Chapter 75 Ethan
Ethan
The first alarm starts three seconds after Hayes disappears.
Then another.
Then all of them.
Red lights begin flashing along the tunnel walls beyond the loading chamber, painting everything in violent pulses of crimson.
Jonah’s voice tears over comms. “Whatever he triggered in the server room is escalating. You need out now.”
I don’t take my eyes off Ava.
Her face is pale. Her throat is already bruising. She’s shaking hard enough I can feel it through my hands, but she’s upright. Breathing. Looking at me like she’s still trying to process the fact that Hayes is gone.
Forever.
“Ava.”
Her eyes lock on mine.
“We have to move.”
She blinks once. Twice.
Then nods.
I slide an arm around her waist, and the second I do, pain slices across my ribs where Hayes’s blade caught me. Hot. Sharp. Not deep enough to slow me much. Deep enough to piss me off.
Ava notices instantly.
Her hand slaps against my side. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine.”
She gives me a furious look that would’ve been funny if we weren’t standing on the edge of a cliffside escape platform with an underground facility about to blow.
“You are such a liar.”
“Learned from the best.”
A weak, shocked laugh escapes her.
Good.
I’ll take any sign she’s still with me.
“Cross,” Ronan snaps over comms. “Move.”
We run.
Well—Ava runs as much as she can in her condition, and I keep her against me while we tear back through the tunnel.
The red lights flash harder now. Somewhere behind us, metal groans.
The air has changed too—hotter, dirtier, thick with the stink of melting circuitry and old dust being shaken loose by pressure building in the walls.
By the time we hit the operations center, Ronan, Aaron, Cal, and Jonah are already pulling back.
The command room is worse now.
Several server towers are on fire. Smoke curls along the ceiling. One of the shattered monitors bursts with a shower of sparks as we pass.
Jonah points toward the corridor. “Main route’s going unstable. We may need the secondary stairwell.”
Ava’s head jerks toward the left side of the room. “There.”
All of us look.
Behind a row of half-collapsed cabinets is a narrow steel door I didn’t notice before.
Jonah curses under his breath. “Not on the plans.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Ava says.
Ronan doesn’t waste a second. “Go.”
Aaron shoulders the door once. Twice. It gives on the third hit and bursts inward.
Concrete stairs.
Straight up.
We push into them as the first real blast hits.
The ground jumps beneath our boots.
Dust rains from above.
The lights cut out.
For one brutal second everything goes black.
Then emergency strips flicker to life along the edges of the stairwell, barely enough to see by.
Ava stumbles.
I catch her.
“Got you.”
Her fingers lock around my vest. “I know.”
The words hit harder than they should.
Harder because she means them.
We climb.
Fast as hell.
My ribs are burning now, each step pulling at the slash in my side.
Ava’s breathing is getting rougher too, thinner, pain threading through every inhale.
Jonah is one step ahead of us, still somehow keeping hold of the tablet he refuses to abandon.
Cal is behind, Aaron behind him, and Ronan is covering the rear like a man who would personally fight the whole mountain if it tried to come down on us.
Another explosion booms from below.
Hot air blasts up the shaft.
Aaron swears. “I hate bunkers.”
“No one made you join us,” Cal says.
“You all looked fun and emotionally unavailable.”
Even now, that nearly gets a laugh out of me.
Nearly.
We hit a landing.
A rusted door.
Ronan drives his boot into it and it flies open into daylight.
Fresh air slams into us.
The force of it nearly knocks me back.
We spill out into the tree line east of the compound, less than fifty yards from the outer fence. The helicopters are circling back in, and one of the black SUVs is already moving toward our position.
Behind us, smoke begins pouring from hidden vents in the earth.
Then the cliffside bunker erupts.
Not one huge cinematic fireball.
Worse.
A chain of underground concussions that rip through the hill in staggered bursts, blowing dirt, rock, and twisted metal into the sky.
The ground bucks.
Ava cries out as the shockwave hits us sideways.
I yank her down beneath me behind a fallen log just as debris rains over the clearing.
Everything becomes noise.
Impact.
Dirt.
Shouting.
Then silence except for the ringing in my ears.
I lift my head first.
Ronan is up.
Aaron too.
Cal is swearing in the distance, which means he’s alive.
Jonah stumbles to his knees, coughing.
And Ava—
My heart slams.
She’s under me.
Eyes open.
Breathing.
“Talk to me.”
“I think,” she says hoarsely, “I officially hate underground facilities.”
Relief hits so hard it almost drops me.
I laugh once, breathless and half-crazed. “Yeah?”
“Strongly.”
I brush dirt from her face with a shaking hand. “Good.”
