Chapter 28 - The Dawn of Ashes
Silence settled over the estate, broken only by the steady hiss of falling rain on burning embers and the groaning of twisted metal.
Ethan Whitmore coughed, spitting dust and soot from his lungs.
He was pinned beneath the heavy iron garden bench, but he was alive. The thick iron legs of the antique bench had caught the brunt of a falling support beam, creating a pocket of survival.
"Naomi...?" he whispered, his voice trembling. "Naomi!"
Above him, the heavy debris shifted.
Naomi Reyes dragged herself up from the rubble. Her maid’s uniform was shredded beyond recognition, blackened with soot and soaked with blood from dozens of deep glass lacerations across her back and shoulders. Yet her posture was upright, her breathing disciplined, her gaze completely steady.
She seized the two-hundred-pound iron beam pinning the bench and, with a guttural roar of focused biomechanical leverage, heaved it off Ethan, casting it aside like scrap metal.
Ethan scrambled out, staring at her in shock. "You took the blast for me..."
"The charges were directional," Naomi said through clenched teeth, wiping blood from her forehead. "Cole designed them to blow upward and collapse the roof, not outward. He wanted a structural burial, not an atomization. You are unhurt?"
"I'm fine. Clara—what about Clara?"
"She's safe in the cellar," Naomi said, glancing down at her hands. The detonator was gone, blown apart in the explosion that had hurled Cole outside.
She walked through the jagged hole where the conservatory wall had once stood, stepping out into the mud of the ruined rose garden.
Ten feet away, lying broken against the stone base of a weeping angel statue, was Marcus Cole.
His legs were twisted at unnatural angles from the fall and the blast wave, his chest heaving with shallow, ragged breaths. His expensive coat was burned away, revealing the electronic receiver unit strapped to his chest—now smoking and dead.
He looked up through swollen, bloody eyes as Naomi approached, her boots squelching softly in the mud.
"You... you never were human, Reyes," Cole wheezed, blood bubbling on his lips. "The Director said it... they built you too well in the facility..."
"The Division didn't build me, Cole," Naomi said, looking down at him with cold detachment. "They just gave me tools. I decided who I was when I walked away."
"You think you walked away?" Cole spat, a horrifying, bloody grin curling on his lips. "You think this was about an old grudge? You stupid girl... look at your wrist."
Naomi’s eyes flicked to the inside of her left forearm, where a deep glass cut had severed the skin beneath her cuff.
Beneath the lacerated skin, embedded beside the radial artery, a tiny, rice-grain-sized metallic capsule was glowing with a faint, pulsing blue ultraviolet light.
Naomi froze.
"What is that?" Ethan asked, coming up behind her, horrified.
May you like
"A subdermal tracker," Cole wheezed, his laughter turning into a wet, rattling choke. "You thought the Division lost you three years ago? We always knew where you were, Reyes. We put you here. We *needed* you inside the Whitmore estate."
***
