Page 291 of Fractured Allegiance
There’s a small, impossible stillness after that. The kind that comes when there’s nothing left to lie about.
I press a hand against his chest, feeling the steady rhythm underneath.
“They’ll come looking,” I whisper. “Maybe not tonight. But soon.”
“Let them,” he says, his tone calm and certain. “We’ve got fire left.”
I reach over, pick up the flash drive, and slip it into the inside pocket of my jacket hanging on the chair. “Then let’s keep it close.”
His hand finds mine again, fingers lacing through, grounding me. “You’re dangerous when you sound like that.”
“I’ve always been dangerous.”
He leans forward, kisses me once—soft, brief, like punctuation at the end of a confession. “That’s why I’m still here.”
For a while, neither of us moves. The faint scent of smoke clings to our skin, and somewhere under all of this, the adrenaline fades into something heavier, deeper—hunger still, but no longer desperate.
I rest my head against his chest, listening to the slow, measured rhythm there, and think about the small drive sitting in my jacket. It feels like the last card in a game no one knows we’re still playing.
When I finally drift, it’s with one thought looping through the dark:
The world thinks it all burned.
Let it.
Chapter 40 – Silas - Fractured Allegiance
The new house doesn’t creak. It just waits, far away from the city.
The kind of stillness that doesn’t belong to peace but to recovery. The lull after too much noise, too much blood, too many choices that don’t wash clean.
It sits high above the shoreline, all stone and glass, one of those rental properties meant for people who can afford to disappear for a while without explaining why. I paid for it in cash from the emergency fund I’d kept buried under a different name, in a different country, for exactly this kind of after. No Bureau trace, no signature. Just a safe place for ghosts pretending they’ve earned rest.
The sea below moves like iron under the morning light, gray and volatile, throwing itself against the rocks as if trying to remind us that even freedom has teeth.
Behind me, Lydia’s sleeping.
She’s sprawled across the bed, one arm thrown across the sheets where I’d been, her hair spilling like black ink over white cotton. There’s a bruise on her collarbone shaped like my mouth: proof that no matter how much distance I put between us and the world, we still find ways to mark each other.
I stand for a while, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest, the faint twitch of her fingers against the pillow. The quiet hum of her being here still feels unreal, as if one wrong move could wake the Bureau’s reach, Drazen’s ghosts, or the weight of everything we burned.
Then I slip out without waking her. The floor’s cold beneath my feet, the hall faintly smelling of salt, smoke, and her skin.
One week since Petrov Station. One week since Drazen’s blood hit the gravel. One week since we burned the ledger and cut every string that once tied Miramont’s shadows to ours.
And yet, even in this house built for anonymity, the past hasn’t stopped breathing.
The Bureau didn’t call the next day. Or the next. But I’ve felt it like a static hum at the edge of my skull ever since. Waiting. Watching.
The back porch overlooks the cliffs. I stand there with a mug of coffee that’s gone lukewarm, staring at the horizon where the sky and water tear into each other. My phone vibrates in my palm. No name on the screen. Just a string of numbers.
It’s her.
I swipe to answer. “Ward.”
The line is clean, no static. Naomi always hated noise. “You’ve been hard to find.”
I let out a low sound that isn’t a laugh. “You didn’t try hard enough.”
