Chapter 3: Heatwave Lockdown
The words ‘get up’ were still hanging in the air when Rhys crossed the room in three long strides. He didn’t ask. He simply bent, slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and lifted her from the couch.
The IV pole clattered to the floor, the needle tearing from her vein with a sharp sting.
“Hey! Put me—” Elara’s protest was cut off as the world tilted. He held her against his chest, her face pressed into the crisp cotton of his shirt. His scent—dark coffee, clean rain, and something fundamentally male—invaded her senses, overwhelming and intimate. A fresh wave of dizziness, warmer this time, washed through her.
“Torin! Kael! Move!” Rhys barked, already striding toward a section of blank wall.
A hidden panel hissed open, revealing a steep, narrow staircase descending into darkness. A sterile blue light flickered on from within.
Torin emerged from the security hub, a black medical kit in hand, his playful demeanor entirely gone, replaced by a cold efficiency. Kael was right behind him, his eyes wide, a tablet clutched in his hand. “The signal’s gone dark. They know we made them.”
“Then we have less time than I thought,” Rhys said, starting down the stairs. His grip on her was unyielding.
Elara pushed against his shoulder. “I can walk! Let me go!”
“You’re barefoot. And you’re slow,” he ground out, not breaking his pace. The metal stairs rang under his boots. “Speed is the only advantage we have.”
The door above them sealed with a definitive thunk and a series of locking mechanisms engaging. The sound was final. Trapped. They were in a concrete shaft now, the air cooler, smelling of dust and static.
The staircase ended in another seamless door. It recognized Rhys’s biometrics and slid aside.
The panic room was not what she expected. It wasn’t some bunker with canned goods. It was a sleek, minimalist cube of black glass and brushed steel, about the size of a large bedroom. One wall was a single, massive monitor currently split into multiple feeds showing every angle of the penthouse above—all empty, all still. The other walls housed integrated cabinets and a small sanitation unit. The only furniture was a low, wide platform in the center, piled with deep cushions and thick blankets.
Rhys set her down on the platform. Her legs buckled immediately, and she sank into the cushions. A trembling had started deep in her bones, a reaction that felt more chemical than emotional. The air in the room was filtered, cool, but it felt thick. Metallic. And beneath it… her own skin was beginning to smell different. Sweet. Cloying. Like wilting jasmine and heated honey.
Torin was already moving. He dropped his kit, popped it open, and pulled out a hypospray. “Adrenaline suppressant, broad-spectrum pheromone blocker. It’ll take the edge off the panic and stabilize your scent.” He moved toward her, the device humming as he primed it.
“Don’t,” Kael said. His voice was quiet but it cut through the room’s hum.
Torin paused, frowning. “Kael, her readings were already chaotic. The stress of the move, the fear—it’s catalyzing everything. She needs the suppressants.”
“Look at her.” Kael hadn’t moved from near the door. His gaze was fixed on Elara.
She was trying to sit up, but a strange, crawling heat was spreading under her skin. It pooled low in her abdomen, a dull, insistent ache that was both alien and terrifyingly familiar. Her breath hitched. She could smell herself, that sickly-sweet scent growing stronger, and it was somehow… inviting. Her body was betraying her on a fundamental level.
“It’s a stress-induced presentation,” Torin said, his voice clinical, but a vein throbbed in his temple. “It’s too soon, her body isn’t ready, it’s a trauma response. The drugs will shut it down.”
“And leave her stranded in a chemical flatline again?” Kael shot back, finally stepping forward. He kept his distance from Elara but addressed Torin and Rhys. “You saw what that did. It fractured her. This… this is her biology trying to reconnect. Trying to find its anchor.”
Rhys stood like a statue, his hands clenched at his sides. He was staring at Elara, his golden eyes wide with a horror that mirrored her own. The possessive Alpha in him was being scorched by the sight of his Omega in distress, his instincts screaming to fix, to claim, to cover that scent with his own. But the man, the one who loved her, was paralyzed by the fear of harming her further. “She’s burning up,” he said, his voice hoarse.
