Chapter 14 #2
The question cut through Havoc’s casual description of Xavier as a malfunctioning weapon. I stepped fully out from behind Xavier’s protective stance, ignoring his immediate attempt to block me again.
“Why reach out? Why warn us? You clearly don’t give a damn whether we live or die.”
Havoc’s jaw tightened. Annoyance flashed, cracking the bored mask for half a second.
“I don’t. Hellhound does. He’s been riding my ass for three days about extracting Blackout. Apparently, your boy here is the only surviving Quinta generation asset, which makes him valuable intel. Or a liability. Depends on the day.”
“Hellhound.” Another codename. Another weapon with a cute nickname. “Who...”
“Someone with a hero complex and terrible judgment.” He cut me off. “He thinks everyone deserves saving. I think most people deserve exactly what they get. We agree to disagree. Frequently.”
Xavier’s palm found the small of my back. Steadying. Or warning. Hard to tell.
“But you came anyway.”
The expression darkened. “I don’t want Dresner getting his hands on an operative who’s trying to get away. Call it professional courtesy. Call it spite. I don’t care what you call it.”
His gaze locked on Xavier with something that might have been respect if it wasn’t wrapped in so much cold calculation.
“Besides, watching their perfect soldier choose a girl over programming? That’s entertainment value right there. Dresner’s going to lose his mind. Again.”
I swallowed hard. The sleet hammered down over the structure.
“The chip. Could it be causing his muteness? The short-term amnesia?”
Havoc tilted his head, considering. Then shrugged, completely unbothered by the life-or-death implications.
“Don’t know. Neural conditioning usually doesn’t include voice suppression. That’s crude. Inelegant. Not Dresner’s style.” A pause. “But I’m not a neurosurgeon. Hellhound might know more. He’s been tracking Oblivion’s methods longer than I have.”
“Where is he?”
“Closer than you’d think. And getting impatient. So here’s how this works. You follow my instructions exactly, or I walk away and let Dresner’s hunters find you. Your choice, nurse and mute boy. But make it fast. And ditch your phone too.”
The burner phone crunched under Xavier’s heel. Plastic and glass ground into the wet asphalt with a finality that felt good. Satisfying. Like maybe we were actually taking control for once.
Specific, crushing sound. Then silence.
“Dramatic. But effective.”
The air shattered.
Not a noise so much as a pressure change, a crack that slapped against my eardrums before I processed what it was. A chunk of brick near my head vaporized into red dust.
“Down!” Havoc barked the order with the annoyance other people reserved for spilled coffee.
Xavier was already in motion. His arm, a heavy bar of iron, swept my legs out from under me.
I hit the wet pavement hard, the breath knocked out of my lungs, freezing slush instantly soaking my jeans.
A second bullet sparked off the metal shipping container exactly where my ribs had been a microsecond before.
Xavier crouched over me, scanning the threat. He had a fishing knife. They had assault rifles. The math was bad.
“Sloppy.” Irritation, not fear. Havoc was crouched behind a concrete barrier. “You led them right to the doorstep. Amateur hour.”
“They tracked the phone.” I gasped, scrambling to keep my head down as another volley of shots chewed up the ground. “You didn’t tell us...”
“What am I? Your babysitter?” Havoc reached into his coat, the action so smooth it looked like a magic trick, and pulled out a matte black handgun. Didn’t look at it. Didn’t check the safety. Just tossed it through the air toward Xavier.
“Catch, Blackout.”
The weapon spun end over end through the rain.
Xavier didn’t fumble. Didn’t hesitate. His grip snapped up, snatching the gun from the air with terrifying familiarity. His fingers molded to the grip like it was a missing limb finally returned.
And then Xavier disappeared.
The man beside me vanished. The confused, silent, gentle man who let me hold him in the bath was gone. In his place was a machine.
Four figures emerged from the sleet, advancing with tactical precision that made my stomach drop. They weren’t street thugs. They wore tactical black, communicated with hand signals, and walked like soldiers in the movies. Just like Xavier.
Dresner’s people.
A bullet sparked off the forklift’s tines near my head. I curled into a ball, shaking, making myself small.
He rolled from cover, rising to a knee. Pop. Pop.
Two precise sounds. Two precise impacts.
Thirty yards away, a shadowed figure on a gantry jerked and fell, tumbling over the railing to hit the concrete with a wet thud.
I stared, my stomach twisting. I’d seen him kill the cops at the clinic. That had been desperate. Violent. Messy.
This was surgical. This was what Havoc had meant. The asset. The operative.
Xavier advanced, and I scrambled to follow, keeping low.
He wasn’t running away. He shifted between cover points.
Crate to pillar to dumpster. A rhythm that made no sense to my civilian brain but clearly made perfect sense to him.
He was suppressing the shooters, drawing their fire, controlling the space.
“Stay down!” Havoc fired three rounds over my head to cover our advance. “Car’s two blocks east. The black SUV. Go!”
He surged forward, closing the distance on a shooter flanking us from the right. Terrifyingly beautiful. Fast. Efficient. He disarmed the man with a brutal wrist lock, his left hand doing the work, right shoulder still not quite right from the dislocation, spun him as a human shield, and...
Stopped.
Xavier froze.
Not a hesitation. Not a pause for breath. He simply ceased to function.
