They move like ghosts, and within seconds, three bodies drop without a sound. The blood pooling in the sand looks black under the moonlight, and I feel nothing but satisfaction.
"Clear," Bane reports, wiping his blade on the dead guard's shirt.
We reach the service tunnel entrance, a rusted grate that looks like it hasn't been touched in years. But Felix produces a key from somewhere, and it swings open on well-oiled hinges.
"He never changed the locks," Felix says with bitter satisfaction. "Always was too arrogant for his own good."
The tunnel smells like decay, the kind of stench that seeps into concrete and never quite leaves. Our flashlights cut through the darkness, revealing graffiti that's probably messages from omegas who never made it out.
"Split here," Felix says when we reach a junction. "Bane, Jackal, you take the north corridor. It leads to the main brothel area. Doctor, you're with me. We're going to the basement levels where he keeps the special merchandise."
Where he's keeping Juniper. The words hang unspoken but understood.
"Copy," Bane says, then catches Felix's arm before he can move. "We get them back. We free the omegas. No one gets left behind."
Felix nods once, then he's moving down the south corridor with me following.
The silence between us is heavy as we navigate the maze of service tunnels. Felix moves with absolute certainty, every turn memorized, every hazard anticipated. But I can see the tightness in his shoulders, the white-knuckle grip on his gun.
"Felix," I say quietly as we pause at another junction. "Are you alright?"
He turns to look at me, and those silver eyes are empty as winter sky. "I'm fine."
"No, you're not." I keep my voice clinical, even though everything in me wants to rage at the unfairness of it all. The fact that he has to come back here to this place that traumatized the hell out of him. The fact that Juniper is here somewhere, probably scared and alone, not knowing if we're coming for her. But a part of me hope she knows somehow. "None of us are. Not until we have her back."
Something flickers across his face—surprise maybe.
"She's strong," I continue, checking my weapon as we prepare to breach the next door.
"I know," Felix says, and there's something broken in his voice. "That's what terrifies me. How much she can survive and still smile. Still see beauty in the shadows. If anything happens to break that in her, I—" He stops, jaw clenching.
"It won't," I tell him with more confidence than I feel. "Not on our watch."
He studies me for a moment, then nods. "The next room will have guards. Probably three, maybe four. Evan likes redundancy in his security. It's the one thing he doesn't go cheap on."
"What, you're telling me the gold candleholders aren’t real?"
His lips twitch slightly at my attempt.
"How do you want to play it?" I ask.
"Fast and quiet. I go high, you go low. No survivors."
"Ready when you are," I say, and mean it.
Felix counts down on his fingers. Three. Two. One.
We burst through the door in perfect synchronization. The guards barely have time to register our presence before Felix's knife finds the first one's throat. I put two bullets in the second's chest, the suppressor reducing the sound to whispers. The third reaches for his radio, but Felix is already there, snapping his neck efficiently.
"Clear," I report, but Felix is already moving to the next door.
The basement levels are worse than the tunnels. Here, the perfume can't quite mask the scent of fear. Doors line the hallway, each one a potential horror story. But Felix doesn't pause, doesn't check. He knows exactly where he's going.
"Trap," he says suddenly, grabbing my arm before I can step forward. He points to a nearly invisible wire stretched across the hallway. "Pressure activated. Probably connected to an alarm, maybe something worse."
We carefully step over it, and I make a mental note of its position for our extraction. If we're running, if we're carrying wounded, we'll need to remember.
More guards appear as we go deeper, but they're expecting scared omegas trying to escape, not two trained killers on a mission. We leave a trail of bodies in our wake, and I feel grim satisfaction. Each one is one less person who can hurt our people. One less monster in a building full of them.
