Page 150 of Jax
The space beyond wasn’t another narrow corridor. It opened wide, cavernous, a warehouse within the warehouse. From the outside, the building had looked like every other forgotten husk along the industrial strip. Inside, it had been gutted, rebuilt, and sharpened into something surgical. The ceiling arched high above with exposed steel trusses, the walls reinforced, the floor a smooth slab designed for weight. Rows of steel racks stretched into the dark, each one stacked with crates stenciled in Cyrillic, markings too familiar to mistake.
Weapons.
Enough to supply an army.
Sully gave a slow, barely audible whistle of surprise. “What. The. Fuuuuuck…”
We were surrounded by rifles. Launchers. Ammunition stacked in neat, deadly towers. Each crate was sealed, catalogued, and ready for distribution. The Dom Krovi wasn’t just dabbling in blood money. This was way deeper than that. This was the makings of an empire.
We fanned out automatically, but no one spoke. The silence wasn’t reverence—it was shock and rage, controlled and sharpened to a point. Every weapon here was a thread of violence that would bleed out into streets, cities, families. And we were standing in the middle of their cathedral.
On the far wall, two more doors waited. Heavy. Reinforced. One wider, bolted with thick external latches and an electronic pad glowing faint green. The other smaller, locked tight, a single strip of light bleeding beneath it.
The hum of machinery deepened from behind the larger door. Steady. Rhythmic. Reassuring in the worst way.
That was no cache. That was containment.
She was in there.
And on the other side of the second door—records, maybe? Names. Ledgers. The kind of evidence that could finally nail them to the wall.
The cold pressed sharper. My grip tightened on the rifle.
We weren’t just breaking in, anymore.
We were cracking open the heart of the beast.
And we were out of time.
34
Jax
There’sa moment in every op, right after the breach, right before the fallout, when time folds in on itself. Not slow, not fast. Just precise. Measured in breath intervals and micro-decisions, in the arc of a trigger finger and the slope of a boot print on wet concrete. It’s not adrenaline. It’s calculus. A low-grade hum behind your molars, telling you every variable is still in play and the equation hasn’t been solved yet.
We were in that moment now, with the mission incomplete, the objective unsecured, the data untouched, the building uncleared, and Violet still just a hope rather than a certainty. The door stood ahead of us, quiet and unremarkable in its design, but undeniably significant. It wasn’t labeled or reinforced, yet the air around it shifted, a subtle drop in pressure, the way the world recalibrates right before impact. Carrick felt it too. His posture changed, grounded with certainty, as if stepping through wasn’t a decision, but a consequence already in motion. Niko was lowering his tools, mouth tight, gaze sharp. The rest of the hallway dimmed, not in brightness, but in relevance.
This was the pivot point, the moment when the mission would stop being a checklist of actions and start showing its cost. Not just in risk, but in reality. Because behind that door, there weren’t tactics waiting. There wasn’t a plan to outmaneuver. There was a person. And people never follow the math.
The lock released with a quiet click, the kind that felt deliberate, like it had been holding its breath. Niko stepped back in silence, already folding his kit with that steady rhythm that said nothing and meant everything. Carrick took his place, shouldering the door open. It groaned as it moved, metal scraping metal, reluctant and raw. The sound stretched into the space ahead, ancient and full of teeth, like the door had been holding back more than air.
What spilled out wasn’t just atmosphere. It was memory, turned fetid. A crawlspace of time collapsed inward, humid with old breath and older pain. The scent was suffocating—mildew soaked deep into concrete, the sharp tang of metal gone sour, and the unmistakable trace of blood that had never been fully scrubbed from the walls. Behind us, the single bulb stretched our shadows forward, but the room didn’t yield to the light. It absorbed it, swallowed it. This wasn’t the kind of darkness that hid something dangerous. It was the kind you used to bury what you didn’t want found.
The room had a single occupant.
She was there, in the corner, folded in like origami undone halfway through completion. Knees pulled up, arms wrapped tight, shoulders sunken. Her shirt clung to her like fabric too tired to hold shape, stained and stretched across a frame left hollow by time and neglect. One of her feet was bare, the other clad in an old, dirty sneaker, as if they’d kidnapped her in the middle of getting dressed. Her skin, where visible, held the dull hue of prolonged hunger. Hair, dark and tangled, veiled most ofher face, dusted with fragments of the room itself. But her eyes, those didn’t hide. They watched us. They had from the second the door cracked open and our silhouettes breached the edge of her world.
She didn’t flinch or speak. Didn’t cry out or recoil. Just watched, calm in the way that only comes after terror has long since stopped offering surprises. Her silence wasn’t stunned. It was surrender. Resignation was embedded in every breath. Whatever fire had once lived behind her eyes had dulled into something harder to name.
No plea lived in her face. No hope. Just a quiet bracing, like she’d counted her ends so many times they no longer startled her. She wasn’t expecting to be saved. She was waiting to disappear.
Sully moved first, the way he always did, anchored and deliberate, like salvation had chosen him as its personal ambassador. There was something about the way he stepped into that room, hands empty, posture open, that made even the stale air feel less cruel. No bravado. No noise. Just energy, tuned to the frequency of a man who understood the language of trauma. He crouched low without hesitation, folding into her line of sight but not breaking it, his voice soft enough to pass through walls built from silence and suffering.
“You’re safe now,” he said, the words carrying no command, only certainty. As if the statement had always existed here, carved deep into the bones of the building, and he was just giving it back to her. “We’ve got you now.”
She blinked—slow, cautious, her lashes glued from dried tears. There was no reaching, and no recoil. Her face didn’t collapse, but something fractured at the edges. A shift, not a shatter. Like a surface held together too long finally allowing a fault line through. Her voice rasped up from a place unused to sound, rough and tentative.
“Stella.” The name came out brittle, like it had to scrape its way past damage just to be heard. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even a call. It was belief and desperation twisted into a single word, and it cracked something open in me I didn’t know was still soft.
