Chapter 110 About Time

Chapter 110 About Time
The second operation goes sideways within the first ninety seconds.
One moment Elias is moving through a service corridor with two of Marcus’s men flanking him, comms chatter steady in his ear, the whole operation unfolding with the same disciplined rhythm as the raid two days ago. The next, gunfire erupts from an angle nobody flagged, a stairwell nobody mapped, and the coordinated team scatters into a dozen separate, isolated problems all at once.
“Contact, east stairwell!”
“Where’s the second team, I’ve lost eyes on–”
“Fall back, fall back to the loading bay–”
The voices in Elias’s earpiece fracture into overlapping static, and then the earpiece itself goes dead entirely, either damaged or jammed, he doesn’t have time to work out which. He presses himself against the wall of a narrow stairwell, breathing hard, waiting for a lull that doesn’t come, and when he finally moves it’s because staying still has stopped being an option.
Somewhere outside the building, Lucia is probably trying to reach him.
He doesn’t know that she has already called his name three times through the dead channel, each attempt answered by nothing but static.
“Elias, do you copy?”
Nothing.
She switches frequencies.
“Elias, respond.”
Still nothing.
Lucia looks up from the bank of monitors, her attention moving across the feeds with growing unease. The cameras are still showing movement, but something about the operation has gone wrong in a way she can’t quite place.
“Dad, I’ve lost Elias.”
No answer.
She checks another screen. Then another. Her frown deepens. The gunfire she’s hearing through the remaining open channels doesn’t match what she’s seeing on the cameras.
Men are moving. Weapons are firing. But nobody is pursuing anyone. And that doesn’t make sense.
“Something’s wrong,” she says under her breath.
Meanwhile Elias comes around a corner into a service hallway with his gun raised, expecting hostiles.
He finds David instead.
Alone.
He is breathing hard, his jacket torn at one shoulder, unarmed, his usual composure stripped down to something Elias has genuinely never seen on this man before, not once in months of watching David Reid perform absolute control in every single room he occupies.
There’s a gun on the floor a few feet between them, dropped somewhere in the chaos of the last ninety seconds.
Elias reaches it first and picks it up.
For one long, suspended second, standing over the man who has occupied the exact shape of his hatred for as long as he can remember, further back than memory even properly reaches, Elias understands with total clarity what this moment actually is.
They’re in a blind spot. Nobody’s watching. David is unarmed, exposed, breathing hard in a corridor with no witnesses and no cameras that Elias is aware of, and every single thing Elias was ever raised to believe about this man, every story his mother told through tear streaked eyes, every year of grief calcifying into a single directive, points toward exactly this outcome.
He could pull the trigger now, blame it on an ambush and no one would ever need to know.
He thinks of his mother’s face on the anniversary of a death nobody properly explained to either of them, the way she used to sit at the kitchen table on that date every year and simply not speak, not eat, not do anything except stare at a spot on the wall that Elias never understood until he was old enough to.
He thinks about the years of orchestrated hatred built into him deliberately, brick by brick, by people who needed that hatred to be useful to them.
Then he thinks about Zeke, cold on a concrete floor, dying with a bluff on his lips because it was the only currency he had left to spend on keeping Lucia alive. He thinks about Lucia’s face in that warehouse doorway with blood that isn’t hers splattered across her cheek, the specific hollowed out look she’s been carrying since. He thinks about every single thing that’s happened since simple hatred stopped being the only true thing he felt about David Reid, since the man in front of him became something more complicated than the villain of a story Elias had memorized before he was old enough to know better.
He looks at the man in front of him and knows this is probably his only chance at a straight, clean revenge.
He lowers the gun.
David looks at him for a moment more and clears his throat.
The stairwell door behind him swings open, and Marcus steps through, four men trailing him with their weapons already lowered, all of them wearing the unbothered expressions of people who have been standing somewhere close this entire time, watching.
It takes Elias a full three seconds to understand what he’s actually looking at.
There was no chaos. Not real chaos, anyway. Someone staged this – an unarmed David Reid alone in a hallway with a dropped weapon conveniently within reach and no witnesses except the one person everyone in this house has openly admitted they don’t fully trust.
A controlled variable. Constructed specifically to put a loaded gun in Elias’s hand and see, once and for all, what he would do with it.
He should be furious. Somewhere distant, underneath the vertigo currently spinning through him, he will be furious that he was tricked.
Right now he mostly just feels the strange, dislocated sensation of having passed a test he didn’t know he was taking, administered by a man he still isn’t entirely sure he trusts, and won given the fact that David clearly still doesn’t trust him either.
“You set this up,” Elias says, the gun still loose in his hand.
“I did,” David says, unbothered, already straightening the torn shoulder of his jacket like nothing at all has happened in the last several minutes.
“You could have gotten yourself actually hurt, if I’d made a different call.”
“I was fairly confident in the outcome,” David says, and there’s something almost approving in the way he says it, though his eyes stay carefully unreadable. “But confidence isn’t certainty. I needed certainty.”
Elias hands the gun back to Marcus without a word, his jaw tight, the anger he predicted finally starting to surface properly now that the adrenaline’s draining out of him.
David studies him for a moment longer, something calculating still moving behind his composed expression, and then he turns to go, brushing past the assembled men without another glance at any of them.
“Come to my study tonight,” he calls out without slowing his pace or looking back. “It’s about time we spoke about your father.”