Chapter 35 #2
“What happened to your arm?” She seemed genuinely confused, and for a moment, I was stunned into silence. She didn’t know? I searched her face for any hint of deception but found none.
With a flick of my hand, I released my haze, keeping it contained enough to stay undetected. The ink of my tattoo faded, revealing the scars beneath. Saoirse’s gasp cut through the silence, sharp and horrified.
Her eyes widened as she took in the jagged lines etched into my skin. “Caden did that?” she nearly shrieked, her whispering voice filled with terror.
I gave a curt nod.
“I can’t believe it. Why would he do that?”
I shrugged, but I couldn’t keep the bitterness from lacing my words. “He needed to lure out my magic. Said the good of the many outweighed the good of the one. Or, in this case, my arm.”
She winced, muttering, “Doesn’t sound like him.” Her features contorted with disbelief as she grabbed my other arm, her gaze locking onto mine. “I had no idea.”
I offered her a small smile. “So much is clear. Don’t worry about it.”
Her frown deepened. “So, if Caden isn’t the reason you came here, and he did that…” she pointed at the scars before I covered them back up with my tattoo, “why the hell did you come to Crown?”
I sighed, feeling the weight of the question settle in. “A guy at Cyclos broke my heart.”
Understatement of the cycle.
Saoirse’s eyes narrowed, her tone cutting. “What did he do?”
I swallowed hard, dodging the emotional landmine. “Nothing a good boyfriend would do.”
Saoirse stilled for a beat before growling, “Fuck him. Who needs men anyway? Overrated species if you ask me.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Exactly.”
She leaned in conspiratorially. “Want me to take care of him? I could make it look like an accident. Or better yet, I could permanently disfigure his dick. He’d live, but trust me—sex with another woman? Never happening again.”
The thought of James with another woman made my stomach twist like I’d swallowed a live eel.
Sure, he was technically free to do whatever—or whoever—he wanted.
I’d broken up with him, after all. But the idea of it still made my blood boil.
And what would it say about his feelings for me if he did?
Then again, the fact he’d lied to me and covered for Julian instead of coming clean about my past didn’t exactly scream undying devotion.
I shook my head, forcing the bile back down. “Thanks, but no disfiguration needed. If I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know.”
Saoirse cocked her head, a gleam of mock disappointment in her eyes. “Please do. I’m itching to use my creativity on something new.”
We spent the next hour in silence, meticulously studying the movements of the Radicals. The post was alive with activity—Radicals moving in purposeful patterns, though nothing about their behavior suggested panic or urgency.
“Have you noticed,” I murmured, breaking the quiet, “aside from the twenty guards glued to the bunker, no one else seems to care it exists?”
Saoirse turned to me, brow furrowing. “What do you mean?”
I gestured toward the fortress-like structure. “They supposedly have a nuclear-level weapon in there, and yet no one’s checking on it? No one making sure it’s still there, not even a glance in its direction? It’s like the least popular VIP section at a club.”
Saoirse bit the inside of her lip, her gaze flicking toward the posted sentries. “Maybe they simply trust those guards to do their job.”
I tilted my head, unconvinced. “Maybe, but… When I was doing my master’s in criminology, I spent some time in heavily guarded prisons.
Any time they moved a ‘dangerous’ inmate, the jailers were hyper-vigilant.
Never took their eyes off him, stayed close to avoid surprises.
Here, we’ve got a compound of hundreds of hostiles, and only twenty of them are standing around this thing?
No backup, no patrols overlapping, nothing?
It feels like…” I trailed off, the thought forming fully in my mind but too strange to voice aloud.
“Like it’s a decoy,” she said, finishing my sentence.
I nodded, the pieces starting to align. “Yeah. Exactly.”
Saoirse frowned, then studied the bunker with renewed intensity. “Okay, so if you were a Radical, and you were hiding a nuclear weapon, where would you keep it?”
Looking around, my gaze swept over the site.
