Chapter 34 Priest #2
I push off Arlo, dragging her to her feet by the vest. My eyes quickly scan her. “You hit?”
“No.” She shakes her head, adjusting her rifle on her shoulder.
“Stay down,” I bark at the others as I move towards the window.
I spot one of Sterling’s men reloading behind a scorched wall. I raise my rifle and put a bullet through his skull. He crumples without a sound.
Another. And another.
The woods are crawling with them. They’re flanking us. Sterling’s personal fucking hounds. They’re not trying to hold us back. They’re trying to keep us here.
“Raze! On me! We need to move!”
My boots slam through the bloody corridor, team behind me. Raze darts left, drops a man with a shot to the kneecap, then puts one in his mouth when he screams.
“Goddamn, I love this job,” he laughs, reloading.
We’re in the main operations center now. A huge room with screens that are shattered, keyboards sparking, bodies slumped over consoles. The air’s thick with the coppery stink of fresh blood and the acrid tang of fried electronics.
“We’re close.”
Sterling doesn’t care about casualties. He never has. He just wants us cornered, distracted. Bleeding. Dead, if possible.
He doesn’t understand that I don’t care about dying.
I care about taking him with me.
We hit another resistance line—three men crouched behind flipped metal tables, laying down cover fire.
I duck behind a pillar and tap twice on the concrete. Raze takes the cue. He sprints low and fast, firing from the hip. One goes down with a scream. The others lean out to return fire.
I pop up and shoot the second through the eye.
The last one tries to run. I shoot him in the spine and keep walking as he screams for help.
“Stack up,” I order.
We form up against the next set of doors, reinforced with thick steel. Raze lights the thermite and steps back, howling.
“Fire in the hole, motherfuckers.”
The doors melt inward with a hiss of burning steel. I’m already moving. Two of Sterling’s soldiers open fire. I drop one with a round to the gut and another to the temple. Arlo shoots the second in the leg. He collapses, screaming—until Raze stomps his throat in.
“Gotta work on your kill shot, stray,” he grunts, grinning as the body twitches.
Arlo glares at him, raising her rifle. “Wanna be my target practice?”
“You couldn’t hit me if—”
“Raze.” I shove Arlo forward, shooting him a look.
He lifts his hands in mock surrender, still smirking. “Damn, can’t even bully your stray anymore.”
The room opens into a corridor of holding cells—but they’re empty. The doors swung wide, locks twisted, restraints hanging loose. Something in my gut twists.
This isn’t right.
He wants me to find this.
“Fuck. We need to backtrack.” I start to turn when a voice cuts through the static of gunfire and smoke.
“I’m in here! Priest, please!”
Dalton.
I push past Raze. The last cell door at the end of the corridor is warped but standing. Dalton’s inside, half-collapsed, clutching his arm. His face beat to shit.
“Where’s Alistair?” I shout, firing a round into the lock. It bursts open with a clang.
“They took him,” he coughs, stumbling out. “They didn’t keep us together. Just get me the fuck out of here.”
Gunfire explodes down the hall. Muzzle flashes. Raze barks orders into his comm.
“There’s no fucking out.” I grab Dalton by the collar and drag him toward cover. “Sterling wanted you alive. He wants us all in one place. Where would he take him?”
“I—I don’t—” Dalton’s voice breaks as bullets tear into the walls around us.
“Priest!” Raze yells over the noise. “We need to move. Now!”
I ignore him, eyes scanning the corridor, mentally overlaying old Sovereign schematics. There’s one section unaccounted for—the sub-levels. The old isolation chambers. Exactly where I’d keep a man meant to suffer.
“Drive them back,” I snap. “We’ll clear the subfloor on our—”
The world detonates.
Heat slams into me like a freight train. The floor heaves. My body lifts off the ground, then slams into concrete. The taste of metal floods my mouth.
Smoke. Screaming. Fire.
I roll onto my side, coughing through the ringing in my ears. Half the wall’s gone. Ceiling collapsing in sheets of molten rebar and dust.
Arlo’s voice cuts through the chaos. “Priest!”
I blink hard, my vision swimming. The ceiling groans again—one beam cracking free, crashing down and splitting the hallway in two. Fire roars up from the breach, cutting her off from me completely.
