Chapter Ten
Time did not pass normally in rooms like this. Victor knew that from experience, but also because his body kept trying to measure it—and failing.
There was no window. No clock. No sound that belonged to the outside world.
The lights hummed softly overhead, sometimes too bright, sometimes dipped just low enough to make his vision blur at the edges.
He could not tell if that change was deliberate or if his eyes were simply losing the argument with focus.
Pain was present, but manageable.
That was the first thing he understood clearly.
They were not trying to hurt him for its own sake.
Nothing was broken that could not be used again.
The bruises were layered carefully, but nothing debilitating.
The cuts shallow. The shocks precisely timed to keep his nervous system awake but not overloaded.
When his muscles trembled, someone adjusted a dial.
When his head lolled, a voice brought him back.
“Victor.”
Always his name.
It anchored him even as it was used against him.
They had sat him in a chair bolted to the floor, restraints firm but not cruelly tight.
The IV line ran into his arm, taped neatly in place, fluid cool against his veins.
He had clocked it early—saline at first, then something else layered in.
Not enough to knock him out, but enough to slow the space between thought and response.
He hated that part the most.
Not the pain. The delay.
The first interrogator spoke with a mild accent Victor could not place.
“Same questions as before,” the man said pleasantly, as if apologizing for the repetition. “We just want to confirm what we already know.”
Victor lifted his head. Kept his eyes level. He made them work for that alone.
“I’ve already told you...” he said. His voice sounded rougher than he expected, like it had been sanded down. “I don’t have what you want.”
The man smiled faintly. “The problem with that answer, Victor, is that we disagree.”
The questions came in a familiar order.
Names. Places. Timelines.
Who ran Black Tide. How many vehicles. Where they staged. Who Victor answered to now.
He gave them fragments. Old truths stripped of context. Answers that were technically accurate and strategically useless. He had learned that skill a long time ago.
They swapped interrogators every few hours—or what felt like hours. Different faces, same cadence, but always calm and professional. No raised voices and no threats that were not implied.
They wanted confirmation, not a confession.
That was how he knew they were pressed.
At some point, someone injected something into the IV line. Victor noticed because the room tilted half a degree to the left. Because his tongue felt thick. Because the effort required to hold onto certainty increased.
He breathed through it.
In for four ... out for six.
He counted the ridges in the metal table in front of him. Thirty-two. Always thirty-two. He used them like a rosary.
The third interrogator was a woman. Her voice was low, almost kind.
“You know,” she said, “we thought they’d be here by now.”
Victor did not respond. She tapped a control and a screen flickered to life in front of him.
Black.
Then static.
Then a feed that looked like a comm channel gone dead. Time-stamped. Silent. She let it play for too long.
“They’re careful,” she continued. “That’s admirable. But it also makes them predictable.”
Victor swallowed. He could feel the effort in it.
“They’re not coming,” she said gently. “They can’t.”
He almost laughed.
Almost.
Instead, something cold slipped into his chest.
They showed him more. A still image of the black van abandoned on the roadside. Another angle, closer in. Painted panels scuffed. No bodies. No pursuit. Just absence.
“They lost you,” the woman said. “And they chose not to burn the world to get you back.”
The thought slid in sideways, uninvited.
If Tane were coming, he’d already be here.
The words landed like a misstep on broken ground.
Victor’s jaw tightened instantly. His breath stuttered once before he forced it steady.
No.
That was the drugs talking. Exhaustion. Repetition. Manufactured evidence designed to bruise, not break.
He closed his eyes.
He saw Tane’s hands instead. Steady. Certain. The way he stood when he was thinking—still as a held breath. The way his voice went flat and dangerous when he drew a line.
Ice, Victor thought. Not fire.
He opened his eyes again and met the woman’s gaze.
“You’re lying,” he said.
She did not flinch. “About what?”
“About them,” Victor replied. “And about how much time has passed.”
Something flickered in her expression. Interest. Maybe respect.
They tried again later. A different man. The same lies. The same doctored silence. The same suggestion that Black Tide was too small, too cautious, already compromised.
