Page 23 of Rescuing Ally: Part 2
The chair’s metal surface chills my skin through thin fabric as I lower myself before the third terminal. Familiar code pulses on the screen—quantum entanglement protocols I spent years developing, algorithms that should have revolutionized communication systems. But they’ve added subroutines, twistedmy elegant equations into something grotesque, something designed to target and destroy.
My research, my beautiful theorems meant to connect people across impossible distances, perverted into death.
The lab door seals with hydraulic finality. No exit. No options. No hope of rescue arriving in time.
My fingers hover over the keyboard. Ice fills my veins, not panic but something colder, more calculated. Something that lets me analyze scenarios without emotion. I won’t give Malfor his weapon, but I’ll give him the illusion of compliance while I find a way to sabotage everything he’s built.
The keys click beneath my fingertips, cold plastic against flesh. And I begin.
EIGHT
The Betrayer
GABE
Rage has a temperature.
Most people think it’s only hot, explosive, wild, and uncontrolled. But that’s amateur hour. The pros know rage comes in flavors. Hot, cold, and everything between.
Right now, mine is nuclear—the kind that irradiates from the inside out. The kind that burns so hot it circles back to ice. The kind that lets you think clearly while plotting murder.
I stand against the wall of Guardian HQ’s command center, watching Mitzy prep the video feed. Her fingers fly across the keyboard as she mutters commands to her tech team. The room is charged with a particular kind of tension—the dangerous quiet before something irreversible happens.
Telling a father his daughter is missing is one thing.
Telling Robert Collins that his head of security betrayed him and took his only child? That’s igniting a thermonuclear device.
And I’d know. I’ve set off enough of them.
“Connection establishing,” Mitzy announces, her voice tight. “Secure uplink in three, two?—”
The central display flickers, then stabilizes. Robert Collins materializes on screen, his silver hair immaculate, his posturerigid even at this hour. He’s in his home office—that austere space of polished mahogany and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. A half-empty tumbler of whiskey sits by his right hand.
His eyes instantly scan the room, cataloging faces. When he reaches mine, the first flicker of awareness ignites—that slight narrowing of the eyes, the infinitesimal tightening around his mouth. He doesn’t know yet, but he feels it.
The wrongness.
“This is unexpected.” Collins’s voice is measured and controlled.
Around me, the team goes still. Blake shifts his weight, a subtle tell of tension. Walt’s breathing changes rhythm, barely perceptible. Rigel crosses his arms, muscles bunching under his shirt. Carter’s face is stone, jaw locked so tight I’m surprised it doesn’t crack.
Hank stands beside me, a glacier to my volcano. His stillness is absolute—the kind that makes predators invisible before they strike.
Forest steps forward, facing the screen directly. No preamble. No softening blow.
“Harrison has betrayed you,” he says, each word precise as a blade strike. “He’s taken Ally.”
The words land like artillery shells. One. Two.
Boom!
I watch it hit—the electromagnetic pulse before the blast. Collins doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, doesn’t breathe. His face empties of all expression, a whiteout, his mind unable to process the words.
One second stretches to three.
Then—
“That’s not possible.” Each syllable is carefully controlled. Denial, not out of stupidity, but self-preservation. “Harrison has been with us for twenty years. He wouldn’t?—”
