Chapter 291: Chapter 291: Before they finish (1)

The city slid past in streaks of muted light and shadow, traffic thinning the farther he drove from the central district. The pin on the map barely moved, but Ethan watched it all the same, tracking each shift in real time like a lifeline he refused to loosen his grip on. He drove fast, but not recklessly; he made sure he stayed just below drawing attention.

When the terrain changed and structures thinned into broad industrial stretches and pockets of undeveloped land, he slowed, eyes narrowing.

’This is wrong… but fitting.’ Ethan thought but didn’t stop.

He eased off the accelerator, letting the car settle into a quieter pace as the world around him emptied into long stretches of dark ground and wind-cut silence. The pin on the map pulsed patiently in a way that made his chest feel tighter with unease.

There was something brutally logical about the setting: isolated enough that no one would stumble here by mistake, close enough to the city to feel reachable while actually being anything but. It was the kind of place where someone could do terrible things and trust that the world would never look closely enough to notice.

He pulled to the side of the road, the tires crunching softly over uneven gravel. The engine idled while he sat there a moment longer, letting caution and practicality have at least a brief say. If someone was watching him, and at this point he’d be a fool to rule it out, then they already knew he was here. A phone swap wouldn’t magically erase him. It wouldn’t outsmart a prepared network.

’I’m not stupid enough to leave without a way to contact help.’

He reached down, slid his personal phone beneath the seat, and pulled his work device from the console instead. Different network. Different routing. Less connected to his social circle and anything Albrecht or anyone else might have peered through. Maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe it would. It was still better than nothing.

“I’m not doing this blind,” he muttered under his breath, more to calm himself than to argue with the night.

He checked Leon’s location again and he was still there.

’Well, the phone is still there.’ Ethan thought grimly. ’Be positive, Miller. Leon is waiting for you.’

He took a long breath, feeling the cold creep into the car now that he had stopped.

Ethan shut the engine off and stepped out of the car, the darkness pressing closer around him the moment the door closed.

The night swallowed him almost immediately.

Cold air bit at his face, sharp enough to shock his lungs. He locked the car with a muted click and started moving, boots finding rhythm against uneven gravel before the ground shifted into dirt and dead brush. Every sound felt too loud. Every small gust of wind scraped along metal somewhere distant, echoing like something moving just out of sight.

He kept his pace sure while watching for movement from the police. Or anyone, really. He needed to think, needed to stay alert, but he also needed to reach Leon before whatever had been set in motion decided to finish itself.

The map shifted subtly.

He adjusted course.

Ahead, faint silhouettes began pulling themselves out of the darkness with low industrial structures, fences gone crooked with neglect, and a skeleton of scaffolding left half-abandoned by a project no one had cared enough to complete. It looked like a place meant to hold secrets. It felt like a place built specifically for this.

He scanned quickly, selecting a cover that gave him angles. A rusted service ladder clung to the side of one of the buildings, bolted into metal that complained softly under his weight. He climbed anyway, carefully distributing his balance, testing every rung before trusting it. At the top, a maintenance platform circled the structure, half corroded and partially fenced, but high enough to give him a view of the entire stretch of abandoned industry.

’Perfect.’

He settled into a shadowed corner, dropped low, and let his breathing quiet. The cold bit deeper up here, wind dragging across open metal and bare skin, but height meant advantage, and at this point he could use whatever advantage he had.

He set his watch.

Thirty minutes.

Below him, the place breathed like something asleep. The fencing creaked occasionally when the wind leaned against it. A loose panel rapped every few seconds in a dull rhythm. Somewhere farther off, a stray dog barked once, and then silence swallowed even that.

Nothing.

He forced himself to think of the waiting as work rather than helplessness. His gaze mapped the terrain, memorizing positions: the pattern of scattered debris, the path someone would take if they ran, the fastest cover between structures, and the blind spots that would kill a man if he rushed in blindly. He tracked potential sniper angles. Entry points. The safest exit if everything went wrong.

The longer he watched, the more the quiet became hostile. Thirty minutes stretched in thin, tense increments of five, gone; ten; fifteen, his jaw tightening with every passing lack of movement. If Albrecht was coming, this should not be taking this long. A coordinated team would have already cornered everything.

Still nothing.

His fingers tightened once around the phone before he forced them still. He checked Leon’s location again. Unchanged. Either Leon was somewhere inside, still holding on… or someone wanted it to look that way.

Wind scraped past again, