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bitterrfruit · 3 days ago

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houndtooth [20]

[masterlist]

ghost x f! reader. 10.2k words cw: sexual assault. heavy violence. heavy gore. 18+ mdni

the jaws close.

The shrapnel of your blood-thinning scream strikes Ghost through the head with the force of a bullet.

It lodges in his brain, festering and swelling until a tumour forms around it, and it’s the only thing he can hear — not an echo, but a broken record, repeating and repeating until his vision turns red and the tendons of his hands nearly snap in the strain of his grip.

His eyes are wide with it as he turns the corner and wrenches the trigger of his rifle, lighting up the dark room with a strobe of yellow fire and shooting down two Konni soldiers in a fusillade of bullets. Even persisting in firing at their lead-riddled corpses once they collapse to the floor beneath them. Stupid, because he’s onto his second-last magazine, but he isn’t lending much thought to practical concerns.

He feels a writhing in his stomach, bubbling like cyanide, dissolving him from the inside out.

He failed you.

He lied to you.

You told him from the fucking start. You knew what would happen.

He didn’t believe you, and now you’re trapped with the very psychopath he promised you’d never have to see again. The fucking animal. At liberty to get his claws in you, his teeth in you, unmuzzled by an audience or the threat of retribution.

The veins in his temples thump hard when he pictures it, as he yells a command at his Sergeant to breach the room on his right. Sees the smug grin pulling in the pig’s paper-cut lips. Hears his frothy laughter among the shrieks you cry out in the hope Ghost can hear them and come to your aid like he promised he would.

Fills him with magmatic rage, viscous and molten in his blood, that makes his heart thud like a sledgehammer against his sternum. Makes his jaw grind to the point of ache, as he stomps his full weight into the head of the terrorist he had just gunned down. Just to see his skull pop. Wanted to feel bone and flesh crushing beneath the sole of his boot, imagining it as belonging to the man ensnaring you.

Six men have been killed in the trap he fell for.

Half of Delta team and two of his own. Their blood amalgamates with that of the enemy combatants he has killed, staining his clothes, dripping from the end of his gun, sticky on his cheeks.

“LT!” The Sergeant yells through a door on his right. “In ‘ere!”

“What?” Ghost roars, busy sweeping the bend in the hallway ahead.

“Just — you need to see this.”

Ghost growls in frustration as he turns to storm towards him. “Stop fucking around, Johnny, we need to get the fuck out of here! ”

There isn’t enough time to waste investigating what little bullshit might be littered around the dead-end factory, with the exfil helicopters a few clicks out, and your fragile life on the line.

“Look,” Soap barks urgently, standing in a cavernous storage room, where fluorescent bars hang on chains from the ceiling, tall rolling doors along one wall. Johnny shines the torch of his rifle on to a stacked palette, wrapped in packing film, concern etched in his pinching eyes. “Y’were right.”

“What is it,” Ghost grunts, coming to a hasty stop beside him, where Johnny tears away a layer of the plastic. Beneath sit four steel drums, lacquered in glossy navy enamel.

Johnny points imperatively at the label on one of the containers. A big yellow sticker, bedizened in a skull and crossbones, all of the warnings in Russian — danger, highly toxic, corrosive.

“Fuck’s sake, Soap, what am I looking at?”

“Phosphorus trichloride,” he blurts, “a shit-tonne of it.”

“And? English!” Ghost roars, impatience boiling within him so vigorously he can feel the steam rising up his throat.

“We were fuckin’ right the first time!” Johnny shouts, jutting a furious pointer finger at the drums. “They were making nerve agents. Our early intel was right. We’ve been following fuckin’ bait they tossed to throw us off the scent.”

If it were possible for Ghost to get any more furious, any more despondent, he might have broken his gun in half. Helps that the Sergeant is consistently cleverer than he gives him credit for — must have paid keen attention in his CBRN defence courses, such that he remembered even a precursor chemical to the production of nerve agents.

Certainty is a powerful weapon, though — and there isn’t a second left to waste pissing into the wind. He pulls his sat phone out of a pocket on his tacvest and dials up the Captain.

Picks up on the second ring — luckily — he was about to crush the plastic phone in his grip.

“Lieutenant — what’s the story.”

“There are no missiles,” Ghost barks, immediately, before the Captain is able to finish his dry greeting. “It’s fuckin’ nerve agents. Not missiles.”

“What? That doesn’t make any sense. If they’ve been taken somewhere else, we need to—”

“Listen, Makarov fuckin’ baited us. It was a trap, a lie!”

“Have you checked—”

“Captain, are you fucking hearing me?” Ghost bellows, “there are. No. Missiles!”

There’s a pause of only a second, long enough to make a capillary burst in his sclera, before the Captain speaks again.

“Zakhaev’s bloody widow, eh?” He seethes, “I told you not to trust that lying bitch.”

The tendons of his neck crack in the strain of his fury. “Jesus — this isn’t her fault. Makarov gave her false intel so that we’d look in the wrong place.”

“So that you’d look in the wrong place. You followed your cock right into a trap. Fuck’s sake, of all people, I never thought you’d fall for—”

“We’re here because you believed the Americans’ intel, not because of her!” Ghost thunders, so ragged with rage that a mist of blood might have sprayed out with his broken voice. “You sent us hunting for missiles that never fucking existed — she is the one that figured that out, and now she’s being fucking tortured for it!”

“Careful, Lieutenant—”

“Pull your fucking head out of your ass, Captain. Makarov never left Kastovia, he’s at Zakhaev’s estate. They’ve got a launch code with hundreds of locations. They’ll already have a network of bombs just waiting for the push of a button, ready to go, no thanks to the fucking months we spent chasing our god-damned tails!”

There’s another venomous pause as the Captain must be in thought — rubbing his jowls, no doubt, white-knuckled and exasperated. If he were standing in front of Ghost in that moment he would have been met with a fist to the gut.

“Fucking hell,” he croaks. “Alright, okay. Fine. Nerve agents, then — how are they dispersing them? When? Have you got that far?”

“Today, Captain. They’re setting them off today.”

“How do you know?”

“Mia,” Ghost grits. “Mia found the drive containing the code.”

“And you believe her?” The Captain spits incredulously, “Sergeant Garrick and I are on route to Russia on her word — the same word that drove you into an ambush — and you still believe her?”