Elara moaned, curling in on herself. The heat was intensifying, becoming a throbbing pulse. Memories, real or implanted, flickered—the pressure of teeth on her shoulder, the solid weight of a body over hers, the feeling of being full, of being soothed. It was a craving, deep and cellular. She hated it. She wanted it. Tears of frustration and raw need leaked from her eyes.
“The drugs are a stopgap,” Kael insisted, his calm cracking into urgency. He looked directly at Elara, holding her hazy gaze. “Her system is seeking balance. A synthetic blocker will just force it to rebel harder later. She needs the bond. She needs us. Not outside. Inside her. To remind her body what homeostasis feels like.”
The crude truth of his words hung in the scented air. It wasn’t about sex. It was about biochemistry. It was about survival.
Torin slowly lowered the hypospray. He looked from Elara’s shuddering form to Rhys’s tortured face. The physician warred with the mate. “It’s a monumental risk,” he whispered. “If her mind rejects it while her body accepts it… the psychological fracture could become permanent.”
“It’s already fractured!” Kael’s composure finally broke. “She thinks she’s from another world! We are treating a symptom, not the disease. The disease is disconnection.”
The lights in the panic room flickered. Once. Twice.
All heads snapped toward the main monitor. The feeds from the penthouse glitched, fragmented into digital snow, then went black.
A low, grinding hum vibrated through the walls, and the primary overhead lights died, plunging them into near darkness. The emergency strips along the floor and ceiling glowed a faint, eerie red. The air recyclers stuttered and fell silent.
“They’re jamming us,” Rhys snarled, his fear for Elara instantly redirecting into a feral rage. “They’ve cut the secondary power and the signal. We’re blind.”
In the bloody half-light, Elara cried out. The darkness stripped away her last veneer of control. The heat crested, a wave of pure, undiluted sensation that erased thought. Her body arched, seeking a touch that wasn’t there. The sweet, desperate scent of Omega in presentation flooded the stagnant air, so potent it was almost tangible.
Rhys groaned, a sound pulled from deep in his chest. His eyes flashed, the gold glowing in the dim light. His control was a thin wire, snapping.
Torin made his decision. He threw the hypospray back into the kit. It clattered against the steel. “No drugs,” he said, his voice rough. He began shrugging off his jacket, his movements deliberate. He looked at Rhys, then at Kael. “We do this together. Or we fall apart together.”
Kael nodded, a sharp jerk of his head. He approached the platform, his movements cautious, non-threatening. He knelt at the edge, within her sightline but not touching. “Elara,” he said, his voice the only soft thing in the pounding dark. “We’re here. We’re not leaving.”
Rhys moved to the other side. He reached out, his hand trembling slightly, and brushed the damp hair from her forehead. His touch was searing. A jolt, like a completed circuit, shot through her. She whimpered, leaning into it against her will.
“I know you’re scared,” Rhys murmured, his voice a vibration she felt in her own bones. “I’m scared, too. But I know you. Some part of you knows me. Let it.”
Torin’s hands, cool and sure, found her ankle, her calf, gently straightening her leg. His touch was clinical at first, then softened, becoming exploratory. “Just breathe, firecracker. Just feel.”
They surrounded her. Their scents—Rhys’s stormy depth, Torin’s crisp citrus and antiseptic, Kael’s clean linen and sage—wove together, a familiar tapestry her body recognized before her mind could protest. The combined aroma didn’t erase her own scent; it enveloped it, tempered the cloying sweetness with strength and warmth and safety.
Kael’s fingers traced the line of her jaw. “You are here,” he whispered. “This is real.”
His kiss was gentle, a question against her lips. It was not a demand, but an offer. A spark leapt in the darkness of her mind—a memory of laughter shared in a kitchen, of a quiet conversation tangled in sheets. It was a flash, then gone, but it left a fissure in her certainty.
