Chapter 36
Callum
The conference table was too clean.
Empty mugs lined the far end, half a plate of stale biscuits pushed aside like they’d forgotten what normal looked like. None of us had touched a damn thing since we sat down. The tension in the room was thick enough to choke on.
Reaper leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled under his chin.
Kieran sat across from me, arms folded tight like he needed to physically keep himself from breaking something.
Seraphina stood off to the side, near the screen, scrolling through the pulled files like she was skimming a grocery list—except every line was a fucking war crime.
The air smelled like sweat and steel.
“She’s safe,” Kieran said, breaking the silence first. “The girl. Dropped her off early this morning. No tails. Changed vehicles twice. No one’s gonna find her.”
“Good,” I muttered. “She deserves to forget we even exist.”
“She won’t,” Reaper said flatly. “Not after what she’s seen.”
I looked at him then. Hard. “She’s seen enough.”
He held my gaze for a second longer than necessary—then looked away. Smart man .
Seraphina clicked something on the tablet, and the screen behind her changed to a sprawling diagram.
Names, faces, aliases. Transaction chains.
Encryption markers, most of which Kieran had already sliced through like tissue paper.
And at the center of it all—Facility E. Still blurred, still shadowed, but starting to take shape.
“You ready for the rundown?” she asked, her voice steady.
I nodded once. “Aye. Let’s bleed this bastard dry.”
“Rook’s personal tech was locked up tighter than most government black sites. But we’ve cracked it. His comms go back ten years. Most of it’s scrubbed jargon, business fronts, clean money run through dirty hands. But there’s one folder he kept off cloud—hardwired, local only. Kieran found it.”
Kieran tapped his finger on the table. “Labelled Harvests. Real charming.”
The screen changed. Photos. Surveillance. Clips of bodies. Children. Teens. Adults. Files tagged with medical notes, behavioral stats, control thresholds.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, dragging a hand down me face.
“This is just his archive,” Seraphina said, quieter now. “The girl told us there were levels. Hierarchies. Facility E wasn’t just about breaking them—it was about building custom profiles. Programming them. Auctioning by obedience, submission, pain tolerance.”
She tapped again. The next image loaded.
It was a blueprint.
Facility E—at least part of it .
It looked like a goddamn maze. Subterranean levels. Private quarters, isolation chambers, surgical suites, observation wings. And something labeled Nexus Core that none of us had a name for yet.
“The girl said they called it ‘the reset room,’” she added. “She didn’t know what went on inside. No one ever came out the same.”
I clenched my jaw so tight it ached.
“This is deeper than trafficking,” Reaper muttered. “This is structural. Institutionalized. State-sponsored, maybe. Or at least state-ignored.”
“They had guards with military-grade loadouts,” Kieran said, voice low. “Encrypted radios. Shift rotations. We're not talking about freelance sadists anymore. This is organized. Financed. Protected.”
I stood, couldn’t sit any longer.
Walked to the screen, stared at the schematic like I could rip it off the wall and strangle it.
“So,” I said, voice steady, “what’s our strategy?”
Seraphina exchanged a glance with Reaper. She was the one who answered.
“Rook gave us names. People he dealt with directly. Some he feared. Others he owed. If we hit them smart, surgical, we start cutting off the head from the neck. Blackdawn’s got too many limbs to hack at random.”
I nodded. “Show me the names. ”
The list populated.
Nine. All high-profile. All involved in various aspects of Blackdawn’s operations—transportation, recruitment, laundering, security, and communications. One was a sitting senator. Another, a Silicon Valley CEO with investments in “youth behavioral reform centers.” The rest were equally charming.
“They’re not ghosts,” Kieran said. “They live in mansions. They throw charity balls. They walk around like gods ‘cause no one’s ever put a bullet between their eyes.”
“Yet,” I muttered.
“Two of them are connected directly to Facility E’s funding,” Seraphina said. “They keep it hidden under an NGO—called Project Ascent. ”
I barked a laugh, humorless. “More like Project Descent. Straight into hell.”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
I crossed my arms, staring at the list.
Every name was a countdown. A fuse waiting to be lit.
“This isn't about revenge anymore,” I said, eyes locked on the board. “This is eradication. We’re not just kicking over the nest—we’re burning the whole forest.”
Kieran sat forward. “Then we start picking them off. Quietly, cleanly. If we go loud too soon, they’ll scatter. Lock down Facility E. Move the kids. Wipe their servers.”
“We go in sequence,” Seraphina agreed. “Weakest to strongest. Work our way up the food chain. By the time the top tier realizes what’s happening, they’ll have nowhere left to run.”
Reaper finally spoke, quiet but sure. “Then it starts tonight.”
I turned to face them all—this strange, broken, brilliant team I’d kill for without a second thought.
“You’re in this,” I said. “There’s no crawlin’ back once we start. No slow lane. No halfway.”
Seraphina looked me dead in the eye.
“We were never halfway.”
And for the first time since I opened Rook’s file, something inside me settled. Not peace. Not hope. Just certainty.
We knew the rot now.
And we knew how to burn it.