“Yes, Captain, I fucking believe her,” he rages. “I’m taking my team and what’s left of Delta back to the estate. I suggest you turn around, because there’ll be an army waiting for you when you land. Only telling you that because I like Gaz alive.”

Price’s sigh cuts through the line like a ripsaw.

“Alright, Simon,” he grumbles. “Garrick and I will circle back. Get the drive, if it exists — that’s the priority. Not Makarov, not the UNs, and not Zakhaev’s fucking wife. Understood?”

The phone screen cracks in his grasp. “Copy.”

There’s a point where terror loses its meaning.

Dulls to a blunt edge like an overused blade. Doesn’t cut as clean, doesn’t draw blood as quickly, but hacks away at flesh all the same.

Still drives you to kick, to scream, to buck and twist like a wrangled cat, to claw and bay and cry until your throat goes splinter-dry and it hurts to inhale; even if your senses are fraught to the point of fog, blurriness where your vision had been clear, a ringing in your ears that deadens your hearing.

It only makes him chuckle, like a dry joke, as he holds a stony arm around your neck, pit of his elbow pressing into your throat. Hauls you down the corridor of your mansion like dead game, towards an open door you’ve never seen before — tucked under the stairs, panelled in the same wainscotting as the rest of the wall. Hidden in plain sight for as long as you had lived there.

“Stay up here, both of you,” he demands, in Russian, to the armed soldiers that followed closely behind him, there to catch you in the unlikely circumstance of your escape.

It fills your belly with dread.

Briney. Corrosive. No audience to spectate him, that might question or criticise him, that he might feel the need to appease.

He wants you alone with him.

He has wanted that from the day you met him, plain as the murky death in the pits of his eyes. In the yellowing where his teeth meet his gums when he grins. In the ownership forboded by his touch.

The certainty of this inevitable outcome, seeded in his mind from the moment your husband had reclaimed the seat of power that would otherwise have fallen to him.

How better to avenge such an injustice than to steal everything he once owned? The throne, the money, the estates, the credit for their terrorist plot — and last of all, you.

You can hear it in his breathing, ragged and approving. Feel it in how he presses his nose into your hair as he drags you down a flight of exposed concrete steps, breathing in your fear like perfume. Fragrance bespoke for him. The raw musk of dread and corporeal anticipation of the agony he is yet to inflict on you.

You don’t bother begging. Your pleas turn to blood at the back of your throat. Wasted breath, because to hear you pray for mercy would only please him.

The crying is instinctive, though. Screams that rip from your chest and rend your diaphragm, sobs that you choke and gulp on and that drool from your mouth. There’s no swallowing that, no matter how hard you try to maintain some dignity, how hard you attempt to compose yourself in an effort to avoid arousing him.

Because you know that it does.

You know every tear that drips from your chin and lands on his forearm pulls vindictive blood into the cock you can feel against your spine. Every scream makes his smile wider. Every splutter makes his grip tighter.

Beyond purely sexual sadism, because you can smell his spite in the vapour of his breath. Rancour as putrid and sanguinary as raw meat. Hatred that has been stewing and rankling in the noxious pits of him for so long that it leaks from his skin and smears against yours.

He wants to hurt you because he loathes you almost as much as he loathed your husband. He delights in conquering you because you’re the trophy he has stolen from the only person that has ever been more powerful than himself.

He relishes in your screaming because to him it sings like victory.

“Here we are,” he croons, as he pulls you into a cement cave — a plainly square room, walls of raw concrete, with a lightbulb behind a cage bolted to the ceiling.

Nothing in here but a metal door in the corner, that ventures to somewhere unknown — and a small terminal fixed to the same wall, with a display the size of a postcard. A keyboard juts out from beneath it, atop a steel cabinet, where thick rope of corded multi-coloured wires creeps out and along the floor. Your eyes follow them to where they travel up to the top of the wall, through a small square hole and into the space behind it.

“Haven’t been down here before, eh?” He asks richly, entrapping you at the base of the stairs, with his cheek against yours.

You only whimper, refusing to ingratiate yourself with words, even if indulging him might help you.

“Keeping secrets was one thing Vic was good at, I’ll give him that,” he says smugly. “You were even better, though, weren’t you?”

You swallow the bile that pushes up your gullet as he nudges you in the direction of the terminal.

“Loyal girl,” he says into your skin. “Never told him about you and I, did you? Kept our secret from him until the day he died.”

He describes it like an affair, like you cuckolded your husband because you wanted to, like you had a choice in the matter.

“You must have known this is where you were headed. Straight back to me.”

You know he isn’t stupid enough to think that. He’s only mocking you. Tormenting you for something he knows you could not prevent.

“Mustn’t have told your Englishmen, either,” he drawls. “I’m sure they wouldn’t have sent you here if they had known how you spread your legs for me. If they had known who you are truly loyal to.”

You choke on a sob, as he shifts his suffocating arm from your throat, and both of his hands land on your shoulders. Fingers burrow into the tender meat just to make you squeak.

“It disappointed me that you did them favours so willingly, I admit,” he grumbles, into the hair at the crown of your head. “But, that’s why I let you send them to Mialstor. I knew you’d share that secret, at least.”

A single hand releases you, and he reaches around you — with the same USB drive you had discovered earlier pinched between his fingers, you watch as he plunges it into the plug at the base of the keyboard, and the little screen lights up. A black window, command prompt, with lines of white text at the top;

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘 𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘 𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚜𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚎𝚍

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘 𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚌𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍

> патриот@𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚝: ~$ _

You feel your beating heart in your teeth, and his lips on the shell of your ear.

“But not our secret, eh, girl?” You feel him smile, his cold teeth on the thin layer of red skin over the cartilage. “Are you embarrassed? Or did you just want to avoid upsetting me?”

You cry, wrenching your eyes shut, and you taste your tears on your tongue.

“Hm?” He pesters, tightening his fingers around your trapezius. “Answer me.”

Every organ in your body resents the words you form with your tongue, but they spill from your mouth, because you do not want to know what he’ll do if you fail to obey a direct demand.

“I was embarrassed,” you sob, refusing to answer him in Russian, the frail syllables barely eking out of your throat. Chose the option you hope might even slightly bruise his ego.

But he only chuckles, synthetic sympathy in his breath.

“Oh, Mia,” he coos, his second hand sliding away from you, “no need to be embarrassed. You have far worse things to be embarrassed about.”