As his mouth moved on hers, Rhys’s lips found the silvery bite mark on her shoulder. He didn’t bite anew. He kissed it, laved it with his tongue, a reverence and a reaffirmation. The sensation was electric, a direct line to the molten core of her heat. A name—his name—echoed in a silent chamber of her memory.
Torin’s hands mapped her ribs, the flare of her hip, his clever surgeon’s fingers learning her anew. He kissed her stomach, her inner thigh, his playful mischief replaced by a focused intensity. “We have you,” he said, his breath hot against her skin.
The fear didn’t vanish. It coiled in her gut alongside the desperate need. But it was now shared. It was diluted by the weight of Rhys’s body settling beside her, by the anchoring stroke of Kael’s hand in her hair, by the steady certainty of Torin’s touch.
When Rhys finally entered her, it was with a shattered gasp that was hers, or his, or both. It was not an invasion. It was a homecoming her body remembered with devastating clarity. The heat, which had been a chaotic inferno, suddenly had a direction, a purpose. It coiled and crested not into emptiness, but into a presence that filled the void inside her.
The fractured light danced on the black ceiling. The silence was now absolute, broken only by ragged breaths, skin against skin, the soft, wet sounds of connection, and her own broken sobs that were no longer purely of despair.
For a moment, there was no past, no other world. There was only the physics of need and the geometry of their bodies, fitting together in a way that felt inexplicably, undeniably right. A forgotten synapse fired. A neural pathway, long dormant, flickered with a weak, steady light.
As the peak ripped through her, blinding and total, a single, coherent image flashed behind her eyes: not a face, but a feeling. The feeling of this exact weight. This specific scent. This profound, exasperating, and absolute sense of belonging.
Then
This profound, exasperating, and absolute sense of belonging.
It lasted for three heartbeats.
Then the heat roared back, a tsunami following the first quake. It drowned the fragile memory, searing through her veins with renewed, vicious intent. Her back arched off the cushions, a silent scream locking her throat. The temporary relief had been a trap, a cruel mockery that left her more sensitized, more utterly raw.
“Again,” Torin muttered, his voice grim. He was already moving, his hand sliding over her damp hip. “It’s cycling faster. Her system is trying to force a permanent reset.”
Rhys, still connected to her, swore softly. His forehead dropped to her shoulder. His own breathing was ragged. “It’s too much. She can’t take wave after wave.”
“She has to.” Kael’s fingers tightened in her hair, a grounding pressure. “There’s no bypassing this. She has to go through the fire.”
Elara couldn’t speak. Sensation was a language of pure pain and need, every nerve ending screaming. The slick heat between her thighs, the unbearable emptiness that returned the moment Rhys shifted, it was a physiological command she lacked the vocabulary to disobey. She turned her head, seeking blindly, and found Kael’s wrist. She pressed her open mouth against his pulse point, not a kiss, but a desperate anchor to something solid.
He understood. He shifted, sliding down beside her, offering the solid line of his body for her to press against. His touch was different—soothing, constant, a steady counterpoint to the frantic peaks. “Breathe, Elara. Just follow it. Don’t fight.”
Rhys withdrew and Torin was there, his entrance smoother this time, her body clenching around him with a shocking, practiced ease that made her sob. This was different, too—an intense, focused rhythm that sought to dismantle her, piece by trembling piece. His green eyes held hers in the red gloom, watching every flutter of her lashes, every hitch in her breath.
“See?” he rasped, his voice stripped of all its playfulness. “You know this. Your body knows.”
A collage of images stabbed behind her eyes: Torin’s smile over a chessboard. His hands, bloody, in a bright operating room. Those same hands, gentle, wrapping a bandage around her scraped knee. The memories had texture and weight. They felt less like movies and more like ghosts stepping back into their skin.
The cycle repeated. Rhys again, his possession a furious, sheltering thing. Kael, his patience an infinite well. Torin, his precision dismantling her defenses. The heat did not break. It evolved. It became a landscape she was lost inside, and they were the only terrain.
