Chapter 8 Ronan
Ronan
Wind clawed at the side of the truck as it climbed higher into the mountains, engine grinding, tires spitting gravel over the edge of a drop that disappeared into fog.
I stared out the cracked passenger window, watching the world fall away beneath us—pine forest, rusted lift cables from some abandoned ski resort, a ribbon of river glinting far below like a knife.
We were close. I could feel it in my bones.
“Elevation’s killing my knees,” Miles muttered from the back seat, boots thudding against the floorboard. “You sure this intel is solid, Pierce? Because if we drove three hours straight up a cliff for nothing, I’m filing a complaint.”
“File it with Hydra,” I said. “If you can find anyone still breathing.”
Aaron snorted softly beside him. Jase didn’t say anything—he rarely did when we were this close to an op. His silence was its own kind of hum, a low-level readiness that matched the tension in my spine.
I checked the GPS again. Cyclone’s route blinked across the screen, a thin red line that ended at a dot marked BILLY GOAT FARM.
Of course.
I thumbed the comms button tucked inside my collar. “Delta Five to Cyclone. Tell me this goat farm has more than goats.”
Static crackled, then Cyclone’s dry voice filled my ear. “You’re right on top of the access road. Side note: those aren’t technically goats, they’re a crossbreed—”
“Don’t care,” I cut in.
He sighed. “Bunker entrance is three klicks above the farm, carved into the north face. You’re looking for a maintenance hatch disguised as a snow-control shed. Warm signatures inside, enough power draw to light a small city. If Lena’s there, that’s where they’d keep her.”
My fingers tightened on the GPS unit.
Lena.
For three years, her name had been a ghost under my ribs. A line I didn’t cross. A door I didn’t open.
Now the door was cracked, and every breath hurt.
We rounded a switchback. The farmhouse came into view—weather-beaten wood, sagging roof, a pen of restless animals clustered near a stone wall. A man in a wool cap looked up as our truck approached, cigarette glowing between his fingers.
“Showtime,” Aaron murmured.
Jase rested his rifle across his thighs, eyes scanning the tree line. “No overwatch,” he said quietly. “If they’re here, they’re buried deep.”
“Which is exactly how Ascendancy likes it,” Miles said. “Moles and tunnels and freaks with god complexes.”
I pushed open my door before the truck fully stopped. Cold air slammed into me, thin with altitude and carrying the metallic tang of impending snow. It was damn freezing.
The farmer watched us approach, his gaze lingering a little too long on the truck’s plates. He didn’t flinch at four heavily built men in civilian layers that still screamed military.
I forced my jaw to relax. “Dobryy vecher,” I said in rusty local dialect. “We’re lost.”
His eyes flicked to mine. Something shifted there—recognition, maybe. Or calculation.
“You are not lost,” he replied in accented English. “Men like you never are.”
Aaron muttered under his breath, “Friendly.”
I stepped closer, hands in my jacket pockets, showing no weapon even though I had three. “We’re looking for an old avalanche station. North Face. Heard it’s abandoned.”
He smoked in silence for a moment, studying each of us in turn. Up here, you didn’t live long if you trusted the wrong person. I respected that.
Finally, he jerked his chin toward the ridge. “Old road. No one uses it now. Too dangerous.”
“We like dangerous,” Miles said with a quick, humorless grin.
The farmer’s gaze lingered on me again. “You go up there, you don’t come back.”
I almost said I don’t plan to leave anyone behind this time, but the words would’ve been for me, not him. Instead, I gave a small nod, a warrior’s acknowledgment.
“Thank you,” I said.
He ground his cigarette out on the railing. “There was a woman,” he added suddenly. “Last week. In a truck with dark windows. She did not walk on her own.”
Every muscle in my body went still.
“Describe her,” I said, my voice lower than I intended.
He shrugged. “I see only her hair when the wind moved the blanket. Dark. Long. Like winter ravens.” His gaze sharpened, like he’d just realized he’d said too much. “They went up. Same road. No one comes down.”
Behind me, the guys went quiet. The only sound was the restless shifting of animals in the pen and the soft hiss of the wind.
Ravens.
Lena’s hair had always driven me insane. In the worst places on earth, it had been the one beautiful thing that didn’t make sense.
My heart kicked hard against my ribs.
“Appreciate the directions,” I said. “Stay inside tonight.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “I always do.”
We loaded back into the truck, wordless until we crested the next hill and the farmhouse disappeared from view.
“You think it’s her,” Aaron said finally.
“I think Ascendancy grabbed a female prisoner with long dark hair and hauled her up to a classified mountain bunker a week after we intercepted a comm mentioning a ‘journalist asset,’” I replied. “So yeah. I think it’s her.”