Your wet eyes follow as his restraining hand joins the other on the keyboard, arms enveloping you, the gritty skin of his clean-shaven jaw chafing against your ear.

He types a short line of command into the terminal;

> патриот@𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚝: ~$ 𝟷𝟷𝟶𝟷.𝚜𝚑 &

“Like fucking the man that murdered your husband,” he remarks, amusement in his tone. “Are you embarrassed about that?”

You whimper, and he laughs.

How could he know that? It makes you sick to think — had he planted listening devices throughout the whole house? Cameras you couldn’t see, or never thought to look for?

Had they been there since the funeral? Or ever since Victor bought the mansion for you, more than five years ago?

Your sight goes hazy at the thought that he had been observing you the entire time. At the thought that you never had a secret, never had a moment of privacy, never had a break from ravenous eyes — not once, not even in what you thought was your only place of respite.

That he had watched you shower, watched you masturbate, watched you fuck your husband, watched you scheme with the spec op that executed him, and watched you fuck that same man on the kitchen counter. Watched you bathe with him, touch him tenderly, sit on his cock in the bathwater. Watched you cry in remorse for it. Watched him cradle you. Watched you open yourself innocently to what you thought was a moment belonging to only two people; Simon and yourself.

But it was never just the two of you. It was never only you.

You’ve been a source of entertainment, of stolen pleasure, of inhumane gratification for every waking moment of your life. Raped by eyes you didn’t even know were defiling you. Followed unremittingly by sniffing dogs at every bend.

“Are you?”

“No,” you croak, because it’s true.

He lets out a chuff of laughter.

“Good,” he muses, “I’m glad, Mia. Because it just as likely could have been me. Shame he beat me to it!”

“What do you mean,” you whine, as his clammy palm slides down your arm, taking your hand in his, pinching you by the pointer finger.

You are past the point of being able or willing to resist him. Hopelessness sits heavy in your abdomen like a new organ, black and meaty. The venom of futility beats through you in place of your blood, it makes your skin turn grey, and your tongue chalk-dry.

You watch vacantly as he pushes the tip of your finger into the enter key. As a line pops up beneath the one he typed.

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘 𝚛𝚞𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐

“Victor was supposed to die here,” he explains gleefully, keeping your hand dead still, and your finger pressed deep into the key he had forced you to press.

You feel a weight in you that is unexplainable, elusive, incomprehensible. A black hole where your guts should be. Something Eldritchian, like gravity, that makes your head feel heavy and nebulous, and your feet sink into the floor.

“Don’t move your finger,” he instructs, stern and unforgiving. He means it.

“I don’t understand,” you cry, obeying as he releases your hand, and he pinches a thin green wire that pokes out from the side of the keyboard.

“I designed this all for him, you see—” he says, gliding his fingers down the wire, to where it enters the steel cabinet beneath the terminal. “He wanted to be the one to set everything in motion, fucking egotist that he was.”

He twists the small metal handle to open the door, and it squeals as it reveals its contents — you can’t quite see until he gives you room to look downward.

You’re not sure what you’re looking at, at first. Blocks of ivory clay, wrapped in plastic, webbed with wires and kept together with straps of black tape.

It dawns on you, though, as your eyes trail back up the little green wire, to where it connects to the keyboard, right beside the enter key.

You let out a whine like a kicked puppy. “Is it — is it going to explode?”

“Only if you lift your finger,” he hums, the pride of victory so concentrated in his voice that you can taste the salt of it in his breath.

You would cry more keenly if you weren’t suddenly petrified of moving — because you understand, now, that you are as good as a warm corpse. A dead man’s switch he had orchestrated for your husband to trigger. He couldn’t run the code himself, having designed it to kill whoever did.

No, he just used the same body he has never had any qualms about using, only this time for an additional purpose.

He has made you his weapon as much as his toy.

“What is it d-doing,” you sob, but you can guess the answer.

“You read the script, didn’t you?” He asks, hot breath seeping through the hair at the back of your head, as one of his hands settles on the side of your thigh. His palm is cold and sticky as it slides up to your hip. It makes your skin bristle and your heart drop.

“I didn’t — I didn’t know what it meant,” you moan, tongue slippery and stuttering on every syllable.

“You’re a clever girl, Mia,” he lauds deeply. “What do you think it’s doing?”

The repulsive softness of his touch makes you shudder, cold abhorrence dribbling down your spine — because he doesn’t need to be aggressive, nor forceful, nor violent, now that he has you where he wants you. Because he knows that you will not and cannot attempt to fight him off. Because he can fuck with your head, like he has always been predisposed to — putting the onus on you to refuse him, knowing that you wouldn’t. Then whose fault is it but your own?

This time, even crueller; he can handle you how he pleases, because he knows you want to live.

“Are there—” you ask in a whimper. “Are there bombs at the coordinates?”

His other hand fixes to your opposite hip, the hem of your long t-shirt draping over his wrists. He’ll have realised by now that you’re not wearing any underwear, because you are still wearing what you slept in. You can hear it in his breathing, it turns frayed as his hard fingertips brush your bare hips.

“Close,” he chuckles, head sinking to your neck.

You break out in sobs, hoarse and shattered, arm quivering where you can’t rest your weight into the chest-height keyboard, nor drop it to relax the slowly aching muscles.

You can hardly utter the words that stammer between your teeth. “Are p-people dying?”

“Guess.”

“Yes,” you whisper.

He smiles. “See?” He murmurs. “You’ve always known.”

The cement floor feels warm under the soles of your feet, and you wonder if the maws of hell are about to open up beneath you and swallow you whole. You hope it does, and you hope it digests you slowly. Hope it eats away at your sin and failures with brimstone and stomach acid, layer by layer, until there’s nothing left of you but the seeds of what once could have been a whole person. Seeds that might have germinated but were never planted, never nurtured. Wasted in the barren soil of a whore like you.

Your eyes cleave to the blinking underscore on the command prompt — running, it says, and it doesn’t change — and you think for a moment you might be able to hear the cries of death over the horizon. The brontide of murder by the thousands, every second. One for every breath you take.

You’re met only with beating silence, and the ragged breathing of the beast behind you.

“If I take my finger off, w-will it stop?”

You quietly hope that he might have overestimated your selfishness. Might have orchestrated some ploy that would force you to decide between your life or the lives of thousands of innocent people. Might tell you that releasing the key would put a stop to the suffering, both yours and theirs.

