3. Chapter 3 - Matt #2
Matt rubbed a hand across his face before wandering toward the kitchen counter in gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt that still smelled faintly like detergent and Colorado.
The thought of home landed unexpectedly hard for a moment before he shoved it aside in favor of more immediate priorities. Coffee first. Existential crises later.
The machine hissed softly while Matt braced both hands against the counter and stared at the dark surface in front of him.
His instincts had been restless all night, though not exactly agitated.
Interested. Somehow that felt worse. Whatever waited had triggered something instinctive inside him that he still did not fully understand, and every thought he had kept circling back to the same uncomfortable realization.
Something had stirred the predator beneath his skin, and it had not felt like prey or threat.
A quiet knock sounded against the apartment door, automatically pulling Matt from his thoughts.
He frowned toward the hallway because nobody sane visited people voluntarily before sunrise.
Crossing the room barefoot, he opened the door to find Keene standing in the hallway holding two folders and looking exactly as emotionally invested in being awake as he always did, which was to say not at all.
Matt stared at him. “Do you ever blink or sleep?”
“Yes.”
“You hesitated.”
“I did not.”
“If this is a surprise psychological evaluation, I’m reasonably confident none of us are passing.”
Keene walked inside without reacting. “Noted.”
Matt shook his head. “I have no idea whether you’re joking anymore.”
Keene handed him one of the folders. “Updated mission briefing.”
Matt accepted it with a sigh before wandering back toward the coffee maker. “You know, normal organizations email documents.”
“Emails can be intercepted.”
“So can people.”
“That is significantly harder underground.”
He poured coffee into two mugs before pausing halfway through the second and looking toward Keene suspiciously. “You drink coffee?”
“Yes.”
“You continue to be deeply upsetting.”
Keene accepted the mug anyway.
Silence settled between them for several quiet moments while the low hum of the facility vibrated faintly through the apartment walls.
Matt opened the folder and found additional structural scans layered beside partial psychological evaluations from recovered operatives, while narrow handwritten notes from Soren crowded the margins with clinical observations and warnings.
One sentence had been underlined twice hard enough to indent the paper beneath it.
“Prolonged exposure amplifies the wolf’s most instinctive behaviors.”
Matt rubbed the back of his neck. “That sounds concerning.”
“It is concerning.”
Matt glanced up. “You guys really need a slogan less terrifying than that.”
Keene leaned against the counter with his coffee untouched in one hand. “You should be aware of the risks before deployment.”
Matt studied him for a moment longer than necessary, increasingly aware that something about Keene felt different down here than it had upstairs during the briefing.
The change was subtle enough that Matt could not fully explain it, but some of the cold institutional distance had slipped just enough to notice.
“You actually think this mission’s a bad idea,” he said cautiously.
Keene was quiet long enough that Matt stopped expecting an actual denial, and the realization settled somewhere uncomfortable beneath his ribs. “You’re still going,” Keene said eventually.
“Not really selling me on confidence here.”
“Confidence gets operatives killed faster than fear.”
“That sounds like it belongs on a motivational poster for emotionally damaged soldiers.”
Keene ignored him again while Matt took another sip of coffee and turned deeper into the file, but his attention abruptly locked onto a blurred thermal image near the bottom of the next page.
A single heat signature appeared in the collapsed remains of a tunnel, large enough to register as dangerous and curled tightly into the corner like something injured or hiding.
Matt stared at the image longer than he meant to while his hyena went unnaturally still. Recognition, stronger now and far harder to ignore, held the hyena still. “What is that?” he asked.
Keene crossed the room and glanced down at the file. “We don’t know.”
The thermal image felt wrong somehow, not because the heat signature appeared dangerous, but because it looked alone in a way that triggered something deep and instinctive beneath his skin.
Injured maybe. Cornered definitely. Before Matt could stop himself, something tightened painfully beneath his ribs hard enough to make his breathing tighten.
Keene noticed instantly. At this point Matt was starting to think the man could detect emotional instability the way sharks detected blood in water.
“That reaction,” Keene said. “Did you feel it during the audio recording too?”
Matt looked up sharply. “Feel what?”
