Page 33 of Oath
That stopped us both.
A project given autonomy. Access to black string funding, legacy assets, terminal authority. No oversight. It made no damn sense and at the same time, it made sense in the worst possible way.
O’Rourke looked between us. “You think this ends here? You think burning that bar did anything but scratch the surface? Vega doesn’t care about your past. It’s coming for your future.”
Voodoo didn’t flinch.
“You know what they really want, Lunchbox?” O’Rourke asked me.
I nodded. “You said they wanted the drive.”
O’Rourke shook his head. “No. That’s just the key. They want what itunlocks.”
Which meant we were already behind.
Voodoo turned away from him, muttering low. “Get us to the fallback. Now.”
I opened the SUV’s rear door. “You sure on taking him with us?”
He glanced back at O’Rourke—bleeding, sweaty, pale.
Then he looked at me. Cold.
“Dead men don’t talk.”
That meant O’Rourke still had a purpose.
But I didn’t trust him. Especially not around Gracie.
Then again, if “Vega” really was coming, they weren’t going to knock again. They would just break down the door next time.
Chapter
Ten
BONES
Pain was just a message. You could ignore it, rewrite it, push it down until it sounded like someone else’s voice echoing in your head.
The hard part was rememberingwhyit mattered.
I rolled my shoulder once, slow and sharp, feeling the tendon pop like overstretched wire. Armor plate caught the edge of the impact from the third operator’s burst. Not enough to drop me. Enough to piss me off.
I was pinned behind an old concrete support beam in the maintenance corridor that ran parallel to the storm tunnel. Voodoo and Lunchbox were clear. That part of the op was done. Alphabet had already looped the thermal feeds—they were ghosts.
I was the distraction.
A flare of movement in my peripheral—shadow, gunmetal, movement too clean to be civilian. I pivoted hard, drove my elbow into the oncoming shape, and felt the impact crack bone. Mine or his—I didn’t care.
He hit the ground with a grunt and I put two fast strikes into his throat before he could bring the rifle up.
Three down.
Still one more.
I heard the shift before I saw it—boots on concrete, the telltale rasp of a suppressed bolt sliding into battery.
I didn’t think.