Victor gave them nothing new.
He withheld. Deflected. Offered half-truths that led nowhere. He never broke eye contact.
Internally, he drew a line.
They don’t get him whole.
Not his loyalty. Not his belief. Not the part of him that knew exactly what kind of man Tane Māno was.
Eventually, they left him alone.
Longer than before.
The lights dimmed—not enough to be mercy, just enough to disorient. The drip continued. The room hummed.
Victor sagged back in the chair, every muscle trembling with fatigue.
The lie lingered.
Not as truth. As a bruise.
The door opened again.
Different footsteps this time. Slower. Heavier. Someone who did not need to hurry.
Victor opened his eyes.
The man who entered did not carry a tablet or a syringe. No gloves. No pretense of civility. He wore the confidence of someone who believed the room, the building, and the hours themselves belonged to him.
“So,” the man said, looking at Victor as if assessing damaged equipment. “We cannot bring you back into the Directorate, you have lost that privilege, and you give us nothing on these Black Tide people. You’re useless to us.”
Victor said nothing.
“That’s disappointing, Victor” the man continued mildly. “But not unexpected. You were always more valuable as leverage than as an asset.”
He leaned closer, just enough that Victor could smell coffee on his breath.
“You’ll be executed in the morning,” the man said. “Outside the gates of the Black Tide compound. Public enough to be understood. Clean enough to send the message.”
He straightened. “Back down. Or this is what happens.”
The door shut.
Victor’s pulse stayed steady.
And somewhere beneath the doubt, beneath the chemical haze and the carefully planted lies, certainty locked into place.
They were out of time.
Victor closed his eyes and waited.
****
From the moment they returned from the mission without Victor, the compound felt too small and was way too quiet.
Black Tide spaces were never silent—not truly. There was always the low hum of generators underfoot, the whisper of air moving through vents, boots crossing concrete, someone laughing softly in a corner or swearing at a screen.
Now, there was a hollow in it.
Victor’s absence sat in the center of the compound like a missing load-bearing wall. Everything else remained upright—screens glowing, lights steady, people moving—but the balance was wrong. Subtly. Precisely. The way a structure could stand for days before collapsing.
Tane paused just inside the command floor and let his eyes track the room.
Kael at the central table, shoulders squared, posture unchanged.
Torch leaning against a console, arms folded, jaw tight.
Reef standing near the far wall, weight carefully off his injured leg.
Luca half-buried behind a forest of screens in the tech pit, fingers moving nonstop.
Tane hadn’t slept properly since the estate.
He had closed his eyes when protocol demanded it. He had lain still, breathing slow, body resting even as his mind refused to follow. Every time he drifted, the same images surfaced—the corridor, the soft thunk of the tranq, Victor’s body folding as if gravity had suddenly doubled.
So, he stayed busy.
Every system was running hot. Drone feeds cycled continuously, overlapping patterns layered on top of each other. Encrypted channels stayed open longer than they should have, Luca pushing latency limits without apology. Search parameters updated every few minutes, then again, and again.
“Any change?” Tane asked, his voice even.
Luca didn’t look up. “Nothing clean,” he said. “Plenty of noise. Too much noise.”
That tracked.
The Directorate loved noise. It gave them cover. It burned time.
The truck they had taken Victor away in was found just after dawn. Not far from their compound. Another fuck you from the Directorate. Kael and Drew had gone to collect it, and now it sat outside their garage
They opened it carefully.
Engine cold. No blood. No trackers. No residue that hadn’t been scrubbed twice.
Abandoned deliberately.
This message was clear as well.
You were too late.
Keanu broke the silence. “They want us angry.”
“Yes,” Tane said. “Which means we don’t give it to them.”
No shouting, no raging against the world, no slammed fists or broken equipment.
Just a recalibration.
They stripped the van anyway. Panels off. Wiring exposed. Luca ran deep signal sweeps that turned up nothing but ghosts—false pings, decoys designed to pull them sideways. Torch cursed once under his breath, then went quiet.
It didn’t rattle Tane.
