Chapter 5 The War Room #3
Adam stood utterly still, only the faintest ripple of breath betraying life.
Predatory stillness turned him into a living sculpture, light and shadow painting his cheekbones in sharp relief.
The camera couldn’t do him justice, but it didn’t have to.
Noah knew every line of that body, every violence it was capable of, every tenderness too.
“Fuck, you look hot,” Noah purred before he could stop himself.
“Mics hot, guys. We have private channels for a reason,” someone quipped, amusement threading through the comms.
Noah’s face flamed crimson as laughter crackled through the channel.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Don’t be sorry, baby. I do look hot. They’re all just jealous.” Adam’s smug lilt was audible even over the static.
Before Noah could come up with a retort, Beverly burst from the second-floor room, barreling for the main staircase. August stepped out of the shadows at the top landing, his Batman silhouette framed by the mansion’s soft, golden light.
“Going somewhere?” he asked pleasantly, but there was nothing gentle in his stance.
Beverly screamed, pivoted, and bolted the other way, straight into Jericho, whose Winter Soldier costume did nothing to blunt the lethal stillness in his eyes.
“I’d suggest the north wing,” Jericho said, his tone calm and razor-edged. “Better lighting. More dramatic.”
Beverly sobbed, spinning again, almost tripping as she sprinted down a side hallway.
Noah tracked her on the monitors, fingers tightening around his stylus. “She’s heading for the conservatory.”
Zane’s jaw flexed beside Felix. He dragged a hand down his face, the movement jagged, brittle. His voice cut through the noise, clipped and trembling with exhaustion. “I don’t know if I can handle this for an hour.”
Felix’s hand landed softly on his back. “You’re doing great, baby.”
“Yeah, Lois. This ends tonight,” Asa said, clearly not giving a single shit about hot mics.
Felix nodded even though Asa couldn’t see him. “Yeah. I know.”
Noah’s eyes narrowed as Beverly started rattling doorknobs, frantic and disoriented.
She’d reached the bowels of the house, the secondary kitchen and the massive storage corridors.
The camera feed flickered as she passed under a motion light, her reflection in the polished steel cabinets warped and trembling.
“She’s right over us,” Noah murmured.
When he glanced at Zane, the man’s eyes were locked on the screen, his mother a panicked blur of movement, directly beneath their feet.
The air in the war room grew heavy. Every monitor glow turned cold and sterile. Above, laughter still echoed faintly from the comms, but down here, the only sound was Zane’s uneven breathing and the faint mechanical hum of inevitability closing in.
When Bev realized the doors were locked to her, she started yanking drawers open so hard that some slammed shut with her fingers still inside. The audio feed picked up a strangled noise, half scream, half rage.
Noah was just starting to breathe again when her hand darted into the chef’s desk drawer, one that was rarely used except for grocery lists and supply schedules.
“Adam,” Noah said sharply, leaning toward the monitor. “She just swiped something from one of the drawers and stuffed it in her bra.”
“Are you asking me to strip-search an old lady?” Adam asked, completely deadpan.
Noah rolled his eyes hard enough to hurt. “No, dummy. I think she snagged a keycard.”
There was a brief pause, then Adam hissed, “Shit. Where is she?”
“She’s in the prep kitchen,” Noah said, voice tight. “By the chef’s desk.”
“Roger that. I’ll herd her back toward the gardens for the twins,” Adam said.
“We’re heading that way now,” Avi confirmed through the comms.
On the screens, Adam’s shadowed figure moved—fluid and fast—as he swept out of the library and down the corridor. His Sherlock coat flared like wings, cutting through the mansion’s low light.
Calliope’s cursor flicked over the schematic with practiced precision.
The icon for the electrical room pulsed like a heartbeat in the corner of the blueprint.
“Bev’s marked at the landing between the conservatory and the east service hall.
Movement data shows her pivoting right. She’s breathing like an athlete. ”
Noah’s voice went low and flat. “I don’t like this. She’s up to something.”
He could feel it, something sharp and wrong in the pit of his stomach. Bev didn’t run like prey. She ran like someone with a plan.
The feed flickered. Adam was closing in through one hallway while another camera blinked online, one of the utility feeds. The image tilted slightly as the lens auto-adjusted. A narrow silhouette slipped fast across the frame, a flicker of pale hair and motion.
“Oh, shit,” Lola said. “That’s the electrical room.”
Zane sucked in a sharp breath. “What does that mean?”
Bev leaned down, fumbling at her neckline, clearly unwilling to fish the stolen card all the way out. She swiped it with shaky precision. The red door light blinked green.