The SUV screeches to a stop near us, and medics pour out with another team. Someone starts shouting triage questions, but I barely hear them.
Because Hayes is dead.
The bunker is gone.
And Ava is alive under my hands.
That truth doesn’t feel real yet.
It feels too big.
Too impossible.
The medics separate us anyway.
I hate it immediately.
Ava hates it more.
“I’m fine,” she snaps as two of them try to guide her toward a stretcher.
“You’re bleeding, bruised, probably concussed, and half-covered in a mountain,” one of them says.
She points toward me. “So is he.”
I start to answer, but a medic grabs my vest and pulls it aside enough to expose the blood soaking through my shirt.
“Fantastic,” the guy mutters. “You’re both nightmares.”
Ronan appears between us like judgment in human form. “Get treated. Both of you. That’s not optional.”
Ava and I glare at him in perfect sync.
Ronan doesn’t blink. “Cute. Still not optional.”
Aaron, filthy and grinning despite a cut over one brow, wanders closer. “For the record, that was one of the worst places I’ve ever visited.”
Cal wipes dirt from his mouth. “And yet somehow still better than D.C.”
Jonah finally makes it over, clutching his tablet to his chest like a beloved child. “Before anyone says anything, yes, I saved the extracted data.”
Aaron stares at him. “You carried that thing out of an exploding death cave.”
Jonah looks offended. “It has evidence.”
Ava, already seated on the edge of the stretcher while a medic checks her throat, gives him a tired little smile. “I like you.”
“Thank you,” Jonah says. “You have excellent taste.”
I sit on the bumper of the SUV while a medic cleans the slash at my side. It stings like hell. Across from me, another medic is rechecking Ava’s gunshot wound and older injury, and I can tell from the set of her jaw she’s about ten seconds away from biting someone if they poke her again.
Good.
That means the fire is still there.
The medic at my side shakes his head. “You need stitches.”
“Do it.”
“No pain meds until we know if you’ve got anything else going on internally.”
“Do it.”
He sighs. “You all really are impossible.”
“Apparently.”
I don’t take my eyes off Ava while he works.
She keeps looking back at me too.
Like neither of us fully trusts the other to still be here if we glance away too long.
It shouldn’t make my chest hurt.
It does anyway.
When they finish with her, she stands too fast.
Sways.
My whole body goes on alert, but the medic catches her elbow before I can rip the stitches out of my side trying to get there.
“Easy,” the medic says.
Ava shakes him off gently this time. Then she walks straight to me.
No hesitation.
No asking.
Just comes.
Stops between my knees where I’m sitting on the bumper and lays both hands on my face like she needs to be certain I’m real.
I go still.
Completely still.
Her eyes search mine. “You scared me.”
I cover one of her hands with mine. “You tackled a monster off his own platform.”
“You got stabbed.”
“Barely.”
She gives me a look.
I exhale. “Okay. Lightly slashed.”
“Ethan.”
There’s so much in the way she says my name.
Too much for out here in the dirt and smoke and noise of teams sweeping a ruined compound.
I lean forward and rest my forehead against her stomach because it’s the only place I can reach from where I’m sitting and because I suddenly feel the weight of the last hour pressing down on me all at once.
She stills.
One hand slides into my hair.
The other stays on my cheek.
And for one quiet second I let myself have it.
The truth.
The relief.
The sickening realization of how close this came to ending differently.
“I thought,” I say roughly, “when he put his hands on you again—”
My voice cuts off.
I can’t finish it.
Ava’s fingers tighten in my hair. “But he didn’t keep them there.”
No.
Because I ended that.
Because she ended that.
Because we did.
I sit up and look at her.
Really look at her.
Bruised throat.
Dirt-smudged skin.
Eyes too bright with shock and victory and the beginnings of the crash neither of us can stop.
“He’s gone,” I say.
She nods once, but I can see it still isn’t landing all the way.
Maybe it won’t for a while.
Maybe some monsters leave echoes even after they die.
Ronan walks over, radio in hand. “Site sweep confirms no remaining hostiles topside. The Coast Guard is responding to a debris field below the cliff. They won’t find a body intact.”
Ava closes her eyes.
Not in fear.
In release.
When she opens them again, they’re wet.
Not spilling over yet.
Just there.
Her voice is thin. “Good.”
Ronan’s expression softens by about one degree, which for him is practically a hug. “You did well.”
Ava blinks like that surprises her.
Then gives the smallest nod.
Ronan looks at me. “Bird leaves in five. Safehouse lockdown after that. Jonah’s going to spend the next six hours tearing through what he pulled from the servers.”
“Others,” Ava says quietly.
Ronan’s attention shifts back to her. “What?”