Chapter 74 Ava
Ava
The corridor blurs.
Boots.
Breath.
Pain hammering through my side.
The narrowing gap of the blast door ahead.
Everything inside me locks onto one truth.
He is right there.
After all these years.
After everything he took.
After every nightmare, every lie, every piece of myself I had to drag back out of darkness with bleeding hands—
he is right there.
Ethan reaches the door first.
Plants one boot against the frame and throws his shoulder into the heavy steel as it grinds downward. Muscles bunch. Teeth grit. Metal screams.
Aaron dives under the gap.
Ronan follows.
Cal slides through after them.
I’m next.
Ethan keeps the door from crushing down long enough for me to duck under. Jonah comes last, and then Ethan is through too, rolling to one knee as the blast door slams shut behind us with a bone-deep boom.
Sealed in.
No way back.
Only forward.
The room beyond is larger than I expected.
A buried operations center.
Banks of monitors line the curved walls. Most are cracked or flickering. A central console is bleeding sparks. One side of the room opens into a lab partitioned by glass, and there are server towers against the far wall, several already burning from some internal purge.
Hayes stands at the main terminal.
One hand bloodied.
One shoulder dark with a spreading stain.
He turns slowly.
And smiles.
I stop so hard Ethan’s arm catches me.
“Well,” Hayes says, voice smooth as oil. “There you are.”
Everything in me goes cold.
He looks older.
More worn.
But not weaker.
Not really.
There’s still that same awful calm in him, that same detached arrogance, like other people exist only in relation to what they can do for him.
Or what can be done to them.
Aaron raises his rifle. “Hands where I can see them.”
Hayes doesn’t even glance at him. His eyes stay on me.
“Ava.”
My stomach twists.
I hate the way he says my name.
Like he owns the shape of it.
Like he built me.
Ethan steps slightly in front of me. “Wrong move.”
Hayes finally looks at him. “Ethan Cross. The ghost who wouldn’t stay buried.” His gaze flicks back to me. “I told them you’d come.”
“You should’ve told them to run,” Ronan says.
That finally gets a small laugh out of Hayes.
“I did.”
Then the far monitors flash.
Red.
Jonah’s face changes as he glances around the room. “He’s armed the servers.”
Cal swears. “Dead-man purge?”
“More than that,” Jonah snaps. “Thermal build. If it cascades, this whole lower level could blow.”
Hayes smiles wider. “I dislike loose ends.”
Ethan’s weapon never wavers. “Shut it down.”
“No.”
Aaron shifts left, looking for an angle. “You’re outnumbered.”
Hayes tilts his head. “Am I?”
He slams his bloody palm onto a backup panel.
The lab glass on the right shatters outward.
Two armed men rise from behind overturned equipment and open fire.
Everything detonates.
Shots explode through the room.
Glass rains.
I hit the floor as Ethan drags me down with him, his body covering mine while Ronan and Aaron return fire. Cal moves fast, flanking right. Jonah ducks behind a terminal and starts working frantically on a side console.
One of Hayes’s men drops.
The other stumbles back, firing wildly.
Hayes disappears behind the central bank of monitors.
“Jonah!” Ethan barks.
“Trying!”
The room fills with smoke and the acrid stink of burned plastic.
I twist, catching a glimpse of Hayes moving toward the rear exit.
“No!” I shove up from beneath Ethan. “He’s running!”
Ethan sees it at the same second I do.
He rises and fires, the shot clipping the metal frame inches from Hayes’s head.
“Go!” Ronan shouts. “We’ve got this room!”
Ethan grabs my arm and hauls me with him around the shattered console. Behind us, Jonah is cursing at the system, Aaron is covering the servers, and Cal is putting down the second hidden shooter for good.
Ahead, Hayes hits the rear corridor limping hard.
Blood streaks one wall where he catches himself.
He looks back once.
Sees us coming.
And runs faster.
We chase him through another concrete tunnel, narrower this time, lined with exposed pipes and low emergency lights. My lungs are burning. My side feels like someone shoved a knife back into it. Ethan must hear my breath hitch because he glances back once, fury and concern colliding in his face.
“I’m fine,” I force out.
“You are a terrible liar.”
“Later.”
Hayes rounds a corner.
We follow.
And slam to a stop.
The tunnel opens into a loading chamber cut into the rock.
A freight platform.
A narrow rail cart.
And beyond that, a reinforced gate rolled halfway open to reveal crashing ocean far below.
An escape route straight out through the cliffside.
Of course, he built one.
Hayes is already on the platform, one hand on the control lever, blood dripping onto the steel.
“It could have been magnificent,” he says over the sound of the surf pounding below. “What I made with you.”
My vision goes red.
Ethan raises his weapon. “Step away.”
Hayes laughs softly. “You still don’t understand what she is.”
“I understand exactly what you did,” Ethan says.
“No.” Hayes’s gaze slides to me, sharp and fever-bright. “He still thinks you survived me. That’s very romantic.”
Every muscle in Ethan’s body locks.
I step around him.
“Ava—”
“No.”
My voice cuts through the chamber hard enough that even Hayes goes still.
For years I heard that word from other people.
Commands.
Corrections.
Control.
Not this time.
This time it belongs to me.
I take another step forward, ignoring Ethan’s hand brushing my arm, the pain clawing at my side, the thunder of my own pulse.
Hayes watches me like a scientist staring at his favorite experiment.
Disgust slams through me so hard I almost shake with it.
“You think you made me?” I ask.
His smile is faint. “I refined you.”
“No.” I keep walking. “You caged me. Drugged me. cut pieces out of my life and called it innovation.”
The smile slips a little.
