Page 265 of Broken Oath

“They thought he would talk.”

Then he touched the image of another missing operator.

“They thought one of them would break.”

His hand moved to the next photograph.

“And they never did.”

No one spoke.

Five years.

Five years of captivity.

Five years of interrogations.

Five years of men doing everything they could to force trained operators to surrender whatever secret had gotten them buried beneath that mountain.

Five years of Wade and his teammates refusing to give it to them.

Sarah’s voice was quiet.

“They kept each other alive.”

Her father looked at her.

“Yes.”

That single word held pride, pain, and fear.

Fathom leaned toward the screen.

“So what changes now?”

Wade’s father looked at me.

“They know you found the mountain.”

“How?” Cobra asked. “We haven’t contacted anyone.”

“They don’t need to know what you’ve found. They only need to see where you’re looking.”

He pointed toward the surveillance photographs we had recovered.

“They found this warehouse. They know Sarah is here. They know you captured Marcus Lane, and they know he failed to kill Shadow Division.”

His voice lowered.

“If I can put the pieces together, the people who built that prison can do the same.”

The room grew colder.

Marcus wasn’t the man moving the pieces anymore. He was locked in our holding room, stripped of his authority and waiting to discover how much pain Sniper could inflict without leaving a mark.

But the men above him were still free.

They would be destroying records.