“Fuck,” Noah snapped. “On your six, boys. She breached the fucking electrical room.”
“What the hell is she gonna do there except accidentally electrocute herself?” Asa asked.
Those were the last words before everything went black.
“Fuck, she took out the power,” Aiden barked, static hissing in the comms.
“Comms are still active,” Noah said, fingers flying uselessly over his dark console. “We’ve got backup generators, but we’ve lost the feed for the next thirty seconds. Hang tight.”
The air pressure in the war room shifted, an invisible weight dropping into the space. The fans and air conditioning groaned to a stop. The faint hum of machines died, leaving the mansion eerily silent.
Without the white noise of electricity, the quiet felt alive, breathing, waiting. Noah could hear his own heartbeat and Zane’s uneven inhale beside him. Somewhere deep in the walls, something ticked like a dying clock.
Lights on the remaining monitors dimmed one by one, the mansion descending into darkness room by room, like the sky itself rolling shut. The air filled with the faint metallic tang of overheated circuits and dust, the scent of hot copper and ozone clinging to the back of Noah’s throat.
For one stretched-out heartbeat, there was only quiet, raw and endless.
“Backup generator,” Calliope said, voice cutting through the dark. “Stand by.”
Outside on the live mics, the silence deepened. Shoes stilled. No breathing. No chatter. Just a faint scuff, a dragged inhale, the entire house holding its breath with them.
Then—boom—the generator hummed to life.
It caught with a grinding hum, and then the world blinked back in a stuttering rush of light and mechanical hum.
A chorus of reboot chimes filled the air like a thousand heart monitors restarting at once. Monitors flickered in staggered bursts—bedrooms, hallways, stairwells—each camera rejoining the grid like survivors crawling back from the dark.
Adam’s frame snapped back onto the cam, static washing over him in ribbons as he approached the electrical room door. He hovered just outside, poised and ready to ambush. But she was ready too.
Noah watched with a nauseating dread as someone—Bev—burst not from the electrical room, but from the pantry across the hall. She came screaming like a banshee, knife flashing in the low light as she surged toward him.
Noah’s throat went bone dry. For a heartbeat, everything froze, like the feed itself had paused in disbelief. Adam’s hand came up to block; Bev’s eyes were wide and rabid; the overhead light carved their faces into sharp relief.
“Adam!” Noah’s voice cracked the silence, a sharp, terrified sound.
The blade hit flesh. Adam jerked, shoulder flaring red on the feed as Bev twisted the knife into him. The camera shook from the impact, or maybe Noah was the one shaking.
And then, impossibly, Adam snarled and threw her like she weighed nothing. She slammed into the wood-paneled wall hard enough to rattle the picture frames, then staggered upright and bolted, a guttural sound tearing out of her throat, half scream, half sob, all feral.
“Adam!” Noah barked again, louder this time.
Reality blurred. There was movement behind him, voices, the scrape of chairs, but no one was fast enough.
Noah tore off his headset and sprinted out of the war room, past Felix’s startled shout, past Zane’s wide eyes.
The door banged open behind him like a gunshot, and the marble hall swallowed him whole.
Every footstep slammed against the floor like a drumbeat. The mansion’s gold light flickered through open doorways, breaking across his vision in stripes of shadow and flame. Shouts echoed down the corridors—orders, confusion—and then Atticus’s voice, sharp and distant: “What the fuck happened?”
“She stabbed Adam,” Noah gasped into his comms, voice rough from running. “Outside the electrical room. Someone get that bitch to the gardens for the twins to play with.”
By the time Noah rounded the corner, Adam was still upright, but only barely. The camera hadn’t done him justice. In person, he looked pale, smaller somehow, his body human in a way Noah hated seeing. Blood slicked his shoulder and dripped down his chest, red soaking into white fabric.
As soon as their eyes met, Adam’s back hit the wall, sliding down until he sat against it. His breathing was uneven, harsh.
He still managed a grin. “Forgot how bad getting stabbed sucks.”
Even bleeding, he was impossible, grinning like a devil mid-defeat, still making Noah’s pulse skip between terror and affection.
Bev was gone. Of course she was. She was smart enough to know that an injured Adam was far more dangerous than a healthy one.
Noah dropped to his knees beside him, the marble cold and slick under his palms. The hallway smelled too clean, too normal, like expensive air freshener and lemon polish instead of blood. The contrast made Noah’s stomach twist. This place wasn’t supposed to feel civilized anymore.