4. Chapter 4 - Matt #2
Romania, Matt decided, appeared to collect ominous scenery competitively.
The pilot’s voice crackled through the headset system a moment later. “Approaching final insertion corridor.”
The atmosphere inside the cabin tightened.
Conversation disappeared almost at once while operatives adjusted headsets, secured equipment, and performed final weapon checks with quiet efficiency.
The casual edges of the flight vanished beneath the familiar focus that hung over military teams seconds before deployment, when everyone stopped wasting energy on unnecessary conversation and narrowed their attention toward survival instead.
The familiar shift settled through his body as training pushed emotion aside in favor of focus. The transition always felt strangely mechanical after enough deployments, like part of his mind simply reached over and lowered a switch whenever missions became real.
Except this mission still carried that same uneasy pull beneath Matt’s ribs.
The monastery kept returning to his thoughts no matter how hard he tried to focus on more immediate concerns.
The tunnels. The claw marks carved through stone.
The blurred thermal image hidden deep underground.
Every time he replayed the mission briefing in his head, the same instinctive curiosity surfaced again beneath the caution training had spent years trying to sharpen into survival.
That was the part he distrusted most.
Fear made sense. Fear kept people alert.
Curiosity, on the other hand, had a long history of convincing otherwise intelligent people to walk willingly toward dangerous things just to understand them better.
And somehow, despite everything they had seen and heard so far, part of him still wanted to know what was waiting beneath that monastery.
The realization bothered him more than the danger itself.
Beside him, Baptiste secured the holster at his side before speaking quietly enough that only Matt could hear him over the engines.
“You’re thinking loudly again.”
Matt kept his eyes forward. “I’m starting to resent that phrase on a personal level.”
“It remains accurate.”
“That seems medically impossible.”
Baptiste glanced toward him briefly, his expression unreadable beneath the dim red cabin lights. “Most predators eventually learn to trust instinct.”
Matt looked back toward the storm outside the window. “And what happens when instinct keeps trying to drag you toward something dangerous?”
For the first time in several minutes, Baptiste hesitated before answering.
“Then you learn whether the danger is hunting you,” he said calmly, “or calling you home.”
The line lodged cold and heavy beneath Matt’s ribs. Before he could respond, warning lights flashed briefly overhead as the aircraft dropped through another violent pocket of turbulence. Then the cloud layer beneath them finally broke apart, and the monastery appeared below.
***
Matt leaned forward as the aircraft descended through broken cloud cover, his eyes fixed on the structure spread across the ridge below them.
Even from the air, the place looked wrong in ways that had nothing to do with age alone.
Sections of the outer walls had collapsed centuries ago, leaving jagged gaps of black stone exposed to the weather, while narrow towers rose unevenly from the ruins like broken teeth against the storm-dark sky.
Nothing about it resembled the peaceful isolation monasteries were supposed to inspire. The entire structure looked defensive.
Ancient forests swallowed the mountainside around it in dense shadows, and the only visible road leading toward the monastery had partially collapsed somewhere farther down the ridge.
Rain lashed across the ruins in silver sheets while lightning illuminated the surrounding peaks often enough to reveal how completely isolated the place truly was.
Matt understood without thinking why nobody would come looking for screams out here. “Jesus,” he muttered almost to himself.
Beside him, Baptiste studied the monastery through the window without speaking. That silence worried Matt more than commentary would have.
The aircraft circled once above the ridge while the pilot searched for a safe descent path through the storm.
From above, Matt could finally see the excavation site spread across the monastery grounds.
Floodlights cast harsh white beams across torn earth and collapsed stone while temporary fencing surrounded portions of the ruins below.
Several black transport vehicles sat parked near a cluster of portable structures that looked hastily assembled against the weather.
Beyond all of it lay the entrance. Matt spotted it almost before he realized it.
A massive fracture split through the monastery courtyard where part of the earth had collapsed inward, exposing descending stone structures buried beneath the original foundation.
