Night had fallen like a curtain over the industrial outskirts. The air smelled of salt and diesel; lights along the road blinked like distant warning beacons. Inside the van, everyone moved with the efficiency of people who had rehearsed this a thousand times — quiet, surgical, contained.
Tonight, they were divided into two teams.
Kael led the main strike. His entry was blunt and brutal by design: force the front, draw all eyes and manpower to where he was, and leave a path for the rescue team to slip in from the rear. With him rode Kanji, Jax, Suri, Kade, and twenty men — the Wolf Marks' hard core, trained to break lines and keep pressure where it mattered.
Rin led the rescue team: smaller, faster, precise. Ari, Raphael, James himself, and ten handpicked operators rode with him. Their brief had been simple: get in, find the hostages, get out — no heroics, no improvisation unless lives depended on it.
They moved on Kael's signal. The strike team hit the front gates like a thunderclap — suppressed rounds, smoke, controlled chaos. Guards poured toward the blare of alarms and the obvious breach. The diversion worked; patrols and cameras pivoted toward the commotion.
Ten minutes later, Rin and his unit slipped through the back door James had said would be unguarded at night.
At first, the back corridors were exactly as James had described: clean maintenance corridors, storage rooms with locked doors, the hum of refrigeration. James led them deeper, shoulders tight, voice low, fingers pointing to routes on the fly. The rescue team moved like shadow hands, searching and spreading out in two-man sweeps.
They came into an open, warehouse-style chamber — an empty stretch where crates had been pushed to the sides.
Instinct prickled along the back of Rin's neck. The space felt deliberately staged; the absence of noise felt too exact.
He glanced at James. The man's face was taut, his hands trembling. Something in the set of James' shoulders made the hair on Rin's arms stand up.
"Where are the hostages?" Rin asked, voice low.
James blinked, and for a moment, Rin thought he was going to point farther in. Instead, James swallowed, mouth working.
He looked not at the team but at the shadows where a dozen silhouettes had just resolved into armed men.
"You lied," Rin said before James could form words.
Guilty crumpled across James' face like a shadow. "I had to," he whispered. "They— my family— they threatened—" He didn't finish. He only raised his hands in a helpless gesture.
Metal thanked him with the dry report of weapons appearing. Groups of men emerged from behind crates and floor-level alcoves, forming a ring around the rescue team with cold, practiced ease. The sudden closeness of hostile barrels pointed at them made the team choke on adrenaline.
Rin's voice snapped. "Fallback! Fall back, now!" he barked.
They moved — a cascade of boots and bodies seeking cover. Two of Rin's men didn't make it out of the open. Gunfire chewed at the air. Rin sprinted, pushing his people toward a maintenance door half a warehouse away. Someone answered with a return volley, and the world narrowed to flash and sound.
Then, suddenly, a blunt impact hit the back of Rin's head so hard the world blew white. The surroundings are quiet, and only the sound of his own heartbeat echoes in his ear.
He staggered, hand flying to his skull. Blood smeared hot across his fingers. For a moment, his vision ticked and shuttered. He looked behind him through the daze and saw Raphael.
Raphyle stood framed in the doorway like a dark silhouette, a crude wooden rod clutched in one hand. He looked almost casual—too casual—his lips curled into a slow, satisfied smirk. For a heartbeat, Ari couldn't believe what he was seeing.
"Raphyle—what the hell?" Ari barked, voice raw with shock.
Raphyle didn't answer. He simply raised the rod, slow and deliberate, as if savoring the moment. "Move," he said softly to someone behind him, and the whisper of boots answered.
Ari didn't wait. He launched himself forward, instincts overriding disbelief, throwing his body between Raphyle and Rin. "No—don't—" he shouted, arms out to shield his leader.
A sharp crack split the air like a whip. Pain exploded in Ari's leg; he cried out and went down, weightless for a second as the ground hit up hard. Hot blood soaked through his trousers, and the world narrowed to a single, furious point: Raphyle's eyes, bright with triumph.
Raphyle didn't hesitate. He swung the rod cleanly across Rin's skull. The impact sounded hideously solid — a wet, final thud — and Rin sagged, knees folding beneath him before he crumpled to the floor. The room shuddered with the sound of bodies and weapons sliding into movement; for a moment, the only thing audible over the ringing in Ari's ears was Raphyle's voice, low and cold.
"Kill them. Leave him alive."
Those words landed like a sentence. Men fanned out, merciless and efficient. Shots cracked. Screams shredded the air. Ari pushed to his feet on one locked leg and tried to move toward Rin, but a figure loomed between him and the fallen leader—Raphyle's silhouette, composed and cruel.
"You betrayed us," Ari spat through clenched teeth as he staggered forward, anger blazing hotter than pain. "Why? Why would you—"
Raphyle laughed then, a hard, contemptuous sound that made the hair on Ari's arms stand up. "Because I could," he said. He raised the rod and struck. The blow landed at an angle that corkscrewed Ari's world. The rod rasped against bone and flesh; darkness folded in from the edges like ink.
The next thing Ari knew, he was on the floor again, everything muffled and slow. When his eyes finally fluttered open, the sight above him was a brutal relief—Kanji's wide face, Suri's grim set jaw, a hand pressing something to his wound. Jax and Kade were there too, standing like statues of menace and command. Their presence anchored him; the chaos he'd woken into a moment ago rearranged into a single, painful reality: betrayal had a name, and they had a list of people to crush.
Ari's eyes skimmed the wreckage — bodies slumped in impossible angles, blood glinting where it pooled against the cold concrete. Numbness gave way to a hot, terrible clarity. He hauled himself upright on shaking legs and groped for the shape of the truth in the chaos.
"Where is Rin?" he demanded, voice raw. The question cut through the ringing silence like a blade.
Kanji hovered beside him, hands already slick with blood from pressing a dressing into Ari's wound. "Calm down," he ordered, voice low but urgent. "You're hurt. And we also want to know where Rin is, how this happened, and I also didn't see raphyle and James. Where are they? Ari, what happened here?"
Ari's chest tightened. The pieces clicked into place with sickening speed—James' guilty hesitation, the way Raphael had lingered at his side. He turned, eyes blazing, and told them everything: how James had led them in, how Raphyle had stood in the doorway with a rod, how the back hall had been an ambush from the first step.
Kael listened without a sound, his face hardening until the lines of his jaw looked carved from stone. When Ari finished, Kael didn't pace or shout; he pivoted and spoke with the slow, lethal calm of a hunter zeroing in on prey. "Who scoped this place?" he asked bluntly, voice cold as winter.
Kade's answer was a whisper that punched the air. "Raphyle did the check last night."
For a fraction of a breath, Kael's expression dropped into a dark, dangerous quiet — the kind of silence that swallows sound. Then he moved into action with military precision. "Get him out of here," Kael snapped toward Kanji. "Patch him. Now." He looked up at the circle of men around them, eyes snapping from face to face. "Tell Milo and Tobi to pull every camera feed, every server log. Find where they led him. And inform Lucas and Rowan to mobilize every available man. Search the docks, the warehouses, every route out of the city."
He paused only long enough to let the weight of his words land. "I want Rin back by morning," Kael said, and there was no question in it — only a promise. "And Raphyle," he added, voice a low, lethal promise, "if he's breathing when I get my hands on him, I will make him regret the day he ever looked at us as a profit."