Chapter 37 – Silas - Drazen’s Net #2
The knife glints in her hand, and my throat goes tight when she steps forward. Not because I think she’ll do it; I know her too well for that. It’s because this moment isn’t ours. It’s theater, and the audience is armed to the teeth.
The men close ranks, rifles raised. One twitch, one mistake, and the floodlights cut us all into corpses.
Lydia stops in front of me. The blade kisses the hollow of my throat, cool and sharp. Her eyes lock on mine, steady, unreadable, but I catch the faintest flicker—a question, buried under her control.
“Make it clean,” Drazen says behind her, his voice smooth as glass. “Or I’ll make you watch while someone else does.”
Elias stands to the side, his gun still at his hip, his expression carved from stone. He’s not going to move yet. This is Lydia’s play. Mara’s hands are clenched white around her arms.
My pulse hammers under the blade. I could say something, could beg her not to, but that would cheapen us both. Drazen would smell the weakness and turn it into blood.
So I don’t flinch. I don’t blink. I give her nothing but truth.
“If you cut me,” I say, low enough that it’s just for her, “you better kill me. Because I’ll never stop coming for you.”
Her pupils flare, her face still as stone. To anyone watching, it looks like she’s considering the strike. To me, it looks like she’s already chosen.
She tilts her head, just a fraction. Then she moves.
The knife slashes down, fast as lightning, but not into me. She pivots, spins, and buries the blade deep in the throat of the nearest one of Drazen’s soldiers behind my shoulder. The man chokes, blood spraying across my chest in a hot arc, his body folding before anyone processes what’s happened.
The yard explodes.
Elias fires, his pistol cracking once, twice, men dropping before they can react. Lydia yanks her blade free, spinning to open another soldier’s stomach with a vicious rip. I fire point-blank into the chest of the man raising his rifle at her, the impact throwing him back into the dirt.
And through it all, Drazen just smiles.
“Kill them all,” he orders.
The floodlights shatter under gunfire. The night becomes a furnace of screams, muzzle flashes, and blood.
I drop to one knee behind the nearest concrete barrier, fire three rounds at the shadows moving along the fence. One drops. Two more take his place. Drazen’s soldiers move like they’ve drilled this before—systematic, sweeping lines, each man covering the other’s blind spot.
More vehicles arrive without warning, engines roaring in from the access road beyond the gate. Headlights split the dark, tires grind against gravel, and the first truck slams through the chain link fence like it’s paper. Men spill out—black gear, rifles raised.
Eidolon, the man leading them, calls out, Elias and his men exchange looks with the new reinforcements in recognition as they all join us in the fight.
The balance shifts instantly.
“Push forward!” Elias’s voice cuts through the chaos, clear and hard. He’s moving already, a blur of precision and rage, taking shots with unerring calm. Every bullet he fires lands. Every move means death for someone else.
I move with him, staying close enough that I can track Lydia in my periphery. She’s fast—too fast for the chaos. Her blade catches the light again and again, carving through the mess like she was born inside it. She moves like she’s conducting the storm, not surviving it.
Jax is behind Mara now, keeping her covered. The kid’s trembling, but he holds the line. His shots are messy, erratic, but they count. The sound of gunfire overlaps with shouted orders, the metallic crack of ricochet, the high whine of bullets clipping stone.
I reload. Slide. Snap. Breathe. Move.
Another soldier rushes me from the left, swinging a rifle like a club. I grab it mid-swing, twist, and drive my elbow into his throat. He gags, stumbles, and I shove the barrel under his jaw. One pull. Red mist. Gone.
I don’t even pause. My hand finds Lydia’s shoulder as she stumbles over a corpse. She glances back, and for half a second our eyes lock.
No words. No plan. Just understanding.
We pivot together, back-to-back. I fire at the catwalk above, dropping a man aiming for her. She ducks, slices through another, blood spraying across both of us. The air stinks of copper and burnt powder. My ears ring, but I can still hear her breathing—fast, controlled, alive.
A grenade arcs through the air.
“Down!” I grab her, dragging us both behind a broken slab of concrete. The explosion punches the ground like a hammer, shockwave slamming through my chest. Dirt and glass rain down.
