Chapter 21
Xavier
The weapon in my hand felt more familiar than the woman I had left sleeping in a warm bed three hours ago.
That was the tragedy of my existence.
I sat in the back of the car, the silence so heavy it felt pressurized. On the roof, freezing rain hammered, turning to sleet as the Geneva temperature plummeted. It sounded like static.
My thumb engaged the safety, then disengaged it. Engaged. Disengaged.
Click. Click.
I knew the weight of the trigger pull, the exact grain of the rounds in the magazine, how the recoil would travel up my arm and settle in my shoulder. All of this, and I had absolutely no memory of ever learning it.
“Stop clicking, Blackout.” Havoc didn’t turn around from the front seat. “You’re making the air anxious. And the air is already freezing.”
I stilled my thumb. “Not Blackout.”
“Right. Xavier. Sorry. Hard to keep track of the existential crisis when we’re five minutes from committing treason.”
Havoc was typing on a tablet, the blue light washing out his features, making him look like exactly what he was: a killer built in a lab who coped by treating the world like a bad joke.
I looked down at my hands. Large, scarred, lethal. Currently trembling.
Just a phantom vibration. A microscopic tremor in the left index finger. To anyone else, it would be invisible. To a sniper, it was a missed shot. To me, it was a countdown clock.
Clare.
Her name cut through the static. I closed my eyes for a second, summoning the image of her. Not the terrified woman in the alley, but the fierce, exhausted creature who had fallen asleep in my arms hours ago. The heat of her skin. The phantom pressure of her head on my chest.
Come back to me.
Her voice was the only thing loud enough to drown out the sleet.
“We have an eighteen-minute window.” Hellhound’s voice was low, granite-rough.
He sat in the front, checking his own gear.
“Security sweep rotations leave a gap on the northeast grid between 02:50 and 03:08. We need to be in, up to the twelfth floor, and plugged into Dresner’s terminal before the grid resets. ”
“Eighteen minutes,” Havoc muttered, snapping a magazine into his sidearm. “Nothing says ‘good plan’ like breaking into a black site with a dying man who might have a seizure mid-infiltration. Top-tier strategy.”
Hellhound ignored him. His hazel eyes locked onto mine. They were calm, measuring. He knew exactly what a liability I was. He also knew I was the only key that fit the lock.
“You good?” Not a question about my mood. A question about whether I was going to collapse and get us all killed.
I gripped the gun harder, forcing the tremor into submission. My knuckles turned white.
“Good enough.”
Hellhound held my gaze for a second longer, assessing the truth of that statement. Then he nodded.
“Let’s move.”
The cold hit me like a physical blow. Not just winter, a wet, biting misery that sank straight through my tactical layers into the bone. The air smelled of ozone, damp concrete, and the metallic tang of city exhaust.
We moved.
Hellhound took point. I took the rear. We slipped through the shadows of the industrial park, moving between shipping containers and dormant machinery. The CuraNova Biotech building loomed ahead, a monolith of glass and steel, glowing softly from within.
It looked sterile. Corporate. Benign.
My stomach rolled over. Bile rose in my throat, hot and sour.
I knew this building.
I didn’t have a picture in my head, no specific scenes. But as we reached the perimeter fence, my body reacted with violent rejection. My skin crawled. The scars on my neck, usually numb, began to itch and burn.
Pain lives here.
“Loading dock.” Hellhound signaled with a hand movement.
I moved forward, stepping past him. My legs engaged, carrying me toward a specific shadow near a large compressor unit.
“Left. Avoid the camera. Northeast corner.”
The words tasted like ash. I hated it. I hated that my body was a map of this hellhole. I wasn’t a man, I was a glitched piece of hardware returning to the factory.
We reached the service door. Heavy, reinforced steel with a biometric reader and a keypad.
Hellhound pulled a decoder from his vest, but I reached out. My hand moved without my permission, hovering over the keypad, the black rubber buttons wet with sleet.
Don’t think. Use the asset.
My fingers danced.
8-4-7-2-9-3.
I stared at the numbers as I punched them in. They meant nothing to me. I had never seen them before in my conscious life. But my fingers knew the rhythm, the sequence.
Beep. Clack.
The magnetic lock disengaged with a heavy thud.
Havoc let out a low, impressed breath. “That is deeply unsettling. Remind me never to play poker with your subconscious.”
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The transition was instantaneous and jarring. The cold, wet chaos of the storm vanished, replaced by climate-controlled silence. The air here was dry, filtered, and smelled faintly of antiseptic cleaners.
Nausea hit me hard. I grabbed the doorframe, my vision tilting dangerously.
