Chapter Eight #2
A man stumbled into frame, weapon half-raised, eyes wide with shock. The shot was clean. The body dropped. No drama. No hesitation. Just cause and effect. Riley flinched anyway.
They didn’t slow.
The feed split—Dorian’s angle, then Kairo’s, then a wide feed from one of the Razorbacks.
The room became a blur of movement and sound, short commands, boots scuffing, the crack of gunfire contained and relentless.
The E.S.E. moved like a single organism, every team slotting into place with purpose.
There were too many of them in the next space. Riley counted without meaning to—ten, fifteen—then lost track as more spilled in from side corridors. Over thirty by the time the room was fully in view.
They cut through them.
Not recklessly. Not brutally. With intent.
The leopards were ghosts—there one heartbeat, gone the next, blades flashing in tight arcs, bodies dropping before alarms could fully form.
Razorbacks were force—shoulders driving men back into walls, weapons barking in controlled pairs, space clearing around them like a tide pulling out.
Lions hit like a closing vice, coordinated fire breaking resistance into fragments that the others absorbed and finished—methodical, relentless, no wasted rounds, no hesitation once a target was marked.
Gorillas moved through the chaos with frightening calm, anchoring the line, stabilizing angles, stepping over the wounded without a glance as they secured lanes of fire and finished threats where they lay.
Wolves were everywhere—Rafe at point, Dorian moving through gaps Riley could barely see until they were already closing.
They didn’t shout. They didn’t waste breath. They ended the fight.
Riley’s stomach knotted, her chest burning with something that was part fear, part awe.
The room fell silent in pieces—gunfire tapering, shouts cutting off mid-word, the last of the resistance collapsing to the floor.
The cameras kept rolling over bodies and broken equipment, over blood darkening concrete, over the controlled, efficient movements of the teams as they secured the space.
Riley drew a breath that felt like it scraped her lungs.
Then she saw what they had been protecting.
Chains bolted into the walls. Medical equipment pushed into corners, IV stands, restraints, scorched marks where something had gone wrong and someone had tried to erase it.
Tables stained and scrubbed and stained again.
The sickly, sterile brightness of surgical lighting hanging over a room that had never been meant to be clean.
Riley’s hands curled into fists. She’d seen hospitals. Trauma bays. This was neither. This was purpose-built for something that should never exist. Hybrids had been developed there, but there had been no hybrids among the forces the E.S.E had fought.
She turned to Ivan. “Don’t you think it is odd that they are not using the hybrids they are creating to guard this place?”
Ivan and Victor shared a quick look. “That is a fucking good point.”
Elara, who had stepped into the Command Center halfway through the battle for the inner sanctum of the facility, stepped forward. “Maybe they see humans as expendable, and don’t want to waste their creations?”
Riley frowned as she thought that over. “I have no doubt that they believe humans to be expendable, but they did not know that E.S.E were going to storm that place tonight.”
“There’s a system here,” Dorian said over comms, breath steady despite everything. “Multiple terminals.”
“Hack into it” Victor replied from Command. “We want everything.”
One of the Gorillas moved a case into frame. A drive was slotted into the main unit. For a heartbeat nothing happened—then the data began to stream. Lines of code. File trees opening like wounds. Command hummed as their systems bit into the facility’s, pulling down everything it had tried to hide.
“And if whatever it is on these servers is so damn important that they surrounded it with an army,” Riley surmised out aloud. “Then why were the hybrids not there?”
Ivan smiled. “Another good point, Riley. You’ll put us out of a job soon.”
Riley leaned closer to the information that was streaming into the center, scanning what she could understand—logs, schedules, medical notes that made her skin crawl. The creation of something that was never meant to be balanced. Never meant to choose.
Then something snagged her attention.
A cluster of files buried deep in the architecture, flagged but heavily encrypted, tagged with a naming convention that felt deliberate rather than automated. Not Chimera-standard. Not random. Her pulse kicked as she leaned closer.
“This section,” she said, pointing. “That pattern doesn’t match the rest.”
Ivan stepped in beside her, eyes narrowing as he took it in. “Yeah. That’s custom encryption. And old-school nasty.” He straightened slowly. “Whatever’s in there isn’t meant to be found quickly. It’s going to take time to crack.”
Malik’s voice came through from the far side of Command, already distracted by incoming data. “Flag it and lock it down. I’ll get to it as soon as I’m back.”
“Download complete,” Jamal said.
They moved again, clearing the last of the inner rooms, checking corners, cataloguing what could be taken and marking what would be destroyed. The cameras finally pulled back. The fight was over.
Only then did Riley realize her hands were shaking.
The return took longer than she wanted it to. She paced. Sat. Stood again. Staring at the elevator doors. When they finally opened, she didn’t think—she ran.
Rafe came through first. Then Dorian. Then the rest of them, faces marked with sweat and grime and something darker. Riley reached them on instinct, arms around Rafe’s neck, then Dorian’s shoulders, holding on as if letting go might make the world tilt again.
