Page 35 of Cold Ignition

Hands on the wheel. Foot on the pedal.

Control.

“Status,” he snapped.

“Devices secured from those we took down,” Luca said. “Victor’s got a couple of thumb drives. I’m ghosting their system—leaving a burn in the logs to make it look like internal failure.”

“Charges set,” Tane added, voice calm as the ocean before a storm. “On your mark, Torch, I mean Ahi, fuck, whatever. You know who you are.”

Keanu looked once more at the building through the cracked windshield.

His grip tightened on the wheel.

“Burn it,” he said.

No hesitation. No doubt.

“Copy that,” Kael’s voice cut in—low, final. “All teams, extraction point alpha. We’re done here.”

Keanu shifted into gear. The Hellcat roared, and he glanced once at his passengers.

Rangi’s eyes were on him now. Searching. Alexios leaned back, breathing hard, gaze sharp despite the blood.

Neither of them spoke. Good. He didn’t want words. Not yet.

“Hold on,” Keanu said.

Then he drove.

The car surged forward, tearing through the remaining debris and out into the open night in a blast of heat and dust. Behind them, the first charges detonated.

The building shuddered.

Then began to collapse in on itself, fire blooming through its broken frame as Black Tide erased every trace of what had been hidden inside.

Keanu didn’t look back.

He pushed the Hellcat harder, faster, the engine screaming as they tore across the desert toward safety. Toward answers. Toward something none of them were ready for.

Inside the helmet, his breath stayed steady.

But something deeper had shifted.

And for the first time in a long time—Keanu felt something within him that he had struggled with for the past six years settle within him.

Chapter Seven

Rangi couldn’t remember the last time a helmet had offended him this much.

It wasn’t the gear itself—he’d worn enough of it in his life, trusted it with his bones and blood more times than he could count. It was what it hid. The man behind the visor. The voice coming through a filtered speaker instead of a throat he could read, a mouth he could watch, a breath he could feel.

Ahi sat to his left, hands loose on the wheel, driving like the road belonged to him and always had. Smooth. Controlled. Fast when it needed to be, precise when it didn’t. The car ate the distance between them and wherever the hell this compound was, engine humming low and dangerous beneath them.

Alexios sat between them, one shoulder angled slightly forward, his arm still strapped but no longer immobilized. Even injured, he took up space like a blade—contained, deliberate, impossible to ignore.

Rangi’s gaze kept flicking left. To the helmet. To the visor.

To the way it reflected the dashboard lights instead of giving him anything real.