And he intended to finish it.
Chapter Eleven
Eliza stood at thelong dining table that had been converted into the Covenant’s nerve center.The polished surface was hidden beneath screens, tablets, hard drives, and paper maps weighted at the corners.
Kansas City lay quiet outside the mansion’s walls.Inside, war was unfolding in real time.
Banks of monitors lined the far wall.Live body-cam feeds from Kol, Rafael, and the rest of the Covenant flickered between infrared and low-light.Telemetry streamed in from the helicopters overhead—altitude, fuel, wind speed, distance to target.Comms chatter filled the room in clipped bursts, professional and precise, the language of people who trusted each other with their lives.
Eliza stood beside Mara, headset on, one hand braced against the table.
She wasn’t in charge of the action that was taking place.
But she was very much in it.
“Alpha team, breach in thirty,” Elias’s voice came through, calm and unhurried.“No deviations.”
“Copy that,” Kol replied.
Rafael didn’t bother with more than a single word.“Moving.”
At the far end of the room, Kaiser stood with arms folded, eyes on the perimeter feed rather than the body cams.“Perimeter’s quiet there,” he said to Mara and Eliza.“No movement toward the house.”
Slayer, seated at a secondary console, snorted softly.“If they do go that way, they won’t get far.Nitro never misses.”
Eliza exhaled slowly and leaned closer to the display.
Floor plans overlaid the live feeds—every room, corridor, stairwell mapped in wireframe.Heat signatures pulsed and shifted as bodies moved through the structure.Power fluctuations flickered red and amber along the edges of the layout, alarms and suppression systems tripping in sequence.
She felt ...calm.
Not numb.Not detached.Just focused.
Adrenaline sharpened her thoughts instead of scattering them, and for a moment she wondered when that had changed.When fear had stopped drowning out clarity.
“East wing stairwell,” she said into her mic, voice steady.“They’re trying to funnel you toward the service corridor.It dead-ends.”