When the ringing clears, Lydia is still under me, her hand gripping my shirt tight. Her mouth moves. There’s no sound at first, but then: “You good?”
I nod. “You?”
She gives a sharp grin, the kind that shows teeth. “Ask the others.”
She shoves me off and stands, already scanning.
Across the yard, Elias has advanced halfway to the compound door, his reinforcements spread out like a living wall. He moves through bodies like a current—calm, lethal, absolute. Mara’s pinned near a crate, Jax covering her, both firing at shadows I can’t see.
“Silas!” Lydia calls out, pointing toward the right flank. “They’re circling the fuel tanks!”
If they light that, the whole damn place will go up.
I grab her wrist, and start pulling her toward the side passage, cutting between two wrecked trucks. The air thickens with smoke and the taste of metal. I can hear the hiss of leaking fuel, smell it mixing with blood.
Two of Drazen’s men are setting charges: plastic bricks along the tank base, fingers fumbling with detonators.
Lydia doesn’t wait. She runs straight for them, sliding on the oil-slick concrete, her knife flashing once, twice.
One man falls clutching his gut; the other she grabs by the hair and slams into the metal tank, his skull cracking on impact.
He collapses. She finishes him without hesitation.
I move to the charges, yanking the wires free, tossing the bricks away from the leak. One is half-armed, red-light blinking. I toss it toward the drainage ditch and shoot it mid-air. The explosion is small but bright, enough to light the sky for an instant.
Lydia’s chest rises hard, her face streaked with blood. She wipes it away with the back of her hand, her mouth curved in something that isn’t a smile but close enough to count.
“You always know how to ruin a good detonation,” she says.
“Just trying to keep you alive,” I reply.
“Maybe I like the fire.”
“You’d burn just to watch it dance.”
She shrugs. “Better than dying quietly.”
“Lydia!” Elias’s voice from across the yard—sharp, commanding. “Inside! Now!”
She doesn’t argue. Neither do I.
We run.
The main structure looms ahead, concrete and steel, one side already torn open from the blast of the earlier firefight.
The sound changes the moment we cross the threshold—gunfire muffled by walls, replaced with the echo of footsteps and the low groan of an old ventilation system still humming through the dark.
We fan out automatically: Elias takes point, Jax behind him, Lydia beside me. Mara stays near the door, covering the rear.
Drazen’s inside somewhere. I can feel it. The bastard’s always one step deeper than the smoke.
Lydia catches my arm before we turn the corner, her voice a harsh whisper. “Are you ready for this?”
I look at her, and for a moment the world shrinks down to her blood-smeared face, her eyes burning like they’ve seen this ending before.
“Past ready,” I say.
She nods once. “Then let’s go finish it.”
We move.
The lights flicker overhead, shadows shifting like ghosts. Every step echoes. Every corner is a risk. But there’s no turning back. Not tonight. Not after this.
The hallway eats sound.
After the chaos of the yard, the silence inside the compound feels wrong—too complete, too controlled. Every footstep lands heavy, every breath feels stolen. The walls are industrial gray, streaked with oil and soot, lit by the pulse of red emergency lights that flicker in and out.
Elias signals a halt with one sharp motion of his hand. His face is streaked with grime, blood along his temple, but his eyes are clear. Controlled. “Two paths,” he murmurs. “We split. Jax, you’re with Mara. Cover the exit. Ward, Lydia—inside, with me.”
He doesn’t need to explain why.
Jax nods, then moves with Mara down the left corridor. The metal door slams behind them, echoing down the spine of the compound.
We take the right.
The deeper we go, the worse it smells: there’s too much gunpowder, rust, blood baked into the floor. The air hums faintly, electricity crawling behind the walls. Lydia moves beside me, her knife still in her hand, knuckles pale. She’s too quiet, even for her.
“You good?” I whisper.
Her mouth curves faintly. “Define good.”
“You’re not bleeding out, you’re still moving, and you’re not dead yet. That’s good.”
She gives a breath of a laugh—short, humorless, but real. “You have a way of lowering standards, Silas.”
“I aim for realistic expectations.”
The corner of her mouth twitches, but her eyes stay forward. She’s scanning everything: the lights, the shadows, the sound of dripping water down the hall. The way she moves reminds me of what she told me once. Control is just another word for survival.