But you know he is smarter than that.

“No, girl,” he says dryly. “There’s no stopping it now. It’s already been done.”

You choke on a cry as he lifts your t-shirt to your waist, and you hear him chortle under his breath.

Seems he has staked his life on your desire to survive. Confident you won’t release the key and kill the both of you, because you want to live. Because you think you have somebody coming to save you. Because you think your life matters enough to preserve.

He nudges your legs apart with his knee, and your finger feels light on the key.

The air in the belly of the NH90 is resinous and heavy. Scarce. Hard to breathe and even harder to keep in his chest.

The weight of death and failure hangs thick in it, a smog, one that keeps the remaining soldiers penitently and bitterly silent. Seething, mourning the men they lost; whose bodies they had to abandon, left to bloat and rot in the ambush they were caught in like mice in an unmonitored trap.

There’s a rage shared, though. Swelling and shuddering in the steel bowel of the helicopter, as he and his men listen to the incoming reports from Laswell, and all they can do is sit and wait for the bird to approach its destination.

“…Istanbul, Hamburg — fuck. Zurich. Dublin. Two in Paris, so far,” her voice is weak, grim, compulsively relaying every attack as if it might fuel their hunger to stop it. “We’ve sent out an emergency alert to instruct civilians to stay indoors. Until you find that drive, that’s all we can do.”

“How frequent, Laswell,” Johnny grumbles into his headset.

“Roughly — one every thirty seconds.”

The Sergeant presses his fingertips into his eyes, head bowed, all but keeled over in his seat. Mumbles fuckin’ hell mournfully under his breath. Weighed down by that heroic grief, the poignant lamentation of his failure to save the lives he had set out to, the collapse of three years worth of efforts to prevent this very outcome.

“They’ve targeted business districts, street corners, office buildings. Public transport. Subways.”

Ghost checks his watch; just after half-past nine in the morning. One or two hours behind in the more western regions of Europe. Peak commuting hours in central cities.

Failure . It rumbles deep in Ghost’s ears as he stares into the dark clouds through the small window across from him.

It putrefies. It festers. Fury that turns black and sticky, thick in his veins — but not slow moving. It beats through him hard, and fast, it makes his vessels distend and his skin burn. Pellets of acidic sweat form on his skin and do little to cool him. His hands are rigid. Searing. Tendons taut and close to snapping. Knuckles white-hot.

His eyes are red with it. Wide and bloodshot and twitching in the corners. Jaw grinding so ferociously into his skull his molars threaten to shatter under the pressure.

He can hear you, indistinctly, somewhere in the hollows between his ear canals and the back of his throat.

Not only your indelible scream, the one ringing in his ears louder than his tinnitus — but your voice. The gentle terror in your throat every time you warned him of exactly this.

You know what will happen.

Riddles him with guilt that manifests as crude oil. Incendiary fuel for the rage that thunders within him, that needs only a single spark to ignite. But he contains it, for now. Chews on it like tobacco, lets the inebriant anger seep through his gums and bleed into his brain where it simmers behind his forehead.

His Captain told him that you aren’t his priority.

But you are.

Now, he knows it, as certain as gravity — there is no denying it anymore, no dancing around the inexorable fact, that you have been from the start.

You were his priority when he stole you. His priority when he interrogated you. His priority when he dragged you back to your estate. His priority when he let you loose among the mongrels.

He just hadn’t accepted it yet.

He had repudiated it with every fibre of his being, every synapse of his brain. Didn’t let himself make the calls he knew, deep in his gut, were the right calls to make — the call to spare you, the call to exonerate you, the call to send you home unharmed.

You are stuck where you are because he was too much of a coward to confront his own humanity.

He won’t abide his cowardice anymore. Any residual shame for his concern for you has sloughed from him like irradiated skin, been trampled beneath the rugged soles of his boots, shot to pieces the moment he heard your broken scream over the radio signal.

The ETA from the pilot crackles through his headset; “Five minutes out. Get ready to drop.”

He shoves the magazine he had been flipping between his knuckles into his rifle and it clicks as he seats it. Tugs back the charging handle to chamber a fresh round. Taps the spare clips he had preemptively stuffed into the pockets of his tacvest, the backup that the helo had brought along with it. A blessing, because he does not plan on being frugal with his bullets.

Igneous anticipation surges through him like a current, as he pushes himself to stand, gripping the handles on the ceiling of the aircraft to maintain his balance. Rolls open the sliding door early and peers out into the stormy sky — beneath the helicopter he sees the rampart of cedar hedges that encircle your summer estate, and he’s so close he can smell you.

Soon your mansion comes into view, and he hopes you can hear the blades of his helicopter thundering across the sky. He hopes the walls of the building shake with it. He hopes Makarov can fucking feel it in the air, the fate so soon to befall him once he is caught between Ghost’s teeth.

The Sergeant comes to stand beside him, clutching the ceiling and leaning out into the air to glare down at their destination.

“Reckon Makarov is still in there?” Johnny asks through gritted teeth, acrimony thick in his voice.

Ghost responds with a stiff nod. “He’ll be taking his fuckin’ time.”

“Plenty of time to catch him, then.”

Whatever tell he failed to conceal seems to alert Soap to the machinations of his mind, and the Sergeant lands a firm pat on his shoulder.

“She’s a tough girl,” he assures him. “Don’t lose your head, eh?”

Ghost bites on nothing, and a ragged breath rips from his lungs. “Too late.”

It’s a fast few minutes before the helicopter begins its descent behind the treeline, far enough from the mansion that they’ve avoided fire from the woefully unprepared mercenaries that litter the estate.

Ghost turns to address the men in the bird with him, and those that had been sent as reinforcement — the Captain had finally pulled his fucking head in, once the proof was drilled unremittingly into his ear, and he could suddenly justify returning to the estate with significant forces in tow. The next two aircrafts are not far behind.

So as he roars his orders into his headset, he addresses all of them.

“Right, the lot of you — we’re cleaning fucking house. Not a Konni soul left breathing. I want the fucking floor wiped with them! Copy?”

Follows the uproar of yes sirs and copies as the rest of the soldiers up and ready themselves, rearing and ripe with a hunger to avenge the men they have already lost and the lives still being taken every minute. Exactly the furore he needs from them — he needs them driven, and vigilant, and angry, so that he can focus on his own objective.

