Page 140 of Jax
“I can’t bring in the department,” Quinn said. “Too many leaks. Too many risks I can’t plug. But you guys? You’re ghosts. And I trust you.”
Quinn wasn’t giving us an order. But hewasasking. And his words rang true.
Across the room, Niko’s nod came first, immediate and certain. Carrick’s fists curled against the table, jaw clenched like he was holding back something jagged. Sully exhaled again, this time with purpose. Bellamy leaned in, her posture unreadable but focused. Deacon hadn’t moved from the window, but his stance said enough.
I didn’t raise my voice, but it almost shook with the strength of my conviction. “We’re in.”
I ended the call, but Quinn’s voice didn’t leave. It echoed with consequence, not sound. The order didn’t need repeating. We were already moving.
Niko moved first, re-centering. He set the marker down and shifted to the corkboard, overlaying zoning maps with the new data. His hands moved with a rhythm carved from instinct. Pins and string followed, paths and angles. Entry. Exit. This was how he made sense of chaos, grinding it into lines and order.
Carrick opened the backup laptop. The screen hadn’t caught up, but his fingers were already typing, running tactical programs, calculating routes. His jaw didn’t flex. His posture didn’t shift. But his spine had straightened like a weapon being drawn.
Sully pushed off the table and made for the gear locker. His voice slipped into the room in a low cadence, too fluid to be casual. Radios. Thermal. Grip tape. Fallback kits.
Bellamy stayed in her chair, still and alert. Her stillness wasn’t passive. It was clinical. She tracked every shift in the room with surgical calm, watching for the moment things tipped from planning into action. She wasn’t absent. She was measuring the edges of impact before it came.
Deacon reached for the cold coffee on the windowsill and took a long sip. He didn’t comment. He never did. But anticipation radiated off of him like gravity. He didn’t need to announce his readiness. He just was.
And Stella, her voice broke into the moment, softer than it should have been, but absolute in its clarity. A single breath shaped into truth.
“That’s it,” she said. “Where they kept me. That’s where she is.”
It wasn’t a question. Her voice didn’t rise or falter. It landed with impact, recognition cutting clean through the last thread of disbelief. The shift in her wasn’t loud, but it was gravitational. Her body didn’t stagger or collapse. She didn’t grab for something to hold. She simply went still, anchored in a way that warned against mistaking composure for peace.
I moved toward her and brushed a hand across the small of her back. Just a tether. My way of saying I’m here. You don’t have to do this alone. She didn’t turn or lean in, but she didn’t pull away either. And for her, that was enough.
Niko grabbed a fresh marker and started framing the plan in color-coded logic. Red for breach. Black for fallback. Blue for systems we’d have to cut on the fly. We didn’t have every answer. We never did. That was the job, interrogating the unknown until it gave up something useful. You plannedfor failure, for fallout, for the kinds of mistakes that didn’t announce themselves until it was too late.
And through it all, Stella moved like none of it could stop her, like forward was the only thing that made sense, like slowing down wasn’t in her vocabulary.
I watched her, this woman who no longer looked like someone surviving. Shoulders squared, eyes fixed on something only she could see. She didn’t look fragile or afraid. She looked inevitable. Not the girl who once flinched at her own heartbeat. Not the woman who shook beneath my blanket. This version had been forged by everything that failed to break her. Her posture didn’t ask for permission. It announced readiness. She would walk into hell to drag her sister out, and if she didn’t make it, she’d go down swinging, because standing still would cost more.
The room adjusted around her like it always did when the stakes spiked without warning. Carrick shifted the projector. Niko dragged in a second board, maps and routes already pinned. Sully disappeared toward the hall, inventory low in his throat. Deacon stepped in closer, quiet taking shape as resolve.
“The main warehouse has a truck dock on the south,” Niko said, marking it red. “Steel exit doors northeast and west. No rooftop access on the public plans, but Quinn tagged a thermal anomaly dead center.”
He tapped the smudge on the projection, the irregular heat bleed already anchoring a theory. “Probably a vent hatch. Possibly reinforced. But it’s a way in.”
Sully returned with two duffel bags and dropped them with zero ceremony. He laid the gear they contained out piece by piece, checking batteries, sliding mags into place, each motion clean and certain. He didn’t need to ask what we needed, just how fast we’d need it.
“If we come in from the east,” Niko said, “we’ve got wind cover and natural interference from the old silos. West is exposed. Floodlights, perimeter fence, camera feed every twenty feet.”
Carrick glanced up from his screen without pausing his fingers, eyes sharp as he asked the question we were all circling. “Stella. Which direction did the planes come from?”
Her voice didn’t waver. “West. Always from the west. Louder at night. Like they were flying lower after sunset.”
Carrick tapped a few keys, and a map snapped into place, an airfield just under a mile from the target. Half-decommissioned. Mostly cargo and private charter flights. Close enough to shake the building. Close enough to make sound a weapon.
It tracked. Low-altitude runs after dark. Subsonic resonance. That kind of vibration doesn’t just rattle the walls; it settles into your bones. The hum. The cold. The way she felt it in her teeth. If she heard it, Violet did too. And if the site was still live, the flight path likely hadn’t changed.
“Add it to the auditory baseline,” I said. “Time our approach under engine cover. Noise masking buys us movement.”
Carrick was already adjusting the grid.
Seconds later, Quinn’s next drop landed, encrypted files pushed to our secure server. Shift rotations, shell staff, two flagged names linked to suspected Dom Krovi. No photos. No clean trail. Just aliases popping up in enough connected records to draw a line. Carrick ran the cross-references while Sully handed off a preloaded tablet, screen already lit with gear specs and layout.
Deacon took the second whiteboard and started drafting exit paths. Not entries. Not tactics. Extraction. That was always his lane: quiet egress, blind kill zones, fast disposal. His pen moved with the precision of muscle memory, marking where wallswould catch sound and shadows would let us vanish without leaving heat behind.