Keene regarded him for a long moment. “The way your attention lingered.”
Matt looked back at the thermal image. The blurred shape hidden beneath miles of earth no longer looked threatening.
Instead, it seemed impossibly isolated, buried beneath a darkness so complete that the feeling it stirred should have been caution, yet the hyena shifted with a quiet, irrational urge to know what waited in the dark.
Curiosity settled in, instinctive enough that Matt distrusted it instantly.
Every survival habit the military had carved into him warned that interest could get people killed faster than fear ever would, especially when something unknown waited surrounded by blood, missing operatives, and claw marks gouged through stone.
But the pull remained anyway, quiet and persistent beneath his ribs, like some deeper part of him already recognized the shape hidden in the dark and could not stop leaning toward it.
***
The deployment team assembled six hours later inside a reinforced hangar buried somewhere beneath the eastern side of the facility.
Matt only knew they were heading east because the elevator hadn’t traveled straight down.
At one point it had shifted onto horizontal rails, and he’d spent the ride counting every turn out of habit.
Underground complexes irritated him on principle.
Too many sealed corridors and identical walls made it easy to lose orientation, and losing orientation got people killed in places far less dangerous than supernatural black sites.
The hangar itself looked less like part of a hidden paranormal organization and more like the inside of a classified military airbase.
Steel support beams disappeared overhead into shadow while maintenance crews moved between armored vehicles and equipment crates marked with symbols Matt did not recognize.
The low mechanical growl of generators vibrated faintly beneath the concrete floor, blending with the smell of fuel, oil, gunmetal, and predators.
There were predators everywhere in the hangar, enough that the predator in him stayed alert without fully relaxing.
He adjusted the strap of his duffel while scanning the room out of long military habit, automatically tracking exits, weapons, and the quiet tension beneath the controlled movement around him.
Two wolf shifters loaded equipment near a matte-black helicopter parked at the center of the hangar.
A woman with hawk-like eyes stood beside an open weapons case checking ammunition magazines with methodical precision.
Across the bay, somebody laughed too sharply for the sound to belong entirely to a human throat.
His hyena stayed alert the entire time because nobody in the hangar carried themselves like this was routine, and Matt found that strangely comforting in a deeply unhealthy way.
“You’re late.”
Matt glanced sideways as Baptiste approached carrying a tablet in one hand and a travel mug in the other.
“I’m literally early.”
“Barely.”
“That still counts.”
Baptiste considered that. “Technically.”
Matt eyed the coffee. “Please tell me that’s actually coffee and not some ancient predator ritual tea.”
“It’s coffee.”
“You all continue to exceed expectations.”
Baptiste handed him the mug without warning.
Matt blinked down at it suspiciously. “You drugged this, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“That hesitation was concerning.”
“There was no hesitation.”
Matt took a careful sip anyway before pausing. “…Okay that’s actually fantastic.”
“I know.”
“That somehow makes you more upsetting.”
Baptiste’s expression remained perfectly neutral. “I contain multitudes.”
Matt stared at him. “Was that a joke?”
“No.”
“That answer somehow makes it funnier.” Movement near the helicopter drew Matt’s attention before Baptiste could respond.
Commander Vale crossed the hangar floor surrounded by two operatives carrying equipment cases while Keene followed several steps behind with the same quiet emotional enthusiasm he brought to literally everything.
Matt was becoming increasingly convinced the man would maintain that expression during an apocalypse.
Vale stopped near the aircraft and addressed the team without raising her voice, though the hangar still seemed to quiet around her automatically.
“We deploy in ten minutes,” she said. “Rules of engagement remain unchanged from briefing protocol. Recovery remains priority one. Containment priority two. If conditions deteriorate beyond operational viability, extraction becomes immediate.”
“Define deteriorate,” Matt muttered.
Baptiste glanced toward him. “Usually screaming.”
“That is an aggressively vague answer.”
“It becomes less vague during experience.”
Matt was still deciding how much he hated that sentence when Keene approached a moment later carrying another folder. The sight alone made him sigh. “If this is more psychological reading material, I want hazard pay.”
“It’s your operational clearance badge.”
“That is somewhat less disappointing.”