You.

He leans out of the open door, unblinking in the gale of the blades, glaring down into the waving sea of grass beneath him. Just about close enough to jump out without breaking his legs on landing.

“Alright!” Comes the inciting yell from the pilot, “move! Move! Move!”

Ghost had leapt to the ground at the first syllable.

He sprints with the fury of a hunting wolf, legs pumping with adrenaline and tumescent rage, and his boots singe the grass underfoot. His massive assault rifle is light in his grip, an extension of his hands, raised and ready, itching to unload on a hair-trigger.

He shoots down the first Konni soldier he sees through the trees before he had consciously acknowledged his presence there. The ear-splitting cracks of his gunfire reverberate through the steppe, likely alerting everyone in the vicinity to his incursion, if the helicopter hadn’t already.

Good.

He wants you to hear him coming for you. He wants those that entrap you scared and scrambling.

Stalks like an android. A terminator. Unrelenting and indomitable. Fires cannonades of red-hot bullets at every combatant that crosses his sights — precise, deadly, unhesitant. Splitting skulls with five-five-six calibre. Trampling over their corpses as he bulldozes towards the back door to your estate.

His vision narrows to an aperture. Turns black at the edges. Pulsing. Bloodthirsty. The sight that’s left is clear and sharp — a reticule, crosshairs bright red, infrared vision hunting for the heatmap of one creature.

Moves like he did when he first invaded your manor, back in the arctic mountains of your husband’s motherland. Just as hungry. Just as targeted. Killing every man in his sight without thought or vacillation — it happens instinctively, on autopilot, pre-programmed to clear targets as if they were still made of paper. His rage then was near as blinding, but rooted in an entirely different source.

His primary objective remains unchanged.

Finding you.

He fires a few rounds into the lofty glass of your sliding back door, and it shatters into shards of snow, sprinkling over his back as he storms in unhampered.

“Mia!” He roars into the hollow of your mansion, hoping only that you’ll hear him, that you’ll know he’s coming for you — he expects no response, but he is still fraught not to hear one.

Two soldiers in the sitting room. He shoots one through the forehead, but the other slips behind the stone pillar of the fireplace, out of sight.

No matter, Ghost advances without reluctance. The man looks surprised to see him when he appears beside him, likely having expected some ducking-for-cover shootout — doesn’t have long to regret it, though, before Ghost fires three rounds through his neck, and his carmine blood sprays in a mist over the cobbled stone behind him.

A chorus of gunfire wracks through the villa from every direction — up the stairs, through the corridor, out the front of the house. Stormed from every angle, now that the reinforcements had shown up, and his manpower matches that of the vermin that infest every corner of the property.

Their extinction is inevitable.

Now, he can focus on what he came here for.

He knows, wherever you are, that you can’t respond to him. So he calls for your captor instead.

“Makarov!” He bellows, steaming through the kitchen, dining room, lounge — “I fucking know you’re in here, you piece of shit.”

Continues up the stairs, shoots down another Konni that crosses his path.

“Wanna know what I’m gonna do when I fucking find you?”

Sweeps the second floor — your bedroom, your cunt husband’s office, the ensuite he can still smell you in. Leaves bloody boot prints in the plush carpet and the sulphur of gunpowder in the stagnant air.

“Might start with your tongue, you disgusting cunt. Gonna cut it out and make you fucking swallow it.”

The hatred starts to ulcerate within him when he doesn’t find you. Can’t even hear you. Feels the blisters of fury distending in every organ, threatening to burst, and he’s apoplectic with it.

“Where the fuck are you!”

He thunders down the stairs, still inexplicably certain you’re somewhere, somewhere in the bowels of the palace. Not sure what it is that fortifies his confidence — magnetoreception, perhaps, sensing you nearby like your presence disrupts a radio signal. Maybe the lingering fragrance of your perfume and your sweat that dances in the air, leading him toward you like a string through a maze.

But as there’s a fluke pause in the chaotic din of gunfire — in that fraction of a second—

He hears you.

What he thinks is you, anyway.

A cry that cuts through the ephemeral silence like a knife, the pitch of your voice just high enough to pass through walls, through foundations, as he tracks it to the wall beneath the floating staircase.

He notices immediately the gap in the edges of the panelling.

Doesn’t waste a heartbeat looking for how to open it, whatever convoluted mechanism there might be in place to keep it locked — he steps back, hurling his boot into the centre of the panel with an explosive thud , and the echo behind it sounds hollow.

He kicks it again, and again, and again, until a split forms in the lacquered wood — unceasing, even as he begins to feel splints in his shin — his boot slams into the panel unrelentingly until it erupts through the crater he deepened with every blow. His hands do the rest, tearing at the splintering wood like it’s made of cardboard, until the fissure is large enough for him to reach through and feel for a handle on the other side.

He finds it quickly. Pulls it down and opens the door. It creaks as it swings.

So encumbered by wrath that it weighs him down, his boots thud loudly with every step down the concrete stairs. Huffing like a bull. Steaming.

Hears the pig before he sees him.

“Unfortunate timing, Riley.”

Met with the back of him, sinewy fucking ghoul — panting as though short of breath, clad in a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Only as his hand lowers does Ghost catch a glimpse of the Pernach pistol wrenched in his grip — he wipes the long barrel on the leg of his trousers, and in the dim white light of the bulb in the ceiling, Ghost sees a smear of wetness left behind in the fabric.

The thought that crosses his mind is so putrid it makes his stomach rend itself in revulsion, and all he can do is hope that his assumption is erroneous.

“Interrupted the fun part.”

Ghost keeps the mouth of his rifle high, aligned with the back of his head. The only thing preventing him from pulling the trigger is his indecision on how slowly he wants him to die — and, more crucially, the risk that you are right behind him; that close-range bullets would tear straight through him and embed in you.

And he’s endlessly thankful he curbed the impulse, because he hears your whimper eke out from obscurity.

“Simon—”

You’re alive.

Relief as dizzying as liquor rushes through him in a torrent, a flash flood of napalm, and the embers of his worry reignite into an inferno of inveterate hatred, and his eyes glow red.

Makarov turns his head over his shoulder as he shifts, just slightly — and there, he sees you, hunched over but upright, between your anathema and the wall. Shaking. Knees locked but close to buckling.

There’s nothing else he needs to see. No greater confirmation.