Good.
I take another step. “You didn’t make me stronger. You just taught me what monsters look like.”
His face hardens. “Careful.”
“Or what?” I ask quietly. “You’ll take more from me?”
That lands.
I see the flicker in his eyes.
Not guilt.
Never that.
Something uglier.
Offense.
As if he truly believes he was entitled.
“I gave you purpose,” he says.
The words hit the old wounds, but they don’t stick.
Not anymore.
I laugh.
Actually laugh.
Broken maybe.
Furious definitely.
But real.
And that laugh unsettles him more than shouting would have.
“You gave me hell,” I say. “And I walked out of it.”
His hand tightens on the lever. “You walked out because I allowed variables. Sentiment. Attachment. Flaws I won’t repeat.”
Ethan’s voice turns lethal. “You won’t get the chance.”
Hayes jerks his gaze to him. “You were always the flaw.”
I feel Ethan beside me like a live wire.
But this is mine now.
Mine.
“You want to know what your biggest flaw was?” I ask.
Hayes looks back at me, irritated and bleeding and still arrogant enough to think he can control this conversation.
I give him the answer anyway.
“You thought pain would make me belong to you.”
Silence.
The sea crashes below.
The platform hums under our boots.
And then I lift my chin and say the one thing I think he never imagined hearing from me.
“You were never inside the part of me that mattered.”
Something in his face changes.
Small.
Crucial.
His certainty breaks.
Just enough.
And that’s when he reaches for the detonator clipped to his belt.
Ethan fires.
The shot slams into Hayes’s forearm.
The detonator skids across the steel floor.
Hayes snarls and lunges for the cart controls instead.
I move without thinking.
Pain tears through my body as I throw myself forward and hit him full force.
We crash into the side rail.
He’s stronger than he looks.
Meaner too.
His good hand clamps around my throat and slams me back against the metal support.
Spots explode in my vision.
He gets his face close to mine, breath hot with blood and rage. “Ungrateful little—”
Then Ethan is there.
He hits Hayes so hard the sound of it cracks through the chamber.
Hayes staggers away from me.
Ethan doesn’t stop.
Years of grief and fury and helplessness turn him into something brutal.
One strike.
Two.
Hayes goes down against the platform controls.
Ethan drags him up and slams him into the steel again.
“You touch her again—”
Hayes spits blood and laughs.
Actually laughs.
“You think killing me ends it?”
Ethan’s hand closes at his throat.
“It ends you.”
Hayes’s smile is red now. Ugly. “There are others.”
I suck in air, one hand at my neck, the other braced on the rail. The room spins, but his words cut through it.
Others.
Not just handlers.
Not just hired men.
Other architects.
Other programs.
Other buried sites.
Ethan hears it too. I can tell by the way he freezes for one deadly half-second.
That hesitation is enough.
Hayes drives a hidden blade up from his sleeve.
Straight for Ethan’s side.
“Ethan!”
He twists.
Too late to avoid it fully.
The blade slices across his ribs instead of going deep, but blood hits the front of his shirt instantly.
Something inside me goes feral.
I snatch up the fallen detonator from the floor and slam it into Hayes’s temple with everything I have.
He collapses sideways.
Ethan rips the knife from his hand and kicks it away.
For one suspended second the only sound is the surf outside and all three of us breathing.
Hard.
Broken.
Hayes tries to push up.
Ethan plants a boot in his chest and aims down.
Hayes looks at me.
Not Ethan.
Me.
Like even now he thinks I should be the one to stop this.
To hesitate.
To fracture.
To be his creation instead of his ruin.
No.
I step forward until I’m standing over him beside Ethan.
His blood is on the steel.
On my hands.
On the floor of his carefully built escape.
“You don’t get to haunt me anymore,” I tell him.
His eyes narrow.
I reach down, grab the platform lever he was going for, and yank it hard.
The half-loaded rail cart behind him lurches.
The platform jerks.
Hayes loses balance just enough for Ethan to drive him backward.
Straight through the unsecured gap in the side gate.
Hayes’s shout is cut off by open air.
Then nothing but the roar of the ocean below.
Silence hits like a shockwave.
Ethan and I stand there breathing hard, staring at the empty opening.
Gone.
Hayes is gone.
Not escaped.
Not hiding.
Gone.
My knees buckle.
Ethan catches me before I hit the steel.
His hands are everywhere at once—my face, my back, my arms—checking, grounding, making sure I’m here.
“Ava. Ava.”
I look at him.
Really look at him.
Blood at his side.
Wild eyes.
Fear still flooding him.
And all at once the fight drains out of me.
“He’s dead,” I whisper.
Ethan’s chest heaves. “Yeah.”
“He’s really dead.”
His forehead drops to mine. “Yeah, baby.”
The endearment wrecks me.
My eyes burn.
My whole body starts shaking.
I don’t know if it’s relief or pain or delayed terror or all of it at once.
Ethan doesn’t ask.
He just holds me.
Tight.
Like he’d hold the world together with his bare hands if that’s what it took.
Then Ronan’s voice erupts over comms. “Cross! Status!”
Ethan keys his mic without taking his eyes off me. “Hayes is down.”
A beat.
Then Aaron: “Down how?”
Ethan glances once toward the open cliff gate. “Permanently.”
There’s a pause.
Then Cal’s dry voice comes through. “I’m going to need more paperwork, aren’t I?”
Against all logic, a laugh rips out of me.
Half-hysterical.
Half-sobbing.
Ethan stares at me for one stunned second.
Then he laughs too.
Low.
Disbelieving.
Wrecked.
And for the first time since this all began, it sounds like survival.