جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 60

POV:ARIA Before the operative could take a full breath, Elias moved.He didn't fire. He lunged straight out of the shadow of the trench wall, staying below the line of the tactical light, driving his left shoulder straight into the mercenary’s knee joint. A sickening snap echoed through the narrow fissure, accompanied by a sharp, muffled grunt of pain.The operative stumbled, his suppression rifle discharging a burst of subsonic rounds into the rock ceiling above my head. Sparks rained down like dying fireworks.I vaulted over Elias’s back, driving my combat knife straight up through the soft Kevlar weave beneath the man’s tactical collar. He went instantly limp, his rifle clattering against the gravel.I grabbed the fallen weapon before it hit the dirt, rolling into a low crouch as two more flashlights swept into the mouth of the trench."Contact!" someone yelled from the rim above. "Suppression fire!"A hail of 9mm rounds tore into the narrow fissure, chewing the basalt walls into

POV:ARIA The climb back up the western ridge was longer, harder, and far more dangerous.The wind had shifted, driving thick, greasy clouds of black smoke down from the crater into the forest. The pine needles underfoot were slippery with grey ash, and every step felt like driving a rusty spike into my left knee.I kept low, moving from tree trunk to tree trunk, my eyes scanning the gloom through the red-dot sight of my SMG.The firing on the plateau had stopped.That silence was worse than the sound of rifles. A silent battlefield meant one of two things: either the perimeter had been secured, or everyone was dead.When I reached the edge of the tree line, I dropped onto my stomach, crawling through a patch of icy fern roots until I could look out over the narrow rock shelf where I had left Elias fifteen minutes ago.The scene was a slaughterhouse.Three mercenaries lay sprawled across the grey granite, their black armor torn open by close-quarters gunfire and fragment shrapnel. The

POV: ARIAThe snow didn't fall here; it drove sideways, sharp as broken glass, stripping the skin off my cheeks until I couldn't feel the bite of the storm anymore. All I could feel was the dead weight of Elias’s head resting against my thigh, his breath coming in ragged, whistling hitches through a shattered lung.His tactical suit, designed to survive extreme sub-zero exposure, was torn open from collarbone to hip. Beneath the shredded kevlar, his blood wasn't red anymore. It had turned a dark, frozen plum color where it pooled over his cracked ribs, congealing the moment it hit the Antarctic air."Elias," I rasped. My voice sounded hollow, swallowed immediately by the roaring blizzard. "Stay with me. Look at me."His eyelids fluttered, heavy and tipped with frost. His grey eyes, usually so sharp they could read a man's intentions across a crowded terminal, were glassy, dilated, staring right past me into the grey wall of the tempest."Aria..." His lips barely moved. A bubble of pin

POV:ARIA The interior of the V-22 Osprey smelled of hydraulic fluid, ozone, and the sharp, metallic tang of blood.For three hours, as the tilt-rotor aircraft carved its way north across the Atlantic at four hundred knots, I sat on the folding steel bench beside Elias's bio-pod. The medical team worked in terrifying, practiced silence, their hands moving like machines over his open chest. They had cleared his collapsed lung and sealed the arterial tear in his shoulder, but he hadn't regained consciousness. His face was gray, his skin cold to the touch despite the heating blankets wrapped around him.I held his right hand, the skin beneath his fingernails dark with dried Antarctic dirt and frozen blood. My own hands were trembling.not from the cold anymore, but from an exhaustion so deep it felt like it had settled into the marrow of my bones."He's tough," the lead medic muttered, adjusting the IV drip feeding synthetic blood into Elias's arm. "Most men would have died on that ridge

POV:ARIA The air inside the ship's bridge felt like ice.I stared at the black monitor, at the thermal outline of the Osprey where Elias lay dying in a plastic bio-pod, completely unaware of the three heavy machine guns trained on his skin.My hand holding the 9mm didn't shake, but inside, everything was tearing apart. Twelve years of running. Twelve years of hiding in cold rooms, changing names, burying every human emotion under a mountain of survival instincts.I had told myself I was doing it to finish my father's work. I had told myself I was doing it to destroy Blackbriar.But looking at the screen, I knew the truth. I had done it because I didn't want to be alone anymore. And Elias was the only person in the world who had looked at the shattered, angry mess of my life and decided to stay."Five seconds, Aria," Julian whispered, his breath warm against my cheek as he held the scanner inches from my face. "Decide.""Aria, don't do it!" Mercer barked from behind me. "If you give h