For a split second, I wasn’t standing in a service corridor. I was strapped to a table, screaming, but no sound was coming out. There was a light above me, blinding, white, searing. A voice was murmuring, calm and clinical. Increase the voltage. He’s resisting the wipe.
“Xavier.”
Hellhound’s voice was a sharp hook, snagging me back to the present.
I blinked, shaking my head. The hallway stabilized. White floors. White walls. Fluorescent lights humming overhead.
“Clear. I’m clear.”
“Then move.”
We moved into the facility.
My tactical awareness expanded, filling the spaces my memory had left blank. I didn’t need to look at the ceiling to know where the cameras were. I felt them. I knew the blind spots in the corridor like I knew the ache in my shoulder.
Protocol active. Silent approach.
I shook the voice away. No. Not protocol. Not Blackout. Xavier. I focused on Clare. That was real. This sterile nightmare was the past.
“Service stairs,” I whispered, pointing to a nondescript door on the right. “Two flights. Then freight elevator shaft. Maintenance ladder to twelve.”
“Elevator shaft?” Havoc whispered back. “We didn’t bring climbing gear.”
“Ladder. It’s there.”
We slipped into the stairwell. Concrete steps. Metal railings painted industrial gray. The echo of our boots was swallowed by the silence.
We started up.
Hellhound led. I took the rear again, weapon raised, scanning the empty landing below us.
My heart hammered against my ribs, but it wasn’t fear. It was recognition.
I’ve run these stairs before.
The memory hit me between the second and third floor.
Flash.
I was running down. Not up. My hands were wet. Slick. Red.
Breathing hard, panic clawing at my throat.
Don’t let them take me. Don’t let them...
A door burst open above. Men in tactical gear.
The crack of a rifle.
Pain exploding in my shoulder.
I fell. I hit the concrete hard.
Flash.
I stumbled in the present, my boot catching on the riser. I slammed into the metal railing, the impact jarring my ribs.
“Xavier?” Hellhound’s whisper was urgent. He stopped two steps above me, turning back.
I gasped for air. The walls of the stairwell seemed to pulse, expanding and contracting.
Then the lights went out.
Not the building lights. My eyes.
A wall of static washed over my vision, absolute, terrifying white.
I froze, gripping the railing so hard the metal bit into my palm. Blind. Completely, utterly blind in a hostile infiltration.
No. No, no, no.
“Talk to me.” Hellhound’s voice was a hiss.
“Vision. White-out.”
“How bad?”
“Total.”
A second passed. Then two. The sound of Havoc shifting nervously above us.
“We have fourteen minutes,” Havoc whispered. “If he’s blind, he’s dead weight. We scrub.”
“No,” I growled.
The sheer panic of the darkness threatened to swallow me. If I couldn’t see, I couldn’t fight. If I couldn’t fight, I couldn’t get the codes. If I didn’t get the codes, I died.
And if I died, Clare would blame herself. She would carry my ghost like she carried her sister’s.
Not an option.
I forced my breathing to slow. In. Out. I visualized Clare’s face.
Not the memory, but the future. I visualized walking back through that door in Lyon.
I visualized dropping the drive on the table.
I visualized living long enough to learn how to touch her without wondering if I was going to break her.
Anchor. She is the anchor.
The static began to recede. It didn’t clear, but it fragmented, turning into snowy grain. Then shapes. The railing. The steps. Hellhound’s boot.
It took four seconds. It felt like four years.
“It’s clearing. I have it.”
“Can you continue?” A tactical question. Are you a weapon or a liability?
I looked up at him. The trembling rattled the watch on my wrist. I clenched my fist.
“Yes.”
“Calculated risk,” Havoc muttered. “Emphasis on the risk.”
“Move.”
We climbed.
We bypassed the second floor. The third. The fourth.
At the sixth landing, we shifted to the elevator shaft. I pried the maintenance doors open with a combat knife, another motion my hands knew perfectly. The shaft was a dark throat going down into the bowels of the earth and up to the executive heavens.
Cables groaned in the darkness. The smell of grease and stagnant air hit us.
We climbed the maintenance ladder inside the shaft. Hand over hand. Rung by cold, greasy rung.
Twelfth floor.
We reached the service hatch. Hellhound checked the feed on Havoc’s tablet.
“Clear. Cameras are looping for ninety seconds left on the cycle.”
Hellhound popped the hatch.
We spilled out into a carpeted hallway.
Thick, plush carpet swallowed the sound of our boots instantly. We had moved from the sterile, white-tiled intestines of the building into its velvet heart. Dark wood paneling lined the walls, interrupted by abstract art that probably cost more than the collective net worth of everyone in Lyon.