In a lucid sliver between phases, she found words. They scratched out of her. “The man… at the window.”
Rhys, wiping sweat from her brow with his thumb, went very still. “What about him?”
“He was… waiting.” She panted, the words costing her. “For this. Wasn’t he?”
The silence that followed was heavier than the darkness. Kael exchanged a look with Rhys over her head.
“Yes,” Rhys finally admitted, the word brutal in its honesty. “A pack’s Omega in crisis is a glaring vulnerability. It pulls our focus. Makes us predictable. It’s the best possible moment for an attack.”
A cold spear of clarity pierced the fever. They were trapped in a steel box, blind, while a threat circled above. And her own biology was the weapon being used against them. The helplessness curdled into something sharper: a hot, acidic rage.
“No,” she gritted out.
Torin leaned close. “No, what, firecracker?”
“No,” she repeated, forcing her jelly-like limbs to move. She pushed herself up onto her elbows. The world swam, but the anger held her steady. “This isn’t a weapon. It’s just… a thing. My thing. And I’m tired of it being in charge.”
She looked at Rhys, then at Kael, then at Torin. Their faces were etched with exhaustion, fear, and a desperate, stubborn hope. She saw the attorney, the surgeon, the CEO. And she saw the men who had just poured themselves into saving a stranger who kept spitting in their faces.
Her next wave was building, a tingling ache in her spine. But this time, she didn’t just feel the need. She felt the edges of it. She recognized its approach.
“Help me,” she said, and it wasn’t the plea of a victim. It was a commander’s request. “Not just my body. My head. Tell me something real. Something from after the bite. Something good.”
Kael spoke first. His voice was soft with wonder. “You defended your thesis on cross-species urban ecology. You nailed the panel. That night, you got outrageously drunk on cheap champagne and made us all dance in the kitchen. You were brilliant.”
A flicker. The taste of flat bubbles. The feel of linoleum under her bare feet.
Rhys was next, his words low. “You redesigned the core privacy matrix for Vega. It was elegant. Dangerous. I argued it was too aggressive. You called me a bureaucratic coward and implemented it on a test server at 2 AM. It’s now our global standard.” A faint, proud smirk touched his mouth. “You were right.”
A flash of code streaming past, the thrill of a solved problem, the sharp joy of winning an argument with him.
Torin brushed her tangled hair back. “You volunteer at the free clinic in the Dystrict. You sit with the kids. You have this way of calming them before I have to give them a shot. You’re better with them than I am.”
The smell of antiseptic and warm, small hands trusting her grip.
The memories didn’t slot into place like puzzle pieces. They erupted, vivid and chaotic, colors splashed across the blank wall of her mind. They didn’t feel implanted. They felt recalled. Her breath caught for a new reason.
The heat crested again, a powerful, rising tide. But she didn’t disappear into it. She rode it, eyes open, locked on Torin’s. She reached for him, pulling him down, meeting his rhythm with a ragged determination of her own. It was different. There was a thread of her own will in it now.
After, curled between Kael and Rhys, the heat finally began to recede. Not gone, but banked, a simmer rather than a rolling boil. The frantic scent in the air softened, weaving into theirs, becoming a composite, a pack scent. Her mind was a riot of old and new, truths and impossibilities.
The red emergency lights flickered once, weakly, then glowed steadily. A low hum returned as the air filters kicked back on, sucking the saturated air through purifiers.
Vega’s voice, fractured and glitching, pulsed from a hidden speaker. “…ternal jamming… ceased. Re-establishing… primary link.”
The massive monitor on the wall sputtered to life. The views of the penthouse were back. Everything appeared undisturbed. Empty.
Elara stared at the screen, at the familiar-uncommon living room, the cityscape beyond. The profound, exasperating sense of belonging was still there, a stubborn root in poisoned soil. But now it was tangled with new, green shoots of memory—of triumph, of purpose, of belonging not just to them, but to a life.