Behind them, there was a chorus of noise.
“Hey,” Kairo called, mock-wounded. “What about the rest of us? We don’t even get a handshake?”
“Yeah,” Aleksy added, dry as dust. “We bled for this and all we get is the breeze.”
A few of them laughed. A few didn’t. The Lions exchanged quiet looks—something unspoken passing between them that wasn’t jealousy so much as a soft, aching recognition of what they didn’t have.
Rafe’s arm tightened around Riley. Dorian’s hand stayed warm at her back.
“It’s time for us to go,” Riley said, voice steady despite the way her heart was still racing. “All three of us.”
From the far side of the room, Victor’s mouth curved into something like approval. Ivan gave a small nod. “Go,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”
They took the stairs down, the noise of Command fading with each step. Riley’s body was still humming with everything she’d seen, everything she’d felt—fear, awe, relief braided so tightly she couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.
Rafe’s hand found hers. Dorian’s shoulder brushed hers as they walked, the contact deliberate, grounding, a silent reminder that she was bracketed between them, not protected so much as chosen.
Down on their floor, the world narrowed to quiet again. To breath. To the hum of the building through the soles of her feet. To the simple, almost shocking reality of being together after something that could have gone so wrong.
Inside the apartment, the door hadn’t even closed before Dorian’s hand was at her lower back, guiding her, steady and sure. Rafe turned her toward him, his gaze dark and intent, the kind that stripped without touching. “You were shaking up there,” he said quietly. “Talk to me.”
“I was watching you,” Riley answered, voice rough with everything she hadn’t said yet. “And all I could think was that if I didn’t feel you both when you came back, I wasn’t going to breathe properly again.”
Something shifted between them—heat, need, relief, all braided tight.
Rafe cupped her jaw, thumb brushing the corner of her mouth. “You don’t have to be strong in here.”
Dorian’s breath was warm on her shoulder. “You don’t have to be anything except with us.”
The words undid her.
She reached for them at the same time, fingers curling into Rafe’s shirt, into the solid line of Dorian’s arm.
Their mouths found her—first Rafe, unhurried and consuming, then Dorian, slower, deeper, as if he were memorizing her.
The contrast made her knees soften. The heat of them, the weight of them, the way they closed around her without trapping her—only choosing her, again and again.
Rafe rested his forehead against hers. “You’re ours because you choose us,” he murmured. “Not because we take.”
“And we’re yours,” Dorian added quietly. “Forever and always.”
The emotion was thick in her throat, desire threading through it until she couldn’t separate the two. “Then take me to a place where I don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “Where it’s just us.”
They drew her close, hands warm, mouths still lingering, bodies fitting as if the world outside had never existed. Her heart was still pounding—but now with want, with certainty, with the aching, dangerous sweetness of belonging.
What followed was not gentle. It was not hurried either.
It was heat and hands and breath, the kind of intimacy that left no part of her untouched, no part of them held back.
Whatever shape the night took, it was theirs—claimed not by force, but by choice, by need, by the quiet, devastating truth that she had fallen for both of them at once. Hard.
****
T he city slid past in streaks of grey and sodium light, Seattle already falling away behind them.
Christian sat in the back seat, one arm braced against the door, fingers flexing slowly as the car ate up the miles.
The engine purred beneath them, smooth and powerful, driven by one of his creations.
The hybrid didn’t look back. It never needed to.
Its focus was absolute, attention locked on the road ahead, reactions sharpened beyond anything human.
They had taken it.
Not Chimera’s facility—his.
Christian let out a short, humorless breath. “Idiots.”
There was no reason to stay in Seattle now.
The facility had served its purpose until it hadn’t.
He had turned his back on Chimera long before tonight, taken what he needed and left the human bastards behind.
That facility had been his crowning glory, it had never been theirs—not really. It had been a proving ground.
A pivot point.
Where he had stopped making monsters for men who thought in terms of control, and started making something else entirely.
Gods.
Like him.
Power without permission. Evolution without restraint. A future where he and his kind bowed to no one.
The screen embedded in the back of the seat glowed softly as Christian’s fingers moved, calm and precise.
The shadow network he’d threaded through the facility’s systems was already awake.
They’d missed it. Of course they had. It had been designed to survive a raid—to sleep, to wait, to rise only when the bait was taken.
“There you are,” he murmured as the signal bloomed into view.
The digital marker pulsed steadily, woven through the data they were so carefully siphoning into Command. Not a virus. Not a trace. Nothing anyone would notice until it was far too late.
A door.
And it was opening.
Coordinates began to resolve, bleeding through layers of encryption he had engineered to be irresistible. They thought they were harvesting intelligence, cataloguing evidence, dismantling something dangerous.
In reality, they were carrying him straight to her.
Christian leaned back as the car accelerated, fury coiling tight in his chest, satisfaction cutting through it like a blade. “You took the wrong thing from me,” he said softly. “And now I know exactly where you’ve put her.”
The hunt was no longer theoretical.
It had momentum.