40. Killian
KILLIAN
The private jet fights the Wyoming wind all the way to the tarmac.
It’s an invisible blip on the radar, registered to a defunct maritime export company in Panama that exists only on paper.
I’d acquired the jet nearly nine years ago, back when Julian still thought my loyalty was a permanent fixture of his empire.
It was a gift meant to keep his pet assassin comfortable, but I’d moved the registration through a series of offshore shell companies Jackson had built for me before the world went to hell.
Even when I was in jail, Gabe and Jackson kept it moving between hangars, a tether to the power I’d been stripped of.
Inside, the jet still smells of the same expensive leather and aged bourbon it did ten years ago. It’s a suffocating scent of the life Julian groomed me for, but tonight, the luxury feels like it’s mocking me. The air is pressurized and cold, vibrating with the raw, bone-deep power of the turbines.
Outside the small window, the Teton Range is a wall of rugged black ink against a sky that’s beginning to hemorrhage snow. The storm we’ve been tracking since Montana has finally caught us, the first heavy flakes swirling in the red-washed lights of the wings.
Across from me, Gabriel hasn't looked up since we left Montana. He’s pulling the straps on his vest tight, checking each buckle with a heavy force that makes the nylon creak.
Jackson is hunched over his monitors, his face pale in the light of the screens. His fingers are tapping a fast rhythm against the keys, the only sound in the back of the jet besides the turbines.
Kai is sitting opposite him, his head tilted back against the seat and his eyes closed. He’s running his tongue over the silver ring in his lip, a nervous tic I’ve seen him use before every breach. He’s waiting for the green light.
Ellie is pressed against my side, leaning into me, eyes reflecting the glow of the monitors. One hand rests flat on my thighs, breathing so shallow it’s almost non-existent. I’ve never seen her this still. She looks like a woman who has already decided how this ends.
The plane begins to taxi toward a massive, corrugated steel hangar at the far end of the strip.
The hangar doors are already sliding open, revealing twelve blacked-out SUVs idling in two long rows.
Their exhaust plumes rise like white freezing smoke, billowing around the tires before vanishing into the mountain storm.
As the stairs lower, we descend into the roar of twelve engines and the heavy, metallic tang of jet fuel mixed with the earthy scent of a mountain storm.
Forty-two men are working the line, seating magazines, checking slings, and tossing equipment bags into the trunks. These are the ones who survived the same training grounds I did; men who sold their loyalties to the highest bidder years ago.
Miller is already in the lead SUV, his face empty as he monitors the perimeter feeds.
He doesn't look at us; for him, this is another contract in a long line of expensive deletions.
Next to him, Vince is threading the primary fuse for the breach charge with a practiced boredom that makes my skin crawl.
Kai follows them, the tip of his tongue still flicking the silver ring in his lip with that obsessive rhythm. He’s already checked the seal on the heavy trauma bag at his hip twice, his eyes fixed on the hangar doors.
The hangar air is thick with the heat of the engines as we move past them.
No one needs to be told what to do; the plan has already been downloaded into their hands.
Ten men for the perimeter. Twelve for the primary breach.
Two dedicated signal-jamming teams. It’s a machine designed for total erasure.
"Load up!" Gabe’s voice barks, echoing off the steel rafters. He raises his hand, circling his index finger in the air, the gesture for the team to mount up.
We head for the second SUV. Gabe takes the wheel, Jackson takes the front passenger side, unfolding a ruggedized tablet and plugging it into the vehicle’s encrypted network.
I guide Ellie into the back, sliding in beside her. The interior of the SUV is a pocket of quiet amidst the literal and figurative storm outside, smelling of gun oil and the cold moisture clinging to our gear.
"Jackson, tell me the storm isn't going to fuck with the satellite feed," Gabe says, shifting the vehicle into drive. The convoy begins to roll out, twelve sets of headlights cutting through the white curtain of the fat snowflakes.
"The storm I can handle," Jackson says, his fingers snapping across the screen. "It’s the granite. The Teton Pass is one big signal-blocker. If the convoy gets separated by more than half a mile, the snipers lose their eyes."
"Then don't let them get separated," Gabe snaps.
He keeps his eyes forward, already in the headspace of the raid, where every sentence that isn't a tactical update is useless noise. Jackson knows better than to push him when he’s like this, but he keeps talking anyway, his own way of handling the nerves.