“Arlo!” I shout, forcing myself to stand. My rifle’s gone. Movement flickers at the edge of my vision.
Dalton. He’s up—Raising my rifle.
“Priest!” Raze’s voice, a split second before the bang.
Then impact.
Raze crashes into me, and for a heartbeat, I think he’s tackling me to the floor. But then Dalton drops. Skull exploding in red.
Raze goes limp.
More ceiling collapses, chunks of concrete raining down. I can’t hear anything over the roaring fire. The air’s a furnace, choking the breath from my lungs.
“Raze,” I grunt, shoving at him. “You heavy fuck, move—”
I shove harder, rolling him onto his back, and that’s when I see it.
Blood.
Dark and thick, spilling between my fingers as I press down. He’s been shot. Straight through the gut. And there’s too much of it.
“Well…fuck me.” He coughs, and a spray of blood splashes my chin. “Guess I finally did something heroic.”
“You took a goddamn bullet for me.”
He snorts, grimacing through the pain. “Yeah, well—don’t get used to it. I’m not making a habit outta catching bullets for your ugly face.” His chuckle breaks into another cough, more blood. “If I’d known it’d hurt this bad, I’d’ve let it hit you instead.”
“Don’t you fucking die on me.” My voice is lost in the roar of fire and collapsing steel. “You hear me, Raze? You’re not dying here.”
“We knew someone was feeding Sterling our locations.” His breath hitches, chest jerking under my hands. “Just didn’t think it’d be the dumb one. Should’ve figured. Always is.”
“Shut up. You’re losing too much blood.”
“Got shot by a fucking pretty boy…you believe that? Not even one of the good ones. Just some sloppy-ass foot soldier in designer gloves.”
More blood bubbles out, trailing down his jaw. I press harder on the wound. He lets out a guttural groan, one leg kicking against the floor.
“Listen to me, Priest.” His fingers twist in my vest. “You don’t let Sterling take everything. You hear me? He already got enough. He fucked you up enough.”
“Stop. Fucking. Talking.”
“You’re the biggest liability I’ve ever known. But you’re the best goddamn weapon the Sovereign’s got. Don’t waste it on him. You need to lead, Priest. For the forgotten. The soulless fucks like us. We deserve a chance.”
“You’re not dying on me, Raze.”
Not here. Not like this.
The air is molten. My lungs burn with every breath.
“Priest!” Arlo screams, the ceiling crumbling around her.
He fumbles at his vest, hand slipping through the blood pooling across his ribs, and finds the grenade clipped to his harness.
“Raze—don’t.”
“I’ll give them hell.” He grips his rifle with his other hand, forcing a smirk. “Go get your stray, Priest. Tell Sterling I said…fuck you.”
“Raze—”
He shoves me back.
I stumble, crash into a burning wall. Heat sears my shoulder as I push off and spin, just in time to see him lift the rifle again. Gunfire rips through the corridor. He’s still fighting. Somewhere in that inferno, that goddamn bastard is still laughing.
Then—
The ceiling gives way fully.
Concrete and fire crash down in one deafening roar, the shockwave flinging me backward. The floor splits beneath my boots. When the dust clears, the spot where Raze had been is gone. Just a mangled heap of twisted steel and a hole burning through to the sublevels below.
“Raze!”
Nothing.
Just fire and the distant hiss of something detonating.
Grenade.
I don’t wait for the aftershock to hit. I grab Arlo’s arm and yank her with me.
Smoke claws at my throat. Heat peels at my armor, searing through layers of Kevlar and skin. Every breath scrapes like glass. The bunker groans behind me, surrendering to the fire one beam at a time.
Yanking a rifle off a corpse, I force my mind to snap back.
Focus. Hunt. Survive.
Movement flickers through the smoke ahead with recognizable tactical gear—Axe. His team’s pushing a group of Sterling’s men back, gunfire echoing through the collapsing corridor. He’s already got one boot on a body when he sees me—blood smeared across his skull mask.
“We’re clearing out!” he shouts over the roar. “The whole damn place is wired to blow! Where’s Raze?”
I shake my head.
Firelight flashes across his bloodied mask as he turns and bellows over his shoulder, “Move! East entrance! Go!”
The building groans again, louder this time—support beams fracturing above us, debris raining down in molten chunks.
We’re out of time.