Elias stops at the next junction, crouches, and brushes his fingers over the floor. Blood—thin, recent, smeared in a trail leading deeper into the dark.
“He’s pulling back,” he mutters. “He wants us inside.”
I tighten my grip on my gun. “Then let’s not disappoint him.”
We move again, slower now. Each step feels like we’re walking into a heartbeat—steady, inevitable.
The corridor opens into a wide chamber. Concrete walls, metal catwalks overhead, stacks of crates shoved against the far end. A large window spans one wall, overlooking what looks like an old control room full of shattered monitors, a bank of security feeds still flickering with static.
Lydia stops first. Her eyes flick toward the far corner. “Trip wires.”
I follow her gaze. Thin threads strung between the crates, nearly invisible in the red light. Clever. Old-fashioned, but clever.
“Can you disarm them?” Elias asks.
She crouches, fingers moving deftly. Her calmness in this is unnerving, like the chaos outside never happened. She pinches one wire between her nails, cuts it with a flick of her blade, then another. Her movements are surgical. No hesitation.
When she straightens, she meets Elias’s eyes. “Clear.”
He nods. “Move.”
We step over the wires, guns raised. The chamber opens into another narrow hall, this one lined with offices—glass walls smeared with grime and streaked with something darker.
Inside one, a desk is overturned, papers scattered.
Another holds a flickering fluorescent light that keeps flashing like a dying heartbeat.
“Feels like a trap,” I mutter.
Elias’s mouth hardens. “It is a trap.”
The sound comes before the movement: metal boots on the catwalk above. I spin, gun raised. Two men lean over the railings, rifles drawn. Before they can fire, Elias takes one clean through the neck. I hit the second. Their bodies tumble from the catwalk, slamming into the floor in a wet thud.
The noise wakes up the rest.
From the far end of the hall, a door bursts open and more of Drazen’s men pour in—five, maybe six, all armored, firing as they move. Bullets rip through glass and plaster, shredding walls into powder.
Lydia drops to one knee beside a doorway, firing through the broken glass. Two men go down. Elias advances like a machine, calm and relentless. I cover the flank, taking out one who tries to circle us from behind.
The smell of blood thickens again. The air hums with static and heat.
When the gunfire finally dies, only the hum of electricity remains. The hallway is a graveyard of noise.
Elias reloads, the click of his magazine the only sound. “He’s close.”
Lydia looks toward the end of the hall. There’s a single steel door, heavier than the others. No label, no window. She tilts her head, eyes narrowing. “That’s him.”
I step closer, hand brushing her arm. “You sure?”
She nods. “He likes control. That’s the only room in this place that still has it.”
Elias glances between us. “We go together. He’s not walking out.”
We move toward the door. Every step feels heavier, as if the ground itself is warning us back.
The door’s keypad is still lit, numbers flickering weakly.
Elias gestures for Lydia. She cracks her knuckles, crouches, and works the panel open.
Her hands move quick, wires stripped, contacts crossed. Sparks spit out, and the lock clicks.
The door swings open.
The room beyond is clean. Too clean, one could say. No blood, no dust, no debris. A table sits in the center, a single chair behind it. On the wall opposite, monitors flicker with surveillance feeds from the yard.
Drazen stands in the corner, hands clasped behind his back, as if he’s been waiting. His suit is immaculate, his expression calm. A man built entirely from premeditation.
“Welcome,” he says. “You’ve made quite a mess of my house.”
Elias raises his gun. “We’ll redecorate with your blood.”
Drazen’s smile widens. “Predictable. You always were.”
He looks at Lydia then, and his tone softens. “And you. I expected more hesitation. It seems Elias’s brand of loyalty rubs off.”
Lydia’s knife catches the light again. “No, Drazen. I just finally learned where mine belongs.”
The air thickens.
For a heartbeat, no one moves. Then he laughs. “Good. Then let’s see if you’ve earned it.”
He raises his hand, snapping his fingers.
The wall behind him slides open, and what’s left of his men pour through—four, five, six of them, armored, automatic rifles raised.
Elias doesn’t wait. “Down!”
The room erupts.