"Oh, brilliant. I'll just tell the mountain to move out of the way, shall I?" Jackson huffs, rubbing his eyes. "If we hit a dead zone, we’re blind."
I ignore their bickering and turn my focus to Ellie. I pull a small black drive from my vest, the research we pulled from Denver, the only proof of what Julian has been doing out here and the rest of the facilities, and press it into her hand.
"Keep this safe," I say, my voice low. "If shit hits the fan, make sure it doesn't just disappear."
She grips the drive, her brows knitting together in confusion.
"Why are you talking like we aren't both coming out of there?"
I take a slow breath. "I am. But Julian didn't only train me to kill. He spent ten years breaking me. A kill-switch, he called it. Specific phrases paired with the kind of isolation that breaks you until there’s nothing left to break."
Her head snaps up, her eyes wide and dark in the red light. Her jaw sets, and I watch the blood drain from her face.
"A kill-switch?"
"If he uses them, everything that makes me Killian shuts off. Montana, the house, you… it all goes dark. I don't stop thinking, but I stop feeling. And when I'm empty like that, I don't have a reason to say no to him. I’ll do whatever he tells me."
She looks at me, and I watch her fingers tighten on the drive. "Then how do I reach you? How do I get you back?"
"You talk to me," I say, leaning in until our foreheads touch. "You look me in the eye and you talk to me. You remind me that I'm the man who belongs to you. If you can make me recognize you, I’ll be able to hear you. If you can't... get as far away from me as possible."
Ellie reaches into the pocket of her vest. Her hand comes out trembling, holding a small, white origami swan. It’s tiny, the paper scored with sharp, intricate creases that look like they were made in the dark.
"Kai taught me," she whispers, her fingers smoothing the paper wing.
"He said when the noises get too loud, you have to do something real with your hands.
You have to force the world to take a shape you can touch.
I made dozens of them in the early weeks.
" She presses it into my palm, her fingers cold against mine.
"You told me about Cygnus, about the stars your sister looked for so she wouldn't be afraid.
If you feel yourself slipping away... if you feel the change...
you feel this. Remember who you are. Remember Evelyn. Remember me."
I look at the fragile paper bird and slide it into the inner pocket of my vest, tucked right against my ribs where I can feel the sharp edges of the wings every time I breathe. "I'll find my way back."
She looks out the window as we begin the long, steep climb toward Teton Pass. The storm is a white wall now, the wind rocking the heavy SUV as we wind along the edge of the granite cliffs. It’s a place where people disappear.
"For a long time, I thought the world was simple," she whispers, her fingers interlacing with mine. "I thought my father's memory was all I had left to protect. But everything I’ve learned since Denver... everything I see in you... it’s changed the way everything looks in my head."
I watch the way the snow catches in the headlights, a chaotic flurry of white against the black abyss of the pass.
"My mother used to say that a storm doesn't apologize for being loud, it clears the air for what comes next," she continues, watching the snow bury the headlights. "She spent her life quiet, watching my father try to contain everything. I think she was just waiting for the wind to change."
She turns back to me, her face caught in the dull red glow of the dashboard. "The air is clearing, Killian. Tonight, we’re the ones making the noise."
I squeeze her hand, the only real thing in a world of steel and ice.
As we cross the state line into Wyoming, Jackson taps a final command on his tablet. The screens on the dash dim to almost nothing, cutting the glare against the windshield. "Comms are dark," he says. "Everything from here is radio silence."
The snow is thick enough now that the road markers are gone.
The world is just the glow of the dashboard and the black shapes of the range looming through the white.
No road signs. No towns. Beyond the headlights, the mountains are nothing but a jagged black line that marks the edge of where we're going.
Jackson and Gabe have gone quiet, their disagreement overshadowed by the approach. Somewhere behind us in the whiteout, ten other sets of headlights are cutting through the storm. Forty specialists, forty-two rifles, all moving toward the same objective.
I look at Ellie one last time before we arrive. Her eyes meet mine, our hands stay locked together.
"Together," she says, squeezing my hand.
"Together."
The convoy winds higher, climbing through the heart of the storm. Gabe slows the vehicle as we crest a final, frozen ridge.
Below us, tucked into a natural amphitheater of granite, Julian’s world is a cluster of cold, blue lights and low-slung concrete wings.
It doesn't look like a home. It looks like a laboratory for the end of the world, half-buried under the weight of the snow and protected by perimeter towers that sweep the darkness with long, searching beams of cold white light.
"It’s time," I say.