CHAPTER 85

CHAPTER 86
Chapter 86:
The room was quiet.
Not silent — just waiting.
Caroline sat across from me at the table, legs curled beneath her, a blueprint spread across the surface between us. She wore one of my shirts again, oversized and soft on her frame, sleeves pushed up past her elbows.
A gun lay beside her left hand.
She looked like a contradiction — gentle and dangerous in the same breath.
“How long do you think we have?” she asked softly, not looking up.
“Not long.” I moved one of the red markers across the safehouse schematic. “Raymond was a piece. A very loud, flashy piece. But Reynolds… he’s the real endgame.”
She nodded slowly, chewing the inside of her cheek. “He’ll come for you.”
“He’ll come for us.”
Caroline met my gaze across the table, and there was no flinch in her. No fear. Just the same fire I’d seen in her eyes the day she chose to run instead of die in that warehouse.
She was no one’s damsel.
And she damn sure wasn’t mine.
“We reinforce here and here,” she said, tapping two weak points near the stairwell. “And I want cameras rotated every hour. No static patterns.”
I smirked. “Getting tactical on me?”
“I’ve been watching you long enough to learn a few things.”
“I’m flattered.”
She gave me a dry look. “Don’t be.”
But her smile curled at the edges.
I leaned back in the chair, letting my eyes linger on her face. “You know… you could’ve walked away. Back then. Before all of this got heavy.”
“I could’ve,” she murmured, voice softening. “But I didn’t want to.”
I tilted my head. “Why?”
She stood slowly, walking over to me. Her hand brushed my cheek before slipping down to rest over my chest.
“Because even with all the noise, the chaos… you’re the first place I’ve felt safe.”
I closed my eyes.
That word — safe — meant everything to me. And nothing. I’d never known what it truly felt like. But with her hand against my heart, with her eyes holding mine…
Maybe this was the closest I’d ever get.
“We’re not getting out of this clean,” I said.
“No,” she agreed.
“And there’s a chance one of us doesn’t make it.”
“I know.”
I opened my eyes. “And you’re still here.”
She kissed me gently — not out of desperation, not because it might be the last.
But because it mattered.
“I’m not going anywhere, Kane.”
I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her into my lap. The blueprints were forgotten. The guns. The war. The blood waiting outside our walls.
For a moment, there was only us.
And the storm preparing to swallow everything we’d built.
Caroline’s POV
Later that night, while Kane checked the outer perimeter, I stood at the window — the gun in my hand feeling less foreign than it used to.
I watched the shadows shift in the trees. Every creak of wind, every rustle in the dark felt like a warning.
Reynolds wasn’t like the others.
He didn’t gloat. He didn’t threaten.
He moved — like a disease. Quiet. Precise.
And when he struck… people disappeared.
I glanced at my reflection in the glass. I didn’t look like the girl I was a few months ago.
But that was good.
That girl wouldn’t survive this.
This one might.
Kane came up behind me, arms wrapping around my waist as he rested his chin on my shoulder.
“You okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Just thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.”
“So I’ve been told.”
He kissed the side of my head and whispered, “He’s coming. But we’ll be ready.”
I turned in his arms and looked up at him.
“No,” I said. “We won’t just be ready.”
He raised a brow. “No?”
“We’ll finish it.”
Raymond’s POV
Pain.
That was the first thing.
Not heat. Not blood. Not even the suffocating weight of smoke filling my lungs.
Just pain — raw and deafening.
I opened my eyes to fire-eaten darkness. Concrete rubble. Bent steel. Everything around me reeked of scorched betrayal.
And flesh.
My flesh.
I shifted, groaning as I dragged myself out from under a broken slab of wall. My left side screamed. My face… I didn’t want to touch it.
The mirrors would tell me soon enough.
I stumbled, one arm hanging useless. My ribs were shattered — or cracked at the very least. Blood leaked into my mouth, thick and metallic.
They thought I was dead.
Kelly. Gina. Kane.
They planned it like a show — set the stage, lit the match, and watched from the crowd.
But they forgot something important.
You don’t kill a man like me with fire.
You feed him with it.
I found a half-burnt towel and pressed it to my jaw, muffling a cough. Black smoke bled out of my lungs with each breath, but I was still breathing.
Alive.
I staggered toward what was left of the safe house’s northern corridor. Most of it had collapsed. But not the passage to the emergency bunker.
They didn’t know about that.
Reynolds did.
He made sure of it.
I keyed in the fail-safe code with blood-stained fingers. The panel blinked green.
The door clicked open.
Cold air rushed out like a whisper. Like a welcome.
I collapsed inside, dragging the towel with me, eyes burning, heart pounding.
I was going to kill them.
One by one.
No more pawns. No more games.
Just vengeance.
I looked at my reflection in the polished steel wall.
Half of my face was burned — red, blistered, and ruined. My right eye swollen. My cheek split.
Perfect.
The cold from the emergency bunker seeped into my bones as I limped out through the back exit, wrapped in whatever scraps of cloth I could salvage. The world above was quiet — the kind of quiet that only follows fire and failure.
But I was still breathing.
Still walking.
Every step was agony. Each breath, a reminder of how close they came to ending me.
The sky had started to brighten — that bleeding blue of dawn — but the city didn’t know what I’d become yet. Not Kelly. Not Kane. Not even that little traitor Gina.
They thought the fire had erased me.
But I would rise from it.
I stumbled out onto the road, skin burning beneath the wind, jaw clenched against the pain. Blood ran from my temple in slow rivulets. My heartbeat was a war drum in my chest.
And then—
BEEP BEEP!
Headlights. Screeching tires. Too fast.
I turned.
A city bus, rumbling on its early morning route, barreled toward me like fate hadn’t had enough fun yet.
And for the first time since the explosion…
I laughed.
A dry, wheezing sound that scraped out of my throat like rusted metal.
“Of course…”
THUD!