The stifled fury sweltering within him tumefies to the point that the pressure threatens to crack his skull. He all but shudders with it, as he flips his rifle in his grip so that he holds it by the barrel like a baseball bat.

The fucking egomaniac must have expected time to monologue, turning to aim his glistening gun at Ghost far too late — hardly has time to blink before Ghost swings the butt of his rifle into his armed hand, weapons colliding with a crack and the deafening eruption of a too-slow bullet fired as a last resort. The pistol is catapulted from Makarov’s grip, clacking loudly as it slams into the cement wall and bounces off the floor.

Makarov snarls like a rabid cur, cursing through teeth; “Cукин сын.” Son of a bitch.

Greasy spite of besmears itself across his face. Eyes like beads in his gaunt skull. His belt is undone. Zipper down.

Ghost carelessly tosses his rifle aside, and it skids across the concrete into the corner of the room.

He was never going to proffer the pig the mercy of a bullet.

There was only ever one means of execution befitting him.

Frothing at the jaws as he abruptly thunders toward him, and despite the futile throw of a retaliatory fist, Ghost swiftly has him by the throat. Growls like a bear as he tackles him to the floor, in a furious blur, as the Russian contorts to pull an out-the-front switchblade from his sock.

Only notices when the blade slices through his cheek, sharp as a scalpel, steel knicking the bone — but nothing at this point can hurt him. Everything in him, every nerve, every muscle, every cell — so focussed, so honed in on his victim that anything else is so utterly insignificant it disperses into smoke.

The knife is gone before Makarov can muster a second attempt, riven from his grip and tossed to oblivion, and before he can swallow a breath, Ghost hurls his iron-hard knuckles square into the centre of his face, shattering his nose with a crunch , and the back of his head ricochets off the cement underneath with a teeth-chattering crack that makes the room go silent.

The pig blinks, still breathing — so Ghost throws another, so violent that his nose caves in, and the blood splatters over the taut skin of his fist.

Not enough. He throws another. Beats a crater into his forehead. Skull splits along the crest like ceramic wrapped together by skin.

He throws another. Wrapping splits in the fissure and the blood spills like milk.

Only sees red. Teeth bared. Eyes glass over.

Throws another, carmine fountain splashes out from the impact—

—another, eyeballs birthed from between purple eyelids, burst like blisters—

—another, jaw breaks at the hinges from the rest of his skull—

—another, tongue severed and jutting out through shattered teeth—

—another, grey parasite of gelatinous brain spills out onto the concrete—

—another, and thuds turn to squelches.

—another, a fracture in his own knuckle.

—another, his vision blurs.

…another, and his fist is hitting concrete.

Another. There’s nothing left.

“S-Simon—”

Your weak voice cuts through the red fog like a beacon.

His humanity gradually returns to him when he hears it. Comes back with a gulping breath, as he glares down at the body he bestrides. At the caldera of flesh and bone where his victim’s head used to be.

Chest hounding, jaw loose, he can taste the iron of blood in his teeth. It drips from his beaten knuckles, speckles the cement like spilt paint. It sprays up his forearm like a glove. It glitters across his cheeks like freckles.

You speak, again, and he finally breaks the surface.

“Simon, what do I do?”

He pushes himself to stand with a grunt, breathless, and attempts to wipe the blood spattered on his face with the back of his hand — smears the red leaking from his own wound in so doing, he forgot it was there.

Turns to you, where you still stand facing the wall, and he grimaces — are you chained to it?

“He m-made me—” You stammer out in broken sobs, and he grits his teeth as he girds himself to hear whatever horrific crime you were made victim to. “He made me press it. I c-can’t stop it — Simon, how do I make it stop?”

His brows knot in worried confusion as he rushes towards you, fighting the urge to immediately take you by the arm and haul you into an embrace; such an act would be for his own comfort more than yours.

But as though sensing his approach, you shriek—

“Don’t touch me!”

He stops behind you, but your agitation simmers quickly.

“You c-can’t — I can’t move,” you whine, shattered. “You can’t t-touch me.”

“Mia…” He mumbles, finally registering what you’re looking at as he moves beside you — eyes pinned to a terminal interface, finger pressed into a keyboard below it.

“It’s still going,” you weep. “It’s k-killing them… I can’t stop it. I’m killing them and I c-can’t stop it.”

The tunnel vision that had focused solely on you widens just enough for him to absorb what you are talking about. The terminal, the keyboard — and as he looks at it, the drive. Jutting out of the plug at the base.

The mission returns to him like a kick to the teeth. Laswell’s voice in his ear. Reminding him of every chemical bomb triggered, every thirty seconds, for the last forty minutes.

His eyes catch the wire snaking out from under the key you press. Where it enters the open cabinet beneath the keyboard. Can see past your knees the blocks of C4 stacked from base to top, wired up tidily by experienced fingers.

The realisation douses him like cold water.

“What do I do,” you cry, as he reaches a careful arm around you.

You flinch, and the guilt for startling you falls heavy in his stomach, but he can’t back away. Not now that he understands the predicament you’re caught in.

Settles a thick finger next to yours, pressing into the enter key beneath it.

“I need you to move your finger,” he murmurs gently.

You shake your head vigorously, desperately, shaking like a leaf but inadvertently leaning some of your weight against him. “I can’t.”

There isn’t a choice. He coils an arm around your waist, gripping tight, and he feels you deflate as he lifts you upward.

“ No, nonono, no…” you wail, but you don’t fight him; he twists you, reeling you away from the keyboard, until your finger is free and your hand drops to your side.

You collapse into him once you’re no longer holding the dead man’s trigger — head rocks against his shoulder, weary hands clutching onto his forearm as though you’d plummet off a cliff if you let go.

“I’m sorry,” you lament, voice frail and so fraught with grief it hurts him just to hear it. “I’m sorry — I let him — it’s my fault. I pressed it — I…”

To hear you apologise makes his ribs close in. That you could ever be sorry for anything, that you could shoulder even an ounce of guilt — an injustice he cannot abide, and he presses his lips into your hair.

“It’s not your fault, sweetheart,” he urges. “None of this is your fault. Hear me? It’s mine.”

You sob, and he wants nothing more than to wrap both of his arms around you; to embrace you in earnest, to apologise unremittingly into your skin so that even the blood that pumps under it believes him when he says it. It’s not your fault.