She looked at the three men watching her, waiting for her next fracture. Her body ached. Her mind was a battlefield. But the helpless terror was gone, burned away in the heat.
“Okay,” she said, her voice wrecked but clear. “What’s the plan to get out of here?”
“What’s the plan to get out of here?”
Her voice, rough from exhaustion and everything else, cut through the heavy, scent-laden air. It wasn’t a plea. It was a demand. For a stretched second, no one moved. They just looked at her, as if the question itself was a foreign artifact.
Rhys was the first to react. A slow, genuine smile—the first she’d seen from him that wasn’t edged with panic or fury—touched his lips. He pushed himself up on one elbow. “First, we see what we’re dealing with. Vega, full perimeter diagnostic. Prioritize the penthouse entry points and the building’s security feed integration.”
The synthetic voice responded, still streaked with static. “Running. External jamming signature has dissipated. Re-acquiring feeds.”
Torin rolled off the platform with a tired grunt, found his discarded pants, and pulled them on. He moved to a sleek cabinet, withdrawing bottles of water and high-calorie ration bars. He tossed one to Kael, another to Rhys, and placed a third, along with an open water bottle, on the cushion near Elara’s hand. “Second, we hydrate and fuel. Your metabolism just ran a marathon. Crash prevention is key.”
Elara took the water. It was cool and perfect. She drank greedily, the simple act feeling profoundly human. She watched Kael peel the wrapper from his bar with meticulous care. His lawyer’s mind was clearly already sorting through possibilities, liabilities, legal ramifications of a retaliatory strike.
“The plan,” Kael said, chewing methodically, “depends on intent. Are they scouts? Saboteurs? Kidnappers? The method suggests corporate espionage. The timing suggests something more… biological.”
“They wanted to document her presentation,” Rhys stated, his voice going flat and cold. He stood, all coiled power even in his fatigue. “To prove the Vantas pack Omega was unstable. That makes us look weak. It makes our holdings look vulnerable. Stock dips, hostile takeovers become easier, boardroom challenges gain traction.”
“Or,” Torin countered, leaning against the monitor wall, “they wanted to trigger the presentation. To send her so far into crisis she’d need hospitalization. Get her out of this fortress and into a system where a disguised nurse or a diverted ambulance could make her disappear.” He glanced at Elara. “You’re a walking repository of our genetic codes, our psychological profiles, our biological vulnerabilities. You’re the ultimate insider threat if you’re in the wrong hands.”
A cold knot tightened in her stomach, worse than any heat. She was a security breach wearing skin. She looked down at the silvery bite on her shoulder, no longer just a mysterious mark, but a key to a vault she hadn’t known existed.
“So we don’t go to a hospital,” she said quietly.
“We don’t go anywhere,” Rhys corrected. “We secure this location as a base. I have assets. We can have a private medical team here in twenty minutes.”
“Which tells anyone watching that we’re still here, still holed up,” Kael pointed out. “It confirms the trigger worked. It shows we’re on the defensive.”
“So we go on the offensive,” Elara heard herself say. The words surprised her. They surprised them, too. All three men turned to stare. She pushed herself up, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. The memory-fragments—of code, of a clinic, of champagne—were like grit in her shoe, a constant, irritating reminder of a self she couldn’t fully access. But they gave her a shape to lean into. “You said I’m good with systems. With privacy matrices. Let me see the feeds. The raw data of the breach. Maybe I see something Vega’s parameters don’t.”
Rhys studied her, his golden eyes calculating. This was the woman he remembered—the one who hacked his servers for fun. The one who never backed down from a technical fight. A flicker of fierce pride warmed the worry in his gaze. “Vega, grant Elara Omega-tier access to security logs and exterior sensor arrays. Full decrypt.”
“Processing,” Vega replied.
THE SCREEN FLICKERS.