His body went rigid, locked mid-motion. The gunman he was wrestling broke free, stumbling back, stunned by the sudden lack of resistance. Xavier stood there in the open, rain plastering his hair to his skull, the weapon hanging loose. He stared at something that wasn’t there.
“Xavier!” I screamed.
Nothing. A statue in the middle of a kill box.
The gunman recovered. Raised his rifle, aiming point-blank at Xavier’s ribs. A smile, cruel and professional, touched his lips. He had the shot. Couldn’t miss.
My pulse detonated.
“Move!” I shrieked, the sound tearing my throat raw. “Xavier, move!”
I scrambled forward, grabbing a rusty pipe from the debris, ready to throw it, run at him, do something stupid and fatal.
Xavier’s head snapped to the side. The scream pierced whatever veil he was behind.
Life crashed back into him.
Confusion first. A split second of where am I? Followed instantly by the predator reasserting control. He registered the rifle. The threat.
He dropped.
The bullet sailed through the space his ribs had occupied. Xavier didn’t fire back. He lunged upward, driving the heel of his palm into the man’s nose. Bone crunching into brain. Followed through with two rounds into the torso as the body fell.
“Car!” Havoc roared from somewhere firmly behind cover. “Now, you idiots!”
Xavier spun toward me. Pale. Shaken, panic flaring behind the lethal mask. He grabbed my arm, his grip almost painful, and hauled me into a run.
We sprinted. Lungs burning. Legs screaming. The icy rain turned every surface into an oil slick.
“Right!” Havoc took the lead now, firing behind us without looking.
We swerved around a corner. The black SUV, fifty yards ahead. Salvation.
“Go! Go!” Havoc provided covering fire, walking backward toward the vehicle.
We ran. The ground was ice disguised as asphalt. I slipped, my knee hitting the ground hard. Pain flared, hot and sharp.
Xavier didn’t stop. Scooped me up. Literally lifted me off the ground with one arm, his left, the strong one, while keeping his weapon trained behind us. Kept running. He slammed into the side of the SUV, yanked the back door open, and essentially threw me inside.
I scrambled across the leather seats, gasping for air. Xavier dove in after me. Havoc vaulted into the driver’s seat, and before the door was even closed, he stomped on the gas.
The SUV fishtailed violently on the ice, tires screaming for purchase, before catching traction and surging forward. Bullets slammed into the rear windshield, starring the reinforced glass but not penetrating.
We sped out of the complex, weaving through the shipping containers, putting distance between us and the kill team.
In the back seat, the silence was deafening.
I pressed myself against the door. Adrenaline had turned my blood to acid. My knee throbbed. I was soaked to the bone, shivering violently.
Xavier sat next to me, rigid. He still held the weapon Havoc had thrown him, his knuckles white. Water dripped from his nose, his chin.
Slowly, carefully, he turned his head to look at me.
The green was vivid in the passing streetlights, but the pupil dilation was uneven. One blown wide, one pinprick. Concussion symptom? Or something else?
“You froze.” The accusation hung in the air, heavy and terrified. “Xavier, you completely checked out.”
He stared at me, breathing rapid and uneven. He opened his mouth, throat working visibly, jaw muscles bunching and flexing as he tried to force words past the familiar block that sealed him silent. Nothing emerged, but a frustrated exhale that sounded more like a wounded animal than a man.
I couldn’t stop myself. I reached across the slick leather seat separating us and pulled him into my arms with more force than finesse.
Grabbed his soaked jacket, yanking him close until his weight collapsed against me.
He stiffened for half a second before his arms came around me.
Tight, desperate, trembling with something that wasn’t cold.
I held him there, squeezing hard, feeling his pulse slam through too many layers of wet fabric. Water dripped from his hair onto my neck. He smelled like rain and gunpowder and violence and underneath it all, something raw I couldn’t name.
After a breath that stretched too long, I pulled back just enough to meet his gaze. His forehead dropped to mine before I could decide if that’s what I wanted. The contact sent a shock through my system. His skin ice-cold, mine flushed with adrenaline heat.
I got you. The message was clear in the weight of his head pressing against mine, in the way his fingers still gripped my waist like I might disappear. I came back.
I found his wrist and wrapped around it tight. His pulse hammered wild and unsteady beneath my fingertips. Too fast, too hard. The rhythm of someone who’d just clawed their way back from somewhere dark.
“I know.” I whispered into the tiny space between our mouths, barely an inch of frozen air separating us. “But you almost didn’t.”
He pulled back just enough to look me in the eye. The intensity there hit like a physical blow. Green and possessive and so fucking present it hurt to hold his gaze. He took my palm from his wrist and pressed it flat against his ribs, right over his pulse where it beat against my skin.
Mine.
The silent word screamed louder than the gunfire still ringing in my ears. He wasn’t claiming me. He was telling me that I was the anchor. That when he drifted into whatever blank void had swallowed him whole back there, I was the thread that pulled him back to consciousness, to himself, to here.
My own pulse kicked into a frantic rhythm that had nothing to do with the bullets we’d just escaped. Terrifying. He was broken and glitching and deadly and completely, devastatingly mine to save. And I had no idea if I was strong enough to keep doing it.
From the driver’s seat, Havoc cut through the tension. “You know, this would be significantly more tolerable if you two could refrain from having a romantic moment while I’m actively trying to keep us alive.”
“Shut up and drive. Get us the hell out of Lyon.”