But he can’t. Your life is more important. “Now I need you to step back.”

He lets go of you as you manage to stand on your own feet, balancing you with a hand on your back when you stumble, but you do as you are told — stepping back slowly, trembling, not yet willing to run.

“Get out of the basement,” he orders firmly.

“No,” you refuse, shaking your head, still within arms reach — you gasp when the back of your heel collides with the corpse on the floor, and your head swivels to look down at it.

He sees you gawk at it. Lips parting in horror. Eyes bulging with it. Can barely muster a sound. “...Simon…”

“Look at me,” he insists, and sweet girl, you do. Rheumy-eyed and quivering. “Mia — go upstairs.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” you whimper, swallowing a breath. “Not without you.”

His chest tightens up, and it’s quickly clear to him you won’t leave unless compelled to — brave girl, your lack of self-preservation makes his teeth scrape together.

He needs you out of the room before he attempts to interrupt the script. He can enter the command without lifting his finger from the enter key — but he needs to release it in order to press it.

With his free hand, he speaks into his radio. “Johnny — how copy.”

“Solid, LT,” he returns immediately. “Fucken’ bloodbath out here.”

“I found the terminal. Entry under the stairs. Get here. Now.”

Not even a minute before he hears the heavy boots, bounding down the stairs, but the Sergeant screeches to a halt when met by the carnage on the floor.

“Jes— Jesus fucking Christ , Simon.”

Not often the boy uses his Lieutenants name; says it meekly, like it’s a greater sin than using the Lord’s name in vain.

“Is that…”

“Makarov,” Ghost spits his name out.

“Where’s the girl?” He asks sombrely, as though already anticipating bad news — the state of Makarov’s carcass likely evidence. Ghost only gives him a nod in your direction, and he turns his head over his shoulder; you shrivel up when the Sergeant looks at you.

“Listen to me,” Ghost barks, and Soap marches over hastily, ever obedient. “I need you to take her.”

“Now?” Johnny balks.

“Now.”

“What about the terminal?”

Ghost huffs through his teeth. “I’ve got it,” he grits. “Now get her on a fucking helo.”

“No — no,” you suddenly yelp, inching closer to him, as if he might be the one to protect you from the Sergeant he has ordered to take you. “I said I’m not going anywhere.”

His eyes wrench shut. Bites out a pained sigh. “Mia — go with him. Please.”

“No!” You yell, fragile voice breaking in the strain, “I’m staying, I’m not letting you disappear again—”

“Soap,” he grunts rigidly.

“Copy.”

Needn’t restate the order. The Sergeant understands well enough, and he marches toward you unrepentantly.

That ever-present guilt burns in his throat as he watches you cower away from him, shaking your head and gulping on sobs — but Johnny scoops you up like you weigh nothing, an arm firmly buckled around your waist, back riveted to his side. He wastes no time, stepping over the corpse on the floor and carrying you towards the stairs.

“Put me down!” You squeal — bucking, kicking, you even try to get an elbow in — “I’m not going! No! Simon! Simon!”

His eyes are warm. He cannot listen to it. Agonising as a ruptured eardrum to hear you cry for him — right there, where he could answer you — but he is cruelly unable to.

“Johnny — you get her that fucking passport if it’s the last thing you do,” he roars. “You hear me?”

“You got it, LT.”

The man carting you up the stairs is far stronger than the one who dragged you down them, and no amount of kicking or twisting or scratching loosens his grip.

All you can do is cry, and scream, and pray that Simon changes his mind, and comes bounding up the stairs, having performed a miracle — that he frees you from the restraint of his subordinate, that he promises never to leave you alone again, that he gets on the helicopter with you.

But you are carted down the hallway, toes dipping in the blood that puddles on the slate, and he does not come.

"Put me down you son of a bitch!” You wail, voice shredded to husks and squeaks after the labour of interminable screaming. “Simon!”

The Scotsman — Johnny — is steadfast. Unshakeable. Any moment you feel like you might come close to slithering out of his grip, he readjusts, reorients, subdues.

“I’m only following orders, hen,” he grumbles, and you can hear the unease in his voice, coating his throat. Perturbed, perhaps. Guilty. “Not trying to hurt ye.”

You are not afraid of him. There is nowhere worse he could take you than where you have already been, and you trust Simon not to have left you in the arms of somebody that could hurt you.

No, there’s something else that terrifies you.

That Simon will die at your hand, along with the thousands of others you have already killed.

Your fault, because you sent him to that factory, where there was never anything to be found. Your fault, because you let Vladimir command you like a puppet, too frightened to pull back on his strings. Your fault, because you let Simon ever think you could be useful for anything but your inbuilt purpose.

“I f-fucking hate you!” you sob, though once you utter it you’re not sure who the sentiment is for. Yourself, maybe. Johnny. Vladimir. Everyone you have ever met.

“Ah know,” he says stiffly, giving you a pat where his arm coils around your back. “But he wants you alive.”

He moves quickly despite your wriggling, keeping you as low as he can without letting your feet touch the floor — gunfire rings out in the distance, cracks that echo from within the house and outside.

Soon he has you over his shoulder, just to free a hand, and you hear him talking to somebody over the radio.

“Gaz, Gaz!” He belts, “how copy?”

You can’t hear whoever responds, assuming the conversation is being had within the man’s helmet.

“You near the birds? Reckon you could start one up for me?”

“Got the princess. Lieutenant wants her out of here. Yeah — she’s not happy about it.”

“Does it sound like I give a fuck what the Captain said?”

“Good man. Be there in two. Out.”

He lets out a sharp and beleaguered breath, lowering you from his shoulder, where he must have assumed you might have been uncomfortable — or, less charitably, worried you’d slip out of his grip.

Shards of glass crunch under his boots as he carries you through the shattered back door, out into the hammering rain, where the gunshots are close enough to make you cower into his chest as if he might shield you from them.

“Almost there, hen—”

Boom.

Assurance punctuated by deafening thunder that quakes the ground beneath him. Shatters all remaining glass on the first floor. Twinkles as the slivers fall to the patio behind you.

Your diaphragm seizes. Heart stops dead. Hearing goes dull. Tongue goes dry. Eyes go gauzy.

There’s a beat where you all but lose consciousness. Disappear within yourself like you’ve fallen down a well.

You resurface when your escort begins to run.

“NO!”

