Chapter 31
They Took Her
Ghost
Iknew something was wrong before I even saw proof.
At first, it was instinct. That low, sharp pressure at the base of my skull that had kept me alive long before Ironhand. Mira missed a med rotation check-in by six minutes, and every nerve in my body immediately tightened.
Six minutes wasn’t enough for most people to notice. For Mira? It was impossible.
She ran her schedule like clockwork inside this place because unpredictability got people noticed. And Mira understood survival too well to make sloppy mistakes unless something forced her to.
I stayed still in the upper corridor outside secondary operations and forced myself not to react too quickly as my mind automatically recalculated possibilities. Delay. Injury. Silas unexpectedly pulled her into another assignment.
None of them sat right.
By the ten-minute mark, I was already moving.
The lower med wing looked normal when I entered. Too normal. Nurses crossed between rooms. Fighters waited on stitches. The same smell of antiseptic and blood hung heavy in the air.
But Mira wasn’t there.
Bo glanced up from a supply cart when I stepped inside. “You looking for Lena?”
My pulse narrowed instantly. “She’s late.”
“Thought she got reassigned.”
Cold slid straight down my spine.
“To what?”
Bo shrugged distractedly. “Didn’t say. One of Silas’ guys pulled her earlier tonight.”
I turned before he could ask anything else, already walking fast enough that people started moving out of my way instinctively.
The panic hit quietly at first — not loud or explosive.
Worse. Controlled enough that it sharpened every thought into something razor-edged while adrenaline flooded my bloodstream hard enough to hurt.
Mira wouldn’t disappear voluntarily. And she definitely wouldn’t vanish without finding a way to signal me first unless she couldn’t.
The realization slammed into place so hard it nearly made me physically sick.
No.
I hit the lower admin corridor three minutes later, bypassed two restricted doors before slipping into one of the surveillance access rooms I’d been quietly using for weeks. The terminal came alive under my hands as I simultaneously pulled internal movement logs and security rotations.
Nothing obvious, which immediately told me everything. Silas wouldn’t leave visible traces if he finally caught something important.
I dug deeper. Restricted access pulls. Emergency system activations. Temporary lockdown protocols are buried under standard operational traffic. Then I found it.
Archive containment room.
Level three lockdown authorization.
Triggered at 02:13.
My breathing stopped completely for one brutal second as the timestamp burned across the screen. That was exactly when Mira stopped responding to her scheduled check-ins.
Fuck.
My hands curled against the edge of the terminal hard enough that the metal creaked faintly underneath my grip. Every thought in my head suddenly collapsed into one horrifying certainty.
She got caught.
The panic hit fully then. Violent. Immediate. Nothing is controlled about it anymore. Not because Mira was weak. Not because I doubted that she’d fight like hell. Because I knew exactly what happened when someone like Silas confirmed a leak inside Ironhand.
Interrogation. Isolation. Pressure until something broke.
And Mira was tied directly to me now, whether we admitted it out loud or not.
My chest tightened hard enough to make breathing feel impossible as I stared at the lockdown logs, replaying every stupid decision that led us here.
Every reckless touch. Every moment, we stopped acting undercover and started acting like two people desperately trying to hold on to each other while everything around them burned.
I should’ve pulled away sooner. Should’ve protected her better. Should’ve gotten her out before this place closed its teeth around her.
Instead, she was gone.
And for the first time since I faked my death, real fear hit me hard enough to crack straight through my control.
I was still staring at the lockdown logs when the terminal pinged—one sharp notification.
Internal priority routing.
My entire body went still.
Nobody contacted Adrian directly through restricted channels unless something serious shifted operationally. My pulse slowed into something deadly calm as I opened the message trace, every instinct screaming that this wasn’t routine before the file even finished loading.
No sender listed, of course.
The message itself contained almost nothing. Just a single attached image and one line beneath it.
Curiosity is expensive.
My stomach dropped hard enough to feel physically violent as I opened the attachment. It wasn’t a photo of Mira. Not directly. That was what made it worse.
The image showed the archive containment room after the lockdown was triggered. Empty now except for an overturned chair, scattered restraints hung loose from the side of the table, and one dark smear of blood across the concrete floor. Fresh enough to still shine beneath the overhead lights.
Mira’s blood.
My breathing turned dangerously shallow the moment I recognized the jacket lying crumpled near the far corner of the room.
Hers.
Silas knew exactly what he was doing. No confirmation that she was alive. No visible body. Just enough proof to make this personal. To make me react.
The realization settled cold and brutal in my chest while rage surged beneath it, intense enough to blur the edges of my vision. My fingers clenched tightly around the terminal until pain shot through my knuckles, but it barely registered.
This wasn’t operational anymore. This was psychological warfare. And Silas had shifted his target directly onto me.
Another line suddenly appeared beneath the image, the system updating in real time.
You should’ve kept her out of it.
The room went dead silent around me.
Silas knew. Not everything, but enough to understand exactly where to drive the knife.
