Cole’s smile did not belong in this place. Not in the cold dreamless dark of the Lumen Room. Not in a chamber built to break men from the inside out. His smile was too real. Too warm. Too alive. The kind of smile that haunted Adrian’s sleep long before nightmares took over.The room seemed to tilt around him, the black walls pulsing like a living creature reacting to the collision of truth and memory. Nothing inside the Lumen Room behaved naturally. It responded. It listened. It fed.And right now, it felt hungry.Cole stepped forward. His boots made no sound against the floor that was not really a floor, just a reflection of whatever the room wanted it to be. The gun in his hand remained aimed at Adrian’s heart. The same gun from their last mission together. The same one Adrian had buried with shaking hands in a shattered bunker years ago.Mara’s voice broke through the humming silence, muffled behind the dividing wall. “Adrian, what are you seeing? Is that real? Adrian, talk to me.”

Adrian hit the ground so hard the impact tore the breath from his lungs.Cold.That was the first thing he registered.Not the cold of a room or the cold of fear, but a deeper chill, the kind that seeped into bone. The kind that felt ancient.He pushed himself up on shaking elbows, vision still fractured with shards of black light from the blast. The world spun once, twice, then settled into a slow, heavy stillness.He was lying on something that felt like stone.Not metal.Stone.He blinked hard.This wasn’t the Lumen Room.This wasn’t the underground compound.This wasn’t Cipher’s world at all.The darkness around him wasn’t even darkness. It was something thicker, like a substance, heavy enough to press against his skin. The faintest glow crept across the ground, pale silver, revealing uneven textures beneath him.A floor carved from rock.A cavern.Something drifted in the air. Not smoke. Not steam.Memory.It moved like mist, swirling gently, each wisp carrying faint images suspe

The night had already begun to collapse around them when Lorenzo pushed open the rusted metal door of the warehouse. The echo of the blast from Chapter Thirty Four still trembled along the floor, though the smoke had begun to thin. His heartbeat was steady, too steady, the kind of focus he only reached when danger sharpened everything inside him.Elara was right behind him. Her breath was uneven, her eyes red from the smoke, but her steps never faltered. She hated being this deep inside a battlefield again, yet she moved as though she had been carved from resolve. She had chosen this path the moment she refused to leave him behind.Lorenzo raised his gun and swept the shadows again. Nothing moved. No footsteps. No whispered threats. Just the faint metallic drip from a broken pipe overhead and the distant rumble of engines from the street.“This was a setup,” Lorenzo said quietly, his voice low but edged with fury. “Whoever planted the explosives wanted us dead before we even reached t

Silence never followed explosions.Not in Lorenzo’s world.The white blast Marco triggered swallowed everything in its path. Light roared through the chamber, heat slamming into concrete, steel, and bone. Dust spiraled upward in violent waves as if the earth itself exhaled fury.Lorenzo hit the ground with his forearm braced over Elara, shielding her as the shockwave ripped through the hidden bunker. His ears rang. His vision blurred. The air shook with the sound of metal screaming against metal.But he did not look away from the one face that mattered in that instant.Adrik Volkov.His brother stood unmoving at the far end of the collapsing chamber, coat snapping behind him from the blast, eyes bright with rage and delight. Even wrapped in the chaos, he carried the same unnerving calm that Lorenzo remembered from the night everything had shattered between them.A ghost wearing the face of the boy Lorenzo once tried to save.A monster wearing the name Volkov.Behind Lorenzo, Elara dug

The rain fell in sheets, cold and endless. It blurred the jagged edges of the ruined cityscape, turning shattered concrete into dark mirrors. Adrian Kaine moved through it like a blade through smoke, his boots silent on the wet asphalt. Every muscle was coiled, every sense extended beyond the physical. The air hummed with the wrong kind of electricity.Lorenzo walked beside him, two paces back and one to the left. A soldier’s position. A hunter’s offset. His breathing was steady, his movements economical, but Adrian could see the slight tremor in the man’s left hand. Exhaustion or adrenaline? Or something else?“The core,” Adrian said, his voice flat, cutting through the downpour. “How far?”“Two klicks northwest,” Lorenzo answered without hesitation. “Sub-level access through the old transit hub. It’s the only structure with power.”Too clean. Too quick. The answer was rehearsed.Adrian glanced at him. Rainwater streamed down the hard planes of Lorenzo’s face, catching in the fresh c