Miles whistled softly. “Three years, man. I don’t know if I’d be hoping or puking.”
“Both,” I said.
That earned a ghost of a smile from Jase.
Cyclone’s voice crackled in again. “You’ve got maybe four hours before the weather closes in. Storm rolling off the north face. If you’re not inside by then, extraction gets messy.”
“We’ll be inside,” I said.
“Copy that. Sending you the latest thermal. And Pierce?”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “If she’s there… don’t let the objective cloud the mission.”
I swallowed the surge of anger. Cyclone wasn’t wrong. He was doing his job, which included reminding me that we weren’t just chasing a woman I’d failed—we were chasing the head of The Ascendancy’s European node.
I just wished it didn’t feel like I was walking into the same nightmare I’d already lived once.
“I know the mission,” I said. “Pierce out.”
We parked the truck beneath a stand of twisted pines, disguised it with a camo tarp, and shouldered our packs. The rest of the ascent we did on foot, boots crunching over ice-crusted rock, breath fogging in the air.
Aaron fell into step beside me. “You never talk about that op,” he said quietly. “Morocco. Your team.”
“Nothing to talk about,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Miles called softly from ahead.
Jase glanced back, one brow ticking up. That was as close as he got to joining in.
I tightened the strap on my pack. “We walked into a trap. They died. I didn’t. End of story.”
“But this guy on the intercom.” Aaron watched me from the corner of his eye. “The one in Tunisia, at the Ascendancy hub. The one who said you were still cleaning up your last mistake. He’s tied to what happened.”
It wasn’t a question.
My teeth ground together. “His name’s Viktor Markov. Ex–Russian intelligence, freelance butcher. Hydra used him for their blackest work. Ascendancy inherited him.”
“And he’s in this facility,” Miles added. “Or at least connected enough to use Lena as leverage.”
The thought made the air colder.
Snow started to fall in fine, hard pellets, stinging my face.
“I’m not going to let him touch her again,” I said, surprising myself with how raw it came out. “Not one more time.”
Aaron’s jaw flexed. “Good. Because if he does, we’ll kill him twice.”
Jase nodded once, the mountain wind tugging at his hood. “Eyes up,” he murmured. “Shed, ten o’clock.”
The structure emerged from the fog like a bad memory—a squat concrete box, half-buried in the slope, painted the same dull gray as the rock. An ancient AVALANCHE CONTROL sign hung crooked over the door, bullet holes rusted around the edges.
To anyone else, it looked like a forgotten utility building.
To us, it looked like a problem waiting to be solved.
We dropped into a crouch behind a cluster of boulders. I pulled out Cyclone’s thermal print. The shed glowed faintly—just enough to be wrong.
“Two guards inside,” I said. “Heat signature below ground—big. This is our hatch.”
Miles rubbed his gloved hands together. “So we knock?”
“Too loud,” Jase said.
“Too slow,” Aaron added.
“I wasn’t actually serious,” Miles muttered.
I slid my rifle into a more comfortable position and exhaled, letting the mountain, the cold, and the mission settle over me like armor.
“Jase, take the left door angle. Aaron, right window. Miles, you’re on overwatch the second they realize their avalanche hut doesn’t avalanche anymore.” I met each of their eyes in turn. “We go in silent and we stay silent until we’re below ground. No alarms. No hero shit.”
Aaron smirked. “We’re SEALs. Hero shit is kind of the job description.”
I didn’t smile back. “Today, the job description is ghosts.”
The banter faded. The mountain suddenly felt as if it were holding its breath with us, the whole world poised on the edge of something it couldn’t see yet.
For three years, I’d lived with the image of Lena’s body buried in rubble from that blown street in Korash, the last place I’d seen her. For three years, every lead had gone nowhere.
Now I stood at the mouth of the kind of place Ascendancy would use for their worst secrets, with intel that said a journalist asset had been redirected here for “long-term conditioning.”
I didn’t know why they’d kept her alive.
I just knew that if I hesitated, if I let the ghosts of my last team slow my hand even a fraction of a second, I’d lose her all over again.
I checked my watch, then my comms.
“Delta Five,” I said, voice low. “We go on my mark.”
Snow swirled, catching in my lashes. Somewhere far below, a dog barked once and went silent.
I thought of Lena’s laugh, the way it used to curl at the edges when she didn’t want anyone to know she was amused. The way she’d push her hair behind her ear when she was pretending not to be scared.
Hold on, cuore mio, I thought. Just a little longer.
“Three,” I whispered. “Two. One.”
I rose from cover and moved for the shed, my team ghosts at my back, the past and the present on a collision course deep beneath a nameless mountain.