Chapter 20
CASSIAN
We emerge from the servant tunnels into a slaughterhouse.
The door of the bunker access antechamber groans as I shove my right shoulder against it.
We kept pushing down, straight toward the final fallback point, but the war beat us here.
My left arm is entirely dead weight. Black spots swarm the edges of my vision, and if I let the agonizing, tearing pain in my shoulder fully register, I know I’ll drop right here on the concrete floor.
The basement junction is ruined. The concrete pillars are pockmarked, the overhead pipes venting hissing steam into a haze of drywall dust and gun smoke thick enough to taste.
A sudden, deafening BOOM shatters the quiet as Varro fires a final shotgun blast into a twitching mercenary near the elevator bank.
The overpressure in the confined concrete space is brutal. Iris gasps behind me, clapping her hands over her ears, her face twisting in pain.
Only the close, ugly sounds remain now. The zip of flex-cuffs. The groan of a dying man. The racking of slides as weapons are cleared.
“Clear!” Varro shouts, lowering the shotgun.
I step out of the passage, keeping Iris behind me. My vision swims. The pure adrenaline that carried me through the tunnel is completely gone, replaced by the cold, crushing gravity of severe blood loss. My left sleeve is saturated, dripping a steady rhythm onto the dust-covered floor.
“Cassian!”
Varro spots us. He’s standing by the elevator call button, his face smeared with soot and blood. He rushes over, his eyes widening when he sees my shoulder.
“You’re hit,” he says.
“I’m mobile,” I lie, bracing my good arm against the cold concrete wall to keep the room from tilting. “Report.”
“We flushed them down,” he says, gesturing to the bodies scattered across the corridor. “They pushed hard on the study, so we retreated to the secondary stairs and pinched them against the bunker access doors.”
He looks grim, nodding toward the shattered lighting fixtures.
One of the last surviving guards is down. A medic is kneeling over him, pressing thick wads of gauze into a neck wound. The floor around them is slick with red.
“Bravo Three is gone,” Varro says quietly.
I nod, staring at the blood on the concrete. Another one gone. We traded half the inner guard for a full hit squad tonight. It’s the brutal math of war.
“And Kirill?” I ask.
Varro points to the far corner, near the shattered remains of a utility control panel.
“Alive,” he says. “Barely.”
Kirill is sitting on the floor, his back braced against the wall with his legs splayed out in front of him. He’s clutching his stomach, dark blood seeping through his fingers. He’s pale, his breath catching in a wet, hollow rattle every time his chest heaves.
I turn to Iris.
She’s standing in the opening of the secret passage, clutching the pistol I gave her. Her eyes are wide and glassy, darting around the room as she takes in the absolute carnage of the bodies and the blood. She’s trembling, a fine vibration she can’t control.
“Iris…”
She stares straight ahead, her gaze locked on the empty wall behind me, completely unresponsive.
I step closer and touch her arm.
“Iris.”
She flinches, her eyes snapping to mine. She stares at my lips as they move, shaking her head slightly and tapping the side of her ear.
“I can’t...” she yells, her voice entirely too loud in the quiet room. “It’s ringing. I can’t hear you.”
Tinnitus.
The unsuppressed shot in the confined stairwell, the breach charge, and Varro’s shotgun blast inside the concrete junction. A faint, dark trickle of blood is leaking from her left ear canal.
“Stay here,” I mouth, exaggerating the movement so she can read my lips. “Stay.”
She nods, understanding the physical command if not the words. I watch her lean back against the concrete pillar, sliding down until she’s crouching on the floor. Her arms tighten around her knees to make herself as small as possible. She’s dissociating, checking out of the nightmare.
Fine.
“Watch her,” I order Varro.
A sneer twists my lips as I turn and limp toward Kirill. Each step sends a fresh, tearing jolt of agony through my shoulder. The floor feels like it’s shifting beneath my boots.
I force myself to focus entirely on the physical pain, using it as an anchor to keep from passing out.
Kirill looks up as I approach. To my disgust, he smiles.
It’s a gruesome, awful sight. His teeth are stained red.
“The great Cassian Drazic,” he wheezes. “You look like shit.”
“I’m standing,” I say. “You’re not.”
I stop in front of him and glare down. He took a high-caliber round straight to the gut. It’s a slow, excruciating death.
I kick his wounded leg, hard.
The violent motion tears at my own ruined shoulder, sending white-hot needles stabbing straight into my neck, but I keep my face completely blank.
He cries out, curling in on himself.
I draw the spare pistol from my belt with my right hand, level the muzzle at his stomach, and press the cold steel directly into his bullet wound.
He screams, a high, thin sound that cuts off abruptly as he runs out of air.
“I heard your comms in the kitchen,” I snarl, twisting the gun barrel deeper into the raw, ruined flesh. “I know the Judge sent you. Give me the exact parameters.”
He gasps, his eyes rolling back in his head as the shock waves hit his system. He’s fading fast.
“He said burn it all down,” he hisses, his voice barely audible over the wheeze in his lungs. “Erase you... recover any evidence... bury the whole mess.” He shifts his heavy gaze past my legs. Toward the pillar. Toward Iris.
“And the girl?” he rasps, coughing a thick splatter of blood onto his chin. “He didn’t care. Said she’s been with you too long. If she catches a stray… it’d be a necessary sacrifice.”
Rage burns through every vein in my body. I look back over my shoulder.
Iris is crouched by the wall, ten feet away. Her eyes are locked on Kirill. She sees his bloody lips moving. She sees me leaning over him with the gun dug into his gut.
But her expression is completely confused.
She can’t hear a word.
The ringing in her ears is a physical shield, protecting her from a truth that would destroy her. She doesn’t hear that her perfect father ordered her death.
I turn back to Kirill.
He’s grinning. He knows what he revealed, and he thinks he found a nerve.
“She doesn’t know,” he wheezes, his red teeth bared. “Daddy’s little girl thinks he’s a saint—”
BANG.
He slides sideways, dead.
I stand there with the smoking gun, my chest heaving while the room spins and tilts, plunging darker this time.
I tuck the gun back into my belt and push myself away.
Iris is staring at me, and I go to her. The wound in my shoulder throbs with a deep, sickening pulse that matches my weakening heartbeat.
Varro intercepts me halfway across the floor.
“Cassian,” he says, his voice low, his eyes flicking nervously toward the girl. “He was talking. Why did you—”
“He was done,” I cut him off, my tone entirely flat and leaving no room for argument. “Get a clean-up crew in here, ASAP.”
He doesn’t argue, though I know what he’s thinking. We could have used Kirill to get more information about our attackers. But I know enough.
“And the girl?” he asks.
“She comes with me.”
I try to step past him, but my knee buckles.
I hit the wall hard with my good shoulder to keep from collapsing, the severe blood loss finally dragging me under.
Forcing myself off the concrete, I stagger toward Iris.
She pushes herself up to her feet as I approach, leaning heavily against the pillar for support.
“Is it over?” she asks, her voice cracking in the quiet space.
I nod. “It’s over,” I mouth clearly.
I reach out, offering her my good hand. She hesitates. Her gaze drifts over my bloody knuckles and up to my bleeding shoulder. The fear and tension drain right out of her posture, crumbling into sheer, overwhelming exhaustion.
Varro steps close, his movements slow and telegraphed. He gently eases the pistol from her shaking fingers. She doesn’t fight him for it. She lets it go.
Finally, she takes my hand. Her fingers are freezing cold. Mine are burning hot with blood.
“Come.”
I lead her across the antechamber. Together, we stumble through the smoldering ruins of the basement junction.
I pull her close to my good side, trying to shield her line of sight from the worst of the bodies, but she still sees them.
There’s no hiding the harsh reality as we step carefully over the fallen chunks of concrete and the scattered brass casings until we’re at the service elevator.
I punch the security code in. The steel doors slide open, and we step inside.
Before they can shut, Varro steps into the gap.
Without a word, he rips the blood-spattered tactical pouch off his vest with a harsh nylon tear.
He shoves it directly into the cargo pocket of my pants, securing Elias’s drive.
We exchange nods, and he steps back, letting the doors shut. I lean my head back against the metal wall and close my eyes.
The pain is blinding now, eating through my defenses. I’m running entirely on fumes.
But my mind is racing.
The Judge.
That fucking bastard.
I don’t care that he saved my life. That he pulled me out of a concrete cell and gave me a second chance. I’ve paid that debt. Now it’s time for him to pay his.
I open my eyes and look over at Iris. She’s leaning against the opposite wall of the elevator, hugging herself.
She’s alive. No thanks to him.
I rest my hand on the gun at my hip.
The war isn’t over. The Syndicate was only the hired hammer.
Now, I have to go kill the man who wielded it.