I forced myself to breathe slowly through the fury that threatened to crack my composure wide open, but it wasn’t easy. Every instinct in me screamed to move immediately. Tear through the building. Find her. Kill whoever got in the way.
Exactly what Silas wanted.
That was the trap. He provoked Adrian because he suspected Ghost. And if I reacted emotionally instead of strategically, I’d confirm everything he still couldn’t fully prove.
The problem was, sitting there staring at Mira’s abandoned jacket and blood on the floor, strategy suddenly felt real fucking difficult to care about.
A final message flashed across the screen before the terminal forcibly wiped the communication trace clean.
What is her value to you?
My jaw locked so hard it hurt. Because underneath the bait, underneath the manipulation and pressure and games, Silas had already figured out the one thing I spent weeks trying to hide inside Ironhand.
Mira wasn’t leveraged because she was useful. She was leverage because she mattered to me. And now Silas intended to use that until one of us broke first.
Whatever restraint I’d been holding onto died the second that message disappeared off the screen. I stopped caring about subtlety after that.
The problem wasn’t just that Mira had been taken. It was that Silas wanted me to know she’d been taken. He wanted Adrian to be emotional. Reactive. Sloppy enough to expose himself while chasing after her.
Too fucking bad.
Because if he wanted Ghost’s attention now, he had it.
I tore through Ironhand’s internal systems for the next two hours like I no longer gave a shit who noticed.
Access walls that I’d spent weeks carefully navigating got ripped apart one after another.
At the same time, I dug through movement records, holding locations, restricted route changes, and anything that could tell me where Mira had been moved after containment.
Most of the important files were already scrubbed. Of course they were. But not perfectly. Not fast enough. I found fragments anyway. Temporary elevator lockdowns. Medical sedation requests. Isolated transport clearances routed through sectors normally reserved for high-value assets.
High-value prisoner.
My stomach twisted violently every time that reality resurfaced. The deeper I dug, the more eyes started turning toward me.
I noticed it in the lower operations rooms first. Conversations stopped when I entered. Personnel moving out of my path too quickly. The way people started avoiding direct eye contact once my temper stopped looking controlled and started looking dangerous.
Good. Let them be nervous.
By the third hour, I abandoned the systems entirely and started pulling answers directly from people instead. The first logistics runner cracked fast.
I cornered him in a maintenance corridor near the lower freight elevators, shoving him hard enough into the concrete wall that his head snapped back with a sharp crack. “Where did they move her?”
His face drained white instantly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I hit the wall beside his head hard enough to split skin across my knuckles. “Wrong answer.”
The panic in his eyes sharpened immediately after that. “I swear to God, Adrian, I don’t know. I just heard containment transferred somebody upstairs.”
“Who ordered it?”
“I don’t know!”
I believed him mostly because he looked seconds away from pissing himself. I let him go hard enough that he stumbled backward against the opposite wall before scrambling away without another word.
That happened three more times before sunrise.
Every interaction was worse than the last. By then, people had stopped looking at me like another operative inside Ironhand. Now they looked at me like something they didn’t fully understand anymore. Fear spread quickly in places like this. Faster than information. Faster than logic.
And Adrian?
Adrian wasn’t supposed to move like this. Wasn’t supposed to know how to hurt people this efficiently. Wasn’t supposed to dismantle security protocols and interrogation tactics like he’d done it his entire life.
I saw realization start to spread through the lower ranks whenever someone looked at me too long. The question forming: Who the fuck are you really?
The dangerous part was that I no longer cared enough to hide the answer properly.
By the time dawn started bleeding gray through the high warehouse windows, the entire building felt different around me.
Tighter.
Watching.
Ironhand always carried tension beneath the surface, but now it moved with awareness, as if the structure itself realized something violent had slipped loose inside it.
Personnel avoided lingering near me too long.
Conversations lowered when I entered rooms. Security presence increased near operational corridors, with no one openly acknowledging the reason.
Silas had done exactly what he intended to do. He turned the situation personal.
And worse? I let him.
I stood alone in one of the upper maintenance walkways that overlooked the loading docks.
I stared down at transport crews moving beneath me while Mira’s jacket kept flashing through my head over and over again.
Crumpled on the floor. Blood beside it. Just enough evidence to make me unstable without confirming anything concrete.
Not collateral damage. Not operational cleanup. Leverage.
The realization settled in my chest, ugly and absolute.
Silas hadn’t taken Mira because she breached restricted files. Not entirely. If this were only about internal leaks, she’d already be dead. Clean. Quiet. Disposable. But she wasn’t disposable to him anymore because she mattered to me.
That was the entire point.
Every move since the containment lock triggered suddenly looked different through that lens. The message. The blood. The carefully controlled bait is delivered through internal channels. Silas wasn’t just interrogating Mira.
He was hunting me through her.
My hands slowly curled around the rusted railing in front of me. The metal groaned faintly under the pressure. And standing there watching Ironhand wake up around me while rage hollowed out everything restraint used to occupy inside my chest, one brutal truth finally locked fully into place.
This stopped being infiltration the second they touched her.