It wasn’t a power glitch. It was a violent, digital convulsion. The peaceful penthouse feeds distorted, stretched into screaming bands of color, then went pure black. A single line of text, green and archaic, scrolled vertically in the center of the void.
`>> HELLO, ELARA.`
The air left the room. Rhys moved, a blur, placing his body between her and the screen. Torin cursed, lunging for a manual hard-drive disconnect panel. Kael simply went very, very still, his attorney’s mind parsing the implications of a personalized greeting.
`>> DON’T BOTHER WITH THE DISCONNECT. THE HOOK IS IN THE SUBNET. YOU’RE BORROWING MY EYES NOW.`
The text dissolved. The screen rebuilt itself, but it wasn’t their feed. It was a live, high-altitude drone view of the city, zeroing in with terrifying speed on their building, on their floor, on the specific darkened window of the panic room. The image was crystal clear, thermal overlay showing four glowing heat signatures inside the steel cube.
“They’ve rooted Vega,” Rhys whispered, horror and fury twisting his features. His creation, his guardian, had been turned against them.
The view switched. Now it was the interior of the penthouse living room. From the ceiling. It panned slowly, showing the couch with its rumpled blanket, the abandoned IV pole on the floor, the door to the shattered guest room. A figure walked into frame.
He was dressed in nondescript black tactical gear, no visor this time. He had a sharp, unremarkable face. He picked up the discarded IV pole, examined it, then looked directly up at the camera hidden in the smoke detector. He smiled. It was a small, polite thing.
“Alpha Vantas. Beta,” the man said. His voice came through the panic room speakers, slightly distorted but clear. He had a mild, almost pleasant tenor. “My employer extends his apologies for the disruption to your evening. And his congratulations to the Omega on her… robust constitution.”
“Name your employer,” Rhys growled, the command vibrating with Alpha force, useless against the circuitry.
“Oh, he’ll introduce himself presently. This was just the appetizer. A systems check. A viability assessment.” The man set the pole down carefully. “The Omega’s stress-response is fascinating. Truly unique. The data we gathered is invaluable.”
Elara’s blood ran cold. They’d been lab rats in a maze. Every spike of fear, every surge of heat, monitored and recorded.
“What do you want?” Kael asked, his tone lethally calm, the one he used in negotiations before dismantling an opponent.
“The same thing everyone wants from the Vantas pack,” the man shrugged. “A piece of it. My employer believes the current… leadership structure is inefficient. A destabilized core leads to poor decision-making. He proposes a consolidation.”
“A hostile takeover,” Torin translated, his hand hovering over the physical disconnect switch.
“Hostile is such a strong word. We prefer ‘proactive restructuring.’ The Omega is the lynchpin. Her unique condition makes her a liability in your hands. In ours, she becomes an asset. We have facilities that can… manage her episodes. Study them. Perhaps even cure this unfortunate memory issue.” His eyes found the camera again, his gaze seeming to pierce the walls. “Come out voluntarily, Elara. It will be easier for everyone. Your mates look tired.”
The screen split. One side showed the smiling man. The other showed a new feed: the building’s main lobby. Six more figures in similar gear moved efficiently, placing small, disc-like devices on support columns. Explosives. Not to bring the building down. To isolate it. To cut them off.
“You have five minutes before the lobby is sealed,” the man said, his voice taking on a final, transactional tone. “After that, we come up. The methods get messier. The choice, as they say, is yours.”
The feed died. The screen returned to black.
Silence, thick and choking, filled the panic room. The hum of the air filters was deafening. Elara looked from Rhys’s rigid back, to Torin’s clenched fist on the disconnect panel, to Kael’s pale, focused face.
The plan to get out was now a countdown. And they had nothing.
Then Kael spoke, his voice barely audible. “The sub-net. He said the hook was in the sub-net.” He looked at Rhys. “The building’s internal network for elevators, climate, and plumbing. It’s air-gapped from Vega’s primary security system. Or it was supposed to be.”
