Chapter 23 – Lydia - The Interrogation
The atmosphere on the rooftop tastes like rust and gun oil.
One step out the door and the city is there, spread wide under a bruised sky, but I don’t have time to take it in. Dom is waiting. Two rifles flank him, pointed at us, the men holding them with the twitchy calm of people who’ve already killed once tonight.
Silas shifts half a step in front of me, his arm brushing mine. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t move his head, but every muscle in his back tells me what he’s about to do. He’s calculating the odds, the angles, how many rounds it takes before he can push me behind cover.
Dom smiles like he’s reading the same math. “You’re late to the party.” His voice carries over the wind, brutal enough to cut. “And you brought a date.”
The men lift their rifles a fraction higher. My chest tightens. Silas’s hand goes to his side, fingers hovering near the pistol he drew on instinct back in the penthouse.
“Careful,” Dom adds. “Wouldn’t want her pretty dress to end up painted across the ledge.”
Silas doesn’t answer. His lack of words is its own kind of violence.
I scan the rooftop fast. Two floodlights glare against the slick tar.
The perimeter is boxed with low rails, too easy to fall over if someone missteps.
Farther out, the skyline burns with light, the streets below flashing with headlights and sirens too far away to matter. There’s no exit that isn’t through Dom.
Unless someone creates one.
A crack splits the night, vicious and hot. One of Dom’s men jerks as a bullet takes him through the shoulder. He stumbles, fires blind, the shot snapping against the steel vent behind me.
Elias.
He’s here, shooting from somewhere below or across the alley. My pulse spikes, tangled in relief and dread.
Dom doesn’t flinch. He just laughs. “Of course,” he says, eyes sliding past Silas to me. “Elias always did have bad timing.”
Silas shoves me sideways, pushing me into the cover of a concrete outcrop. Gunfire erupts, harder, faster. My ears ring. The rooftop becomes bedlam of muzzle flashes, shouted orders, the grind of boots scraping tar.
I crouch low, heart pounding, the edge of fear knotted with something worse: the way Dom looks at me even while bullets crack around us, like I’m the center of his amusement.
Silas fires back. Crack-shot. Precise. He’s not reckless. He’s efficient. Too efficient. I’ve seen men fight before, but not like this. Not with training built into their bones.
Dom’s words echo against the gunfire. “You brought a date.”
My gut twists. He’s toying with us, but underneath it, I feel the knife he hasn’t swung yet.
The fight’s only beginning, but already my world is splitting. I thought I knew the shape of the danger. Drazen. Dom. Their cages and threats. But watching Silas move, covering me with every round, every glance, I realize I don’t know who I’m standing behind.
And that terrifies me more than the bullets.
The rooftop is a storm. Shouts, metal clattering, bullets sparking against the vent where I press my back.
Silas leans out, fires two shots, drops one of Dom’s men where he stands.
Silas’s movements are too skilled, too fluid.
Not like a hired thug. Not just another of Drazen’s dogs.
This is training—and it looks like professional training.
I’ve seen it before, years ago, in men who swore oaths to governments, not criminals.
Dom seems to notice too. He’s watching Silas the way a snake watches something worth biting. His smirk is tighter now, teeth bared, eyes alive with something close to delight.
“You see it, don’t you, Lydia?” he calls out. A bullet whines past his shoulder, but he doesn’t duck. He just paces a step closer, boots leaving dark prints in the tar. “Your protector isn’t what he told you. He never was.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Silas snaps, voice raw with control breaking. He doesn’t look at me. Won’t. He fires again, forcing Dom’s other guard behind cover.
I press a hand against the concrete at my side, nails digging into grit.
My mind is a mess of images: Silas yesterday, bringing me dinner with that carefully neutral expression while Dom watched, the moment I whispered Elias's name and saw understanding flash in his eyes, Silas standing guard outside my door all night, so close I could feel him through the wall, his presence the only thing that kept me from breaking, Silas now, moving like a soldier, every motion too exact to be coincidence.
Dom tilts his head. “You didn’t think he just… showed up, did you?”
My pulse hammers. “Don’t—”
“Oh, come on,” he laughs. “You’ve always been smarter than this. He’s Bureau. The leash you thought you cut? He’s the one tightening it.”
Silas moves fast—too fast—breaking cover to put two more rounds toward Dom’s position. The sound shakes through me. He’s not trying to shut Dom up with words. He’s trying to silence him permanently.
But Dom slips behind the floodlight casing, alive and grinning, his voice still carrying across the rooftop.
