All Chapters of SIR: Chapter 241 - Chapter 250

Before I can even process what’s happening, Zeke moves in front of me, stepping forward with both hands raised and putting his entire body between me and the gun still pointed at my head. “Easy,” he says steadily. “Easy. We’re not armed. Nobody needs to do anything stupid here.” “On your knees,” one of the men barks. “Both of you. Now.” I go down quickly and rough hands find my shoulders, patting down my jacket, my pockets, pulling my phone free before I can even think to fight it. Someone yanks my wrists behind my back and I feel coarse rope biting into my skin within seconds. “Please,” I start, some instinct kicking in that thinks maybe talking helps, maybe reasoning with armed men in an abandoned warehouse is a strategy that’s ever worked for anyone in the history of strategies. “Please just let us go. I promise we won’t–” “Shut the fuck up!” the man snaps, and then something dark and cloth like drops over my eyes, cinched tight enough that even blinking hard produces nothing

Ringing. For a while, I can’t hear anything else except loud ringing in my ears. It fills my whole head, drowning out whatever’s happening around me, and underneath it I’m aware of shuffling feet moving around the room. Then a sound I can’t place immediately, something wet and solid being hacked, followed by long commands to put a head in a box, followed closely by the door closing. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. My brain is foggy and my ears are ringing. I squeeze my eyes shut underneath the blindfold, willing myself to wake up from what must be a terrible terrible dream. It takes a few moments before I realize that someone is behind me, untying my wrists. The bindings fall away but nobody says anything to me. The footsteps retreat unhurriedly, the same businesslike calm they arrived with, the message apparently delivered exactly as intended, and then there’s a door, and then there’s nothing. No footsteps. No voices. Just me, alone, on the cold concrete floor of a room I ca

By morning the house doesn’t feel like the house Elias has spent months learning the corners of. The west wing, unused for as long as he’s known this family, empty rooms with furniture kept under sheets and a smell of disuse that never quite lifted no matter how often the staff aired it out, has transformed overnight into something else entirely. Men move through it now with the specific, unbothered competence of people who have clearly done this exact thing in many other houses, for many other reasons, setting up laptops and maps and equipment Elias doesn’t recognize with the efficiency of professionals who’ve stopped needing to think about the mechanics of it years ago. He recognizes a few faces. Men from his months working under Carver, men who by every rule Elias grew up believing should hate David Reid on sight, should refuse to be in the same building as him without a fight breaking out within minutes. Instead they are taking orders from him without hesitation, greeting him wi

I walk straight into the war room without knocking, and every head in the room turns toward the door at once – my father, Marcus, and three men I don’t recognize, all of them mid conversation over a table covered in maps and printouts I don’t have time to fully take in before Marcus is already crossing toward me.“This isn’t a place for you,” he tells me lowly, not unkind, but final in the way he clearly intends it to be.I don’t move. “I want in.”My father, standing at the head of the table, doesn’t even look up from whatever he’s reading as he answers, “No.”I grit my teeth and stand my ground.“I’m tired of being protected while everyone else in this house decides what happens to my own life.” Dad still doesn’t look up. “I’ve spent all my life being handled. Managed. Kept safe by people who won’t tell me the whole truth about anything. I am done with that.”“This isn’t a conversation about handling you,” Marcus speaks up. “This is about the fact that revenge isn’t somethin

The second operation goes sideways within the first ninety seconds.One moment Elias is moving through a service corridor with two of Marcus’s men flanking him, comms chatter steady in his ear, the whole operation unfolding with the same disciplined rhythm as the raid two days ago. The next, gunfire erupts from an angle nobody flagged, a stairwell nobody mapped, and the coordinated team scatters into a dozen separate, isolated problems all at once.“Contact, east stairwell!”“Where’s the second team, I’ve lost eyes on–”“Fall back, fall back to the loading bay–”The voices in Elias’s earpiece fracture into overlapping static, and then the earpiece itself goes dead entirely, either damaged or jammed, he doesn’t have time to work out which. He presses himself against the wall of a narrow stairwell, breathing hard, waiting for a lull that doesn’t come, and when he finally moves it’s because staying still has stopped being an option.Somewhere outside the building, Lucia is probably tryin