Chapter 872
Skye adjusted the collar of her coat against the damp wind. But the cold she felt wasn’t just from the weather — it was the gnawing emptiness of leaving Liam behind. She could still see him lying in the isolation pod at the Vance Estate, wires taped to his chest, Julian monitoring the jagged rhythm of his brain waves. We had to leave him, she reminded herself, the guilt sitting like a stone in her stomach. Moving him was a death sentence. Here, in this lawless pit, is the only place we can find the surgeon who put that bomb in his head. We hunt so he can live.
“It feels like a cage,” she said, her voice tight.
“It is,” Alistair agreed, his eyes sharp as he tracked a shadow moving across a rooftop. “But it’s a cage where the laws of extradition don’t apply. It’s where rats go when they’re cornered. And where we come to kill them.”
They moved inside. The safehouse was a converted factory floor — exposed brick, steel beams, and the smell of rust and abandonment. Skye wrapped her arms around herself, though the chill was internal: the lingering shadow of the submarine, of Victoria Hayes’s disappearance, and the knowledge that the game hadn’t ended — it had simply changed boards.
“The security grid is active,” Felix announced, typing furiously at a console he had set up on a crate. “But Skye… something is wrong.”
Skye walked over, her heels clicking sharply on the concrete. “What is it?”
“The traffic cams,” Felix said, pointing to the monitor. “Look at the intersections surrounding us — three blocks east, two blocks south.”
𝖳𝗁𝖾 𝗆𝗈𝗌𝗍 𝗉𝗈𝗉𝗎𝗅𝖺𝗋 𝗇𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗅𝗌 𝗈𝗇 𝗀𝖺𝗅𝗇𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗅𝗌.𝖼𝗈𝗆
The grainy footage showed a black, modified Mustang idling at a green light. The driver wasn’t moving.
“He’s been circling,” Alistair said, stepping up behind Skye. His chest brushed against her back, a solid wall of warmth in the freezing room. “For an hour.”
“Who is it?”
“Zoom in,” Alistair ordered.
The image pixelated, then sharpened. The driver was young, with a jawline that looked carved from granite and a silver stud in his left ear. He was staring directly at the camera, a smirk playing on his lips.
“Caleb Hayes,” Alistair murmured. The name sounded like a curse. “He should be rotting in a Supermax facility in Nevada. The Mastermind didn’t just pull strings — he must have orchestrated a full-scale system collapse to get him out. Or replaced him with a body double before the intake processing.”
Skye stared at the screen. The man’s eyes were dead. Empty. “What does he want?”
“He’s hunting,” Alistair said. “And he wants us to know it.”
Skye’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out. An unknown number.
We have her. Welcome to hell, sister.
Skye frowned, her blood running cold. “Sister?” She showed the screen to Alistair. “Celeste used to call me that. Mockingly. But Celeste was in a car hit by a Hellfire missile. There shouldn’t be anything left of her to send a text.”
“We assumed she was in the car,” Alistair said grimly. “But if the Mastermind’s extraction team was fast enough — if they pulled her out just as the impact wave hit — she would be broken, burned, but alive. Ghosts don’t send text messages, Skye. But monsters do.”
“We need to draw him out,” Skye said. “If he’s circling, he’s waiting for an opening. We give him one.”
“You want to be bait,” Alistair stated. It wasn’t a question.