Damn it. Nothing else stood out. Maybe I was wrong about the bunker being a decoy, but my gut told me we were on the right track moving away from it.
“Does it even have to be inside this camp?” Saoirse asked suddenly, breaking my thoughts.
I frowned, glancing at her. “What makes you say that?”
She nodded once toward a seemingly unprotected cave carved into the hillside, its mouth gaping wide. It sat higher up, overlooking the settlement.
“That cave up there,” she said, nodding toward the rocky outcrop, “is visible from literally anywhere down here. Everyone here has eyes on it. It might not have a door, but—”
“It might not need one,” I finished, catching on. Hiding something in plain sight was smart. The cave’s openness made it practically invisible—no walls, no doors, nothing suspicious. Only a gaping hole in a hill which, conveniently, had an entire camp full of armed zealots casually keeping watch.
Saoirse met my gaze, and in a split second of unspoken well, this is probably a terrible idea but let’s do it anyway, we moved.
We slipped out of the shadows, low to the ground, weaving between tents, bunkers, and inconveniently placed stacks of supplies. The watchmen weren’t exactly slacking, but they weren’t expecting two lunatics to be sneaking through their outpost either.
The hillside loomed closer with each step, the cave gaping like a silent dare.
Open invitation or elaborate death trap? Hard to say. But we were already too committed to turn back.
“How the hell are we getting up there?” Saoirse hissed, crouched beside me behind a stack of crates at the site’s edge. “It’s not like we can fly.”
“Portal?” I suggested, eyeing the dark opening above like it might kindly lower a ladder for us.
She shut it down immediately. “Terrible idea. We have no clue what’s inside. If we portal in and land in the middle of a Radical slumber party, we’ll be dead before we can say ‘oops.’”
I bit back a curse and scanned the rocky incline. Steep. Jagged. Unforgiving. Basically, the exact opposite of a welcoming climb. But there was no other way.
“Then we climb. Fast.”
Saoirse grimaced like I’d suggested we scale it naked. “Fantastic. Just what I needed tonight—clinging to a rock face, looking like a flailing flamingo in freefall.”
“Could’ve been worse,” I muttered, gripping the rough stone and pulling myself up.
Saoirse glanced down at me, already a few feet ahead. “Oh yeah? How?”
“We could’ve brought Sean and his motivational playlist,” I said, hauling myself to the next ledge.
She snorted, boots scraping against the rock. “At least we’d be climbing faster to escape the cringe.”
I snickered, then kept my eyes glued to the rock—anything but the drop yawning below.
The shadows covered us, but not well enough to compensate for stupidity. Every move had to be exact—one wrong step and we’d either plummet to our deaths or attract the attention of the guards below, which, frankly, would only speed up the process.
The climb dragged on forever. Every muscle in my body burned, screaming at me for making such excellent life choices.
The incline got steeper, the footholds got smaller, and the jagged rock had a personal vendetta against my hands and boots.
Below, the base stretched out in a mess of flickering lights and restless shadows—a reminder we were very much not supposed to be up here.
Translating was out of the question unless I wanted to turn the hillside into a godsdamn fireworks show. Untraceable but visible translation. What a fucking hoot.
So, our brilliant plan remained: climb and hope for the best. The cold night air bit at my skin as we clung to the rock, inching closer to what was either salvation or a spectacular death trap.
Finally, the cave’s gaping entrance loomed above us. Saoirse hauled herself over the ledge first, then reached down to grab me. I took her hand, letting her drag me the last few feet, and we crouched at the entrance, sucking in deep, quiet breaths as we scanned the hillside.
No movement. No alarms. No screaming. Yet.
Satisfied we hadn’t been spotted, we slipped inside.
The moment we stepped in, a wall of freezing air hit us like a particularly judgmental slap to the face. Oh, good. Hypothermia. Just what this mission was missing.
“That went better than I could’ve hoped,” I said, a grin of relief tugging at my lips as I caught my breath.
The words had barely left my mouth when a deep, menacing voice echoed from the shadows of the cave. “Is that so?”