Floodlights illuminated only the upper portions of the excavation before darkness swallowed the lower depths completely.
Even from the aircraft, Matt could feel pressure radiating from that opening.
The reaction hit instantly and hard enough that his breath caught for half a second. The hyena beneath his skin surged awake with sharp restless attention the moment his eyes lingered on the exposed descent leading beneath the monastery.
Fear would have made sense.
This felt disturbingly familiar.
Matt gripped the edge of the harness without fully realizing he was doing it, his attention locked on the exposed stone corridors vanishing underground.
Beside him, Baptiste noticed the movement. “You felt it.” It was not phrased as a question.
Matt kept staring at the opening below while rain streaked violently across the aircraft windows. “Tell me I’m imagining that.”
Baptiste was quiet for just long enough to remove any remaining hope. “No.”
The answer cut deeper than Matt wanted it to.
Below them, floodlights illuminated the upper excavation site in harsh white beams, but the deeper sections remained untouched by the light, swallowed completely by darkness that somehow looked deeper than it should have from this distance.
Matt could not stop looking at it. And worse, some part of him no longer wanted to.
The aircraft descended lower through the rain while the monastery expanded across the windows, growing larger and more oppressive with every passing second.
Matt could now see movement below as ground teams hurried between floodlights and equipment crates while armed operatives secured the landing zone against the storm.
Nobody down there looked calm either, and Matt found that far more concerning than the storm. “The fact that nobody down there looks calm seems worth mentioning.”
“Landing in sixty seconds,” the pilot announced over the headset.
A quiet tension settled over the cabin. Operatives gave their weapons one final inspection while remaining strapped into their seats. Commander Vale secured the tablet at her side, then rested one hand against the deployment hatch as she watched the storm through the small observation window.
Matt cinched the straps on his harness instead of checking his rifle again.
The closer they got to the ground, the stronger the feeling beneath his ribs became.
Whatever instinct kept pulling him toward the monastery no longer seemed distant or abstract.
It moved beneath his thoughts with quiet, restless insistence, blurring the line between his own judgment and the predator instincts pressing steadily beneath it.
He hated that feeling on principle.
Rain hammered violently against the fuselage as the landing gear deployed beneath the aircraft, sending a heavy vibration through the cabin floor.
Another flash of lightning illuminated the mountainside below in stark white detail, and for a single brief second the excavation entrance beneath the monastery became visible through the storm.
Matt’s breath caught.
Massive claw marks surrounded the stone entrance, carved deep enough that even centuries of weather had failed to erase them.
They looked ancient, older than the monastery itself, like the ruins had been built around something that had already existed long before human hands ever touched the mountain.
Then the lightning vanished.
Darkness swallowed the ruins again almost instantly, but Matt couldn’t pull his eyes away from where the entrance had vanished beneath the storm.
Because for half a second, he could have sworn something inside the excavation had looked back at him.
***
The aircraft touched down hard enough to rattle the entire cabin.
Rain exploded across the fuselage while the landing gear slammed against uneven ground beneath them, and for a brief second the transport tilted sideways hard enough that several operatives instinctively grabbed for nearby restraints before the pilot corrected the angle.
Then the engines sank into a lower mechanical roar.
“Perimeter first. Then we advance.” Vale stepped toward the hatch.
The deployment hatch lowered into the storm, and cold air hit the cabin all at once, sharp with rain, mud, fuel exhaust, and something older underneath it that Matt could not identify.
The smell reminded him vaguely of wet stone left sealed underground too long, as though the mountain itself had exhaled after centuries of holding its breath.
The wolf operatives exited first, rifles already raised as they spread outward into defensive positions around the landing zone.
Floodlights cut harsh white beams through the rain while ground crews hurried toward the aircraft with equipment carts and secured cases half-hidden beneath waterproof tarps.
Matt stepped out into the storm a second later and understood why everyone looked tense.
The monastery felt physically wrong, as if the mountain itself carried a pressure Matt could sense beneath his skin.