It just gave him more reason to focus.
Then the secure line chimed.
Once. Twice.
“Put it through,” Kael said.
Kai’s face filled the main screen, sharp-eyed even through compression, the background behind him unmistakably Pathfinders territory.
“I’m coming home,” Kai said without preamble. “Hogan and I can be wheels up in under an hour. Victor’s our brother, too. The others can come if you need them.”
The words landed heavy.
Tane felt them—but he didn’t let them move him.
“No,” he said.
Kai blinked. “No?”
“Too many people,” Tane replied evenly. “Too much noise. A force that size will light us up from three days out. Not to mention, they will clock you as soon as you enter a flight plan, and fuck knows what happens to you on your way here. These bastards are resource rich, but morally bankrupt.”
A beat passed.
Kai exhaled once, sharp. Then nodded. “All right. But when you find him—”
“We’ll need precision,” Tane said. “Not a war.”
Respect passed between them without ceremony.
The call ended with promises to stay in touch, and assurances that both the Pathfinders and Bravo were searching too.
Minutes later, Luca straightened slowly, like someone afraid to jinx what he was seeing.
“Tane,” he said. “I’ve got something.”
The room leaned in.
“Partial signal bleed,” Luca continued. “Old encryption style from what I know was a Directorate black-site from the markers. They’re reusing legacy infrastructure.”
A map bloomed on the main screen. Not a clean pin. A cluster. Overlapping probabilities tied together by timing and pattern, but not certainty.
“This site is old, not current,” Luca said. “But recent enough to matter.”
Tane studied it.
No relief.
No hope.
Just stillness.
This was enough.
He looked up and caught Kael’s eye, then nodded,
“Prep the team,” Kael said quietly. “Call signs active.”
No one questioned it.
Ice locked into place.
They were going in.
But not blind.
Luca didn’t sit back down. Instead, he rolled his shoulders once and dragged another set of windows onto the main display—older files, archived deep enough that most people forgot they existed.
“Before anyone moves,” he said, voice tight with focus, “there’s something else.”
Tane turned fully toward him. “Talk to me.”
Luca flicked his fingers and brought up a grainy satellite image dated years earlier. “This came from Marsh.”
That earned immediate attention.
“He sent this through Pathfinder back channels,” Luca continued. “Didn’t flag it as urgent at the time. Just ... odd. A data anomaly tied to an old logistics sweep.”
The image shifted—zooming in, resolving into a nondescript industrial property tucked against scrubland and access roads that went nowhere useful.
“Black-site architecture,” Luca said. “Temporary. Portable power. Shielded sublevels. Same construction logic we’re seeing in the signal bleed.”
Kael leaned closer. “Why didn’t this light up before?”
“Because it’s supposed to be dead,” Luca replied. “Decommissioned. Burned. Wiped from current Directorate maps. But Marsh noticed residual traffic patterns that never fully went dark. Just ... slept.”
Tane felt the pieces align.
“They woke it back up,” he said.
Luca nodded. “And they reused old encryption because they didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough—or patient enough—to look backward.”
Torch let out a low breath. “So, they hid him in a grave.”
“Looks that way,” Luca said. “And Marsh’s anomaly lines up with the strongest probability cluster from the signal bleed.”
The map adjusted again. The cluster tightened. Not clean—but sharper.
“This doesn’t give us certainty,” Luca added. “But it gives us direction. And timing.”
Tane absorbed it without comment.
This wasn’t luck.
It was pattern.
He turned back toward the central table, palms resting flat against the surface. “We go quiet,” he said. “No external pings. No extra assets. We move before they expect the lie to settle.”
Kael nodded once. “Call signs only.”
Niko shifted his weight, testing his leg. “I’m good,” he said before anyone could ask.
Keanu cracked a thin smile. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Tane’s gaze flicked briefly to each of them—his team, his family—before settling again on the map.
Victor was somewhere inside that cluster. Drugged. Beaten. Still fighting.
The Directorate thought time was on their side.
They were wrong.
Tane straightened.
“Mount up,” he said quietly. “We end this.”