. Silence, except for the machine’s electronic dirge and the frantic whine of the defibrillator recharging.Winters’s glacial stare bored into him. *"The package, or the facility. Choose. Now."*Time didn’t slow. It shattered. Images flashed: Silas whispering *"my heart"* in the rain; the scientist collapsing in the lab; Dominic’s smile over Silas’s agony; hundreds of frail, unsuspecting faces at Havenridge, moments from an internal inferno. Thorne’s cold voice echoed in Silas’s delirium: *"Find the weak… make them burn from the inside…"*Leo’s gaze snapped from the flatline monitor to Winters. The hollow cold that had fueled him through the Aerie’s corridors returned, forged in this crucible of imposs

Five minutes.The bullhorn's echo died, leaving a silence thicker than the clinic's stone walls. Rain lashed the boarded windows. The only sounds were Reynolds’s ragged breathing, Silas’s drugged whimper, and the frantic ticking in Leo’s skull.Harlan’s face was granite, etched with fury and anguish. He stared at the door, knuckles white on his rifle. Mack. His brother-in-arms, alive, used as a bargaining chip.Winters stood like a statue near the rear entrance, his scanner silent, his gaze fixed on the rain-streaked darkness. The cold precision of the voice had resonated with him – too familiar, yet subtly *off*. Thorne’s detachment, yes, but underpinned by a deeper, colder certainty he recognized from a different monster.Leo looked at the vial pouch on the table, the purple poison glowing faintly. He looked at the data drive Winters held. Hand them over? Condemn thousands, including the vulnerable at Havenridge, Metro General, Oakhaven? Defy? Sign Mack’s death warrant. Silas moaned

The rain felt like needles on Leo’s face as he crouched beside the groaning generator, Winters’s retrieved vial pouch and data drive clutched in his hand like live grenades. The clearing was a tableau of retreating chaos: mercenaries vanishing into the downpour, dragging wounded comrades, leaving behind the shattered tablet and the chilling echo of Mack’s screams and Dominic’s enraged roar. The immediate threat receded, but the silence that followed was heavier, charged with the aftershocks of revelation and violence.Winters materialized beside him, his expression no longer icy, but carved from flint. The shot through the feed, the wounding of Dominic – it hadn’t been just tactics. It was vengeance for the deception, for the insult to the Ghost’s lethal reputation. **>** His voice was a low rasp, the closest Leo had ever heard to emotion from him. **>**Leo n