Chapter 21 - Damian
The tunnels breathe around us through vents that should have died decades ago.
Every step echoes like it’s trespassing on old ghosts, unsettling dust that rises in pale spirals around our boots. I keep Harper close enough that I feel her shadow slide against mine with every turn, every stumble over fractured concrete.
The underground complex unravels in front of us like a body that remembers pain. Flickering lights pulse overhead, stuttering in uneven patterns as if they’re trying to finish their last sentence before dying.
The deeper we go, the more the air tastes of rust and of wires stripped bare, sparking their secrets in the dark.
This place shouldn’t exist anymore.
Fucking Anton, he could only find this place?
Harper moves behind me, her breath steady but sharp. She’s been steady through every collapse, every ambush, every betrayal. But down here, where the world narrows to dim corridors and the hum of dying machines, I feel the tremor beneath her composure.
I curve my arm back and let my fingers brush hers, just enough to anchor her. She squeezes once, then releases them.
The tunnel widens ahead, swallowing us in its mechanical throat. Bundles of wires snake along the walls, thick and disorganized, new coils grafted onto old infrastructure like someone tried to resurrect the place with scrap tech and a prayer.
A faint buzzing vibration travels through the floor. Several heartbeats overlapping. Machines stirring where they shouldn’t.
Harper notices it too.
“Damian,” she murmurs, her voice lowered but not weak. “The power draw shouldn’t be this high. Not in a place this abandoned.”
“Which means it isn’t abandoned.”
She nods once, grim, face pale in the stuttering light.
We keep moving.
A junction splits ahead. Left corridor is collapsed under a ceiling cave-in, right corridor lit by a string of emergency bulbs that shouldn’t have power. They sway softly from the frayed cables above, casting elongated shadows across the floor like warning signs.
Anton’s voice slithers from the right passage, distant but clear enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
“You’re late,” he calls out, tone lilting with the unhinged cadence of someone who has lost their last tether to sanity. “I thought the Ignatovs ran on punctuality.”
Harper stiffens. I raise a finger to my mouth, signaling silence. She stops moving instantly, disciplined as any soldier I’ve ever trained.
Anton’s laugh echoes thinly, fragile, but laced with static.
He’s near.
The echo reverberating through metal and stone makes it impossible to pinpoint his exact location though.
A trap. It has to be.
I move forward slowly, every sense sharpening. The tunnel narrows again, pressing close, the ceiling low enough that I have to duck beneath sagging panels. Sparks hiss from a ruptured conduit above, briefly lighting the corridor in violent white flashes.
The wiring is thin and inconspicuous, camouflage with the stones.
Explosives.
Small, compact, military-grade devices strapped to the support beams. Barely noticeable unless you know what you’re looking for.
Or unless you’re looking for the thing that’s trying to kill you.
My breath freezes, then returns in a controlled exhale.
He’s rigged the tunnels. He’s rigged the servers, damn near everything.
And the sick fuck wants an audience.
I turn slightly, keeping my voice low.
“Harper. Don’t touch the walls.”
Her brows furrow.
“Wha–why?”
“It’s a kill switch,” I say. “He’s turned the entire hub into a grave.”
Her throat moves with a swallow, but she doesn’t panic or falter. She nods once, jaw tense, and falls into step beside me.
Her courage has just been a pleasant surprise throughout, a silver lining for a man like me where there is none.
Anton’s voice rises again, louder this time.
“You know what I love about truth, Damian?” The words vibrate through the space, carried by hidden speakers or improvised tech. “It burns so beautifully on its way out.”
He’s close. Too close.
We reach the threshold of a larger chamber. Inside, rows of server racks rise like metallic tombstones, some still lit, others flickering with dying blue screens. The hum is louder and angrier, uneven, like the machines themselves are panicking.
Harper inhales sharply beside me.
“This shouldn’t be online,” she whispers.
“Which means he wants us to see whatever’s left.”
A distant clang echoes; a door slammed, or something kicked open.
Anton steps into view at the far end of the chamber, just a silhouette at first, framed by the sickly glow of emergency lights.
His posture is uneven, his clothes dirty, his hair matted with sweat and dust. Look at the man who once commanded networks and nations. What has all this scheming and plotting made him? A cornered rat wearing the memory of a throne.
It’s too pathetic, really.
He lifts a small detonator between two fingers, wiggling it mockingly.
“Ignatov heir,” he croons. “And his prodigy wife. Fitting that you die here, under the weight of your own family’s lies.”