A memory, sharp as a shard of glass, stabbed into Elara’s mind. Not a feeling. A diagram. A schematic overlay of this building, lines of code showing a forgotten backdoor she’d built into a firmware update two years ago. A joke. A failsafe. A way to win an argument with Rhys about redundancies.
“The service elevator,” she blurted out. All three heads snapped to her. Her heart hammered against her ribs. “Its maintenance override. It runs on the isolated sub-net. I… I left a path. A ghost protocol. It’s blind to Vega. It should be blind to them.”
Rhys’s eyes ignited. “Can you access it? Now?”
“I need a terminal. A hardline.” She was already throwing the blanket off, scrambling for her clothes, her movements fueled by adrenaline. The heat, the fatigue, were distant echoes. “Not Vega. Something they won’t see.”
Torin was already at the cabinet, throwing open panels. He pulled out a sleek, military-grade tablet, cabled it directly into a physical port in the wall. “Dumb terminal. Isolated battery. It’ll only see what’s on the sub-net wire.”
Elara grabbed it. The interface was unfamiliar, but the logic beneath was like a remembered song. Her fingers flew, calling up command lines, navigating through layers of obsolete code. She found her backdoor, buried under years of updates. It was still there. A little digital whisper.
On the tablet, a simple, text-based menu appeared: `SERVICE ELEVATOR 4 - MAINTENANCE MODE - MANUAL CONTROL Y/N?`
“They’ll be watching the main elevators. The stairs,” Kael said rapidly. “They’ve likely disabled the service banks remotely.”
“But they can’t see this one,” Elara breathed, her finger hovering. “It’s not responding to their network commands. It’s only answering this.” She looked up at Rhys. “Where does it go?”
“Sub-basement three. Old freight loading bay. It’s been sealed for a decade.” Rhys’s mind was racing ahead, forming a new plan from the shattered pieces of the old one. “There’s a secondary utility tunnel. It leads two blocks over to a parking complex.”
“Four minutes,” Torin said, his gaze fixed on a digital timer he’d pulled up on his own watch.
“Can you park it on this floor?” Kael asked. “If they see the doors open…”
Elara typed, forcing the archaic interface to obey. `OPEN DOORS - PANIC ROOM ACCESS HATCH - HOLD FOR 30 SECONDS.` She hit enter.
A heavy clunk reverberated through the wall behind the monitor. A section of paneling sighed inward an inch. A rush of stale, concrete-scented air washed into the filtered room.
The service elevator was waiting. A dim, grated cage lit by a single bulb.
“Go,” Rhys said, but he was looking at the black screen, at where the man’s face had been. A new kind of calm had settled over him, the calm of a storm focusing its energy. “Get her to the safe-house at the docks. Protocol Cerberus.”
“You’re not coming?” Elara asked, the tablet freezing in her hands.
“I’m buying you time.” He turned to her. His gaze was ferocious, possessive, but utterly clear. “They’re watching Vega. They’ll see me move through the penthouse, heading for the roof. They’ll follow. It’ll pull their focus.”
“That’s a suicide run!” Torin snapped.
“It’s a diversion!” Rhys shot back. “And I know this building better than they do. Kael, Torin, get her out. Now.”
Kael didn’t argue. He took Elara’s arm, his touch firm and urgent. Torin snatched the medical kit, his jaw set. They moved toward the open hatch.
Elara pulled against Kael’s grip, her eyes locked on Rhys. The memory of his weight, his scent, the furious safety of him, collided with the image of him walking into their sight. “Rhys—”
“Go,” he said, his voice softening for a fraction of a second. “You asked for the plan. This is it. Now execute.”
He turned his back on them, facing the blank screen as if he could see his enemies through it. He was already pulling up a different interface on his own device, making himself a loud, visible target.
Kael pulled her through the hatch into the dank elevator shaft. The door began to sigh shut behind Torin.
The last thing Elara saw was Rhys’s broad back, illuminated by the cold light of his screen, alone in the red gloom, as the steel sealed him in.