You shriek viciously enough to make your vocal cords bleed, entire body contorting and writhing until you finally break free from him, and you land in the grass with a thud.

He fails to grab you in time, you scurry in the mud, fingers clawing at handfuls of grass until you’re able to scramble to your feet — you break into a full sprint, bounding like a hare, sucking the wet air so deep into your lungs it makes you dizzy.

“Mia!” Johnny roars after you, quick in his chase, but you endure.

You run bare-footed over the shards, utterly ignorant to how many slivers might get embedded in your soles — the interior of the house is cloudy with dust and smoke, creaking and crumbling, moaning in dispute of its destruction.

“Simon!” You wail, scrambling down the hallway, towards the staircase — even more glass carpeting the floor where the balustrade had been blown to smithers, and rained down on the slate underneath it.

Charcoal-black smoke billows out from the open door to the basement, entirely obfuscating, beating and waving like a creature in itself.

You venture into it unhampered.

“S—” a shout bitten off by a cough as you leap down the stairs, “Simon! Please—”

You choke on your plea as you trip over something heavy at full speed, toppling into the smokey abyss and landing on sticky concrete.

You cry, it hurts, every part of you — your eyes burn, and your lungs singe with every breath, and your knee stings — but you hastily turn to feel for what you had tripped over, and your hands find warm fabric.

Simon. He made it to the stairs. Find his neck and you feel him breathing — hardly, he wheezes with every pitiful inhale.

And his skin feels wet. Gritty. Peeling.

“No, nononono,” you wail, clambering up and over him, attempting to situate yourself while utterly blind.

You feel desperately for his shoulders, scooping your hands through his underarms until you have him hooked by your elbows.

“Please, Simon—” You beg, coughing, spluttering, as you engage every fibre of muscle in your body to lift him from the stairs.

“Mia — are you in there?” Johnny calls from the basement door, voice dampened by the density of the smoke.

“He’s alive!” You try to roar, voice abraded to near-mute, and you’re not sure if the Scotsman could even hear you.

You heave , pulling Simon’s enormous body up a single step with all of your might — dizzyingly heavy, and yet somehow lighter than you would have expected. You cry in your strain as you pull him again, stepping backward onto the next step up, hauling him agonising inch by agonising inch.

Only as the smoke begins to settle, and you make it up another stair, do you see the blood. Coating you like paint.

The side of his head is singed where it wasn’t covered by his helmet. Thick fabric of his uniform shredded by the explosion, exposing the blackened skin within, where it blisters and peels to reveal the yellow fascia beneath it.

Your eyes land, then, on the strands of crimson flesh where his shin used to be.

“Oh, god,” you wretch, cough, and turn your head to spill tar-black vomit onto the cement wall beside you. “Fuck — S-Simon…”

You feel a hand on your arm, then, and it grabs you, picking you up and dragging you out of the smoke.

“No!” You sob, “no — please, he’s alive, you have to—”

Johnny plants you in front of him, firm hands on either side of your shoulders, and he glares into you with such piercing eyes you have no choice but to meet them.

“We’ll get him help, okay?” He pledges, firm, unyielding. “But he’ll never forgive either of us if you die here today, understood?”

You wheeze, lungs glutted with smoke and charcoal, tears so wet on your cheeks that your skin itches, and you’re not able to form a single word.

“C’mon, hen,” he says gently, scooping an arm under your knees and hoisting you deftly off the ground, carrying you tightly to his chest. “Let’s get you out of here.”

There’s no fight left in you. No wrath, no terror, no spite. Only a hollow pit in the core of you, sucking anything else into its void, and leaving you bitterly empty.

Johnny totes you back out into the pounding rain, and you feel it rinsing the coal and blood from your calloused skin as he sprints across the expansive lawn.

You hear the beating of the helicopter gradually grow louder as he gets closer to the treeline.

“They stopped!”

An unfamiliar shout over the roaring aircraft, but you don’t turn to look. You keep your stinging eyes held shut so that you can feel the grit of the smoke wearing down their film.

“Cannae hear ye, Gaz!” Johnny yells back, voice vibrating right through you.

“The bombs! They’ve fuckin’ stopped!”

You realise then that what you had thought was a shout, was a cheer.

“Hear that, hen?” Johnny says pridefully, lowering his head closer to yours so that you can hear him. “He did it.”

You have no words to utter, but you feel your heart twist up behind your sternum.

He did it.

Soon the helicopter’s engine is deafening, and Johnny unfurls you, raising you up by hands under your arms and sitting you down in the open door of the aircraft. Another hand encircles you, then, to prevent your limp body from falling back out.

“Jesus—” blurts the man beside you — the Sergeant. Gaz, you suppose. “She okay?”

“No,” Johnny barks, giving him a pat on the knee. “Y’take care of ‘er, yeah?”

“Course,” Gaz confirms solemnly, with a rigid nod.

The Scotsman addresses you, then.

“You enjoy that new life of yours, eh?” He says loudly, an indeterminate expression of certainty tight in his features. “You’ve earned it.”

With a nod, he’s away, unslinging his rifle from his back and barreling back off into battle. You watch vacantly as he disappears behind the oak trees.

The man in the helicopter with you gives you a nudge to get your attention — doesn’t grab you, or pull you, just waits patiently for you to turn your head and acknowledge him.

“Mia,” he says, as gently as he can while still audible over the helicopter blades. You finally turn to look at him. “C’mere, let’s buckle you in.”

He looks at you sincerely, sick worry in the back of his eyes, reflecting the dim light of the grey sky. You nod weakly, and he helps you stand, leading you to a seat and holding you as you slump into it. He tightens the straps over your chest, buckling them and giving them a jostle to make sure they’re secure.

He fixes a pair of earmuffs over your head, adjusting them over your ears, and you’re suddenly swimming in a deep and thumping silence. Puts a pair on himself.

“There we go,” he says into his microphone, and you can hear his voice clearly. He leans into the cockpit and taps the pilot on the shoulder. “Cleared hot.”

With that, the helicopter begins its ascent. Wobbling on its way up, as the Sergeant settles into the seat opposite you.

“Where are you going to take me now,” you ask dejectedly, hardly a squeak, voice excoriated beyond repair.

You expect him to say something vague, something obscurely menacing. To the compound. To an airbase. To a camp down south.

He gives you a weak smile.

“Home,” he says.

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