Harper’s breath becomes artificially natural, like she’s doing it voluntarily instead of on autopilot.
I step half a pace in front of her to block Anton’s sightline. This wretch doesn’t deserve to look at her.
“Put it down,” I say, voice low.
“Oh, Damian, I didn’t bring you here to negotiate. I brought you here to bury you,” he sighs as he taps the detonator against his palm. “And to bury everything the Ignatovs ever touched.”
Harper speaks up, voice sharp.
“You’ll destroy yourself along with it.”
Anton laughs jaggedly, a broken sound.
“Better a martyr than a pawn. Better ash than a puppet in her hands.”
Inessa Markova, when I get my hands on you…
The way he spits the word tells me everything I need to know.
Harper draws in a breath, about to respond, but the ground shudders beneath us before she can speak. A low rumble travels through the chamber like thunder rolling underground.
Anton’s eyes flick upward.
“Ah,” he murmurs, almost pleased. “Showtime.”
A violent blast tears through everything. My eyes dart behind us, near the entrance, to see stone and metal collapsing, the walls trembling like they’re in the throes of a death rattle.
Harper screams my name, but the roar of debris drowns everything. I grab her, drag her behind a fallen console, shield her with my body as dust engulfs us again.
A cascade of rubble seals the entrance, suffering the same fate as the entrance before this one did. Kiro’s voice on the comm cuts out in a burst of static. Harper coughs, eyes watering from the dust. I brush the debris from her hair, checking her for injuries.
She’s alive, thank the Lord. Shaken but alive.
Her hand finds mine, fingers trembling as they lock around my knuckles. She doesn’t let go.
Anton’s footsteps fade into the deeper dark beyond the servers, retreating like a phantom slipping between worlds.
He’s running deeper into the belly.
Toward something.
Or someone.
Harper squeezes my hand harder.
“Damian,” she whispers, voice hoarse but steady. “Come on, we gotta go after him.”
We move, hands clasped, stepping over shattered stone and sparking wires. My head hurts, the air is full of dust, and I’m sure there are some kind of fumes in the air that are slowly poisoning my lungs.
The only exit now leads further underground, straight toward Anton, straight toward the end of everything we’ve survived to reach.
It’s the woman whose hand is in mine who gives me the courage and resilience to keep going. Her stride is wide, unbothered by the past two blasts. The line of her jaw is unforgiving, and her grasp on me is firm.
Does she know what she does to me?
She feels me looking at her, her fingers tightening around mine.
“We finish this,” she murmurs.
Together.
And we disappear into the dark. The deeper we move, the hotter the air gets.
The concrete rubble is an annoyance. The lights flicker in epileptic stutters, each pulse revealing a different version of the corridor: broken wiring, collapsed infrastructure, the dust drifting like ash from some unseen funeral pyre.
Harper walks close at my side, though she tries to pretend she isn’t. She always acts as if her nearness is coincidence, as if she isn’t matching her breathing to mine so the rhythm steadies both of us.
I let her have this. Let her think I don’t notice the tremor she hides in her frame.
We move through a narrow passage where the ceiling has bowed inward, cracked from the blast. With every step, there is a crunch of glass and grit. The place feels alive in the wrong way with the hum beneath my feet being too rhythmic, like a mechanical heartbeat running faster than it should.
My gut tells me something’s been triggered.
Something big.
“Damian,” Harper whispers.
I lift a hand, not to silence her, but to listen. Ahead, somewhere in the artery of tunnels, sound ricochets unevenly. A ragged voice—Anton.
His voice drips through the air like oil sliding down metal—thick, staining everything it touches.
“…you think you can walk through this grave and come out clean…”
Harper stiffens, and I feel her shiver. I step half in front of her before she can argue; she doesn’t try to push past me the way she sometimes does.
Good. That means she feels that something is eerily wrong too.
“…the Ignatovs built an empire on lies,” Anton’s voice booms, except—
It doesn’t sound the same as it did before, when he was cackling and murmuring to himself like a crackhead. His words no longer drift but are projected.
That’s what this is. He’s using the old PA channels.
The tunnels vibrate faintly with his voice.
“…and now? You inherit the curse.”
He’s everywhere and nowhere at once.
Harper’s eyes look like two huge holes in a skull. She presses her palm briefly to the wall, grounding herself in the solidness of it. But the wall trembles faintly beneath her touch, and she jerks her hand back.
The infrastructure is too unstable.
A cold thread pulls tight in my chest.