“Tell her, Ward!” The name lands like a blade. “Tell her who you really work for before she learns it from someone who doesn’t have to lie about every breath he takes around her!"
The world tilts. Ward. Bureau. The pieces slam together with brutal force.
I whip toward Silas, searching his face for denial, for any scrap of the man who told me he couldn’t walk away from me even if he tried. But he won’t meet my eyes.
And that alone tells me everything.
Another shot screams across the rooftop. I duck, heart in my throat, but it’s not fear that eats me alive this time. It’s betrayal.
Because Dom’s words might be venom, but Silas’s silence makes them true.
The gunfire thickens, swallowing whatever space was left for denial. My ears ring, my pulse claws higher.
Silas moves closer, crouching low, body between me and the line of fire. The way he shields me isn’t instinct, it’s protocol. He doesn’t even glance my way when he reloads, fingers precise, motions drilled in long before he ever knew my name.
That’s when the second figure cuts through the chaos.
Elias.
He bursts up the access stairs, every muscle coiled, pistol raised. He fires twice, both shots surgical. A guard collapses near the east ledge, another drops his rifle halfway across the roof.
Dom curses, snapping back into cover.
And me? I can’t move. My body betrays me, caught between two men I know in entirely different ways, both spilling truths I didn’t want.
Elias’s voice rips through the noise: “You left her in this mess?” His eyes don’t leave Silas, even as he checks his corners. “This is the best the Bureau could do?”
Silas growls low, chambering another round. “This isn’t the time.”
“The time was before you let them put her in a cage,” Elias bites back.
Dom’s laugh slices over the rooftop. “Oh, this is rich. The ghost and the fed. Both crawling back for the same woman.” His voice is lethal, cruel. “Tell me, Lydia, which one hurts worse? The one who lied to you? Or the one who abandoned you altogether all this while?”
The words hit harder than the bullets. I stagger back a step, my throat raw. I want to scream at them, both of them, that I’m not a prize, not a pawn. But the air is too full of smoke and violence and the pounding realization that Silas never was what he let me believe.
Another round tears through the rooftop floodlight. Glass shatters. Elias ducks, grabs my wrist, pulls me low. His grip is familiar, unyielding.
“We move now,” he says. “Or we don’t move at all.”
Silas is already shifting, scanning the perimeter, planning two steps ahead. “South side,” he calls. “The service scaffold—”
“I know the way,” Elias cuts in.
For a heartbeat they glare at each other over my head, two predators forced into the same cage. Then they move, parallel, both dragging me with them, bullets sparking across the rooftop as Dom’s men regroup.
The rooftop tilts into chaos. I stumble between them, lungs burning, ears ringing with gunfire and betrayal, heart breaking with every step.
The south edge looms closer, rain-slick and jagged with scaffolding that looks one bad gust away from peeling off the building. Wind claws at my dress, dragging the thin fabric against my skin, reminding me just how exposed I am in this war they built.
Silas keeps to my right, Elias to my left. I feel their hands catch me, release me, catch me again, like I’m being volleyed between two walls of muscle and grit. They’re not protecting me for the same reason. I know that now. But both are committed enough to bleed for it.
A flash of movement cuts across the rooftop. Dom again. He’s closer, pistol raised, grin cut wide like he knows he owns the field.
“You think you’re getting her out?” he shouts. “You can’t even decide who she belongs to.”
Silas fires back—not words, but a spray of bullets. It clips the vent beside Dom’s head, spraying sparks. Dom ducks, laughing like this is all a game he’s rigged.
“Keep moving,” Silas growls, grabbing my arm. His eyes flick toward Elias. “Cover.”
Elias doesn’t argue. He plants himself at the rear, gun steady, his body moving with that same terrifying calm he carried when I first met him. It’s not ferocity. It’s finality. The kind that says if anyone follows, they die.
We hit the scaffold. The steel groans under our weigh. The city sprawls below, blurred in streaks of neon and shadow. My stomach drops. My hands clutch at the railing before I force them free.
“Don’t stop,” Silas says, already ahead, scanning each platform before pulling me down the first level. His grip is iron, his movements precise, too practiced for a man who’s supposed to just be… what? A shadow in Drazen’s employ? A stray caught in the same net as me?
Elias covers the top, then swings down behind us, boots hitting metal with a clang that echoes like gunfire. He doesn’t falter. Doesn’t even look at me. His focus is split between Silas and the skyline, like he’s calculating how many more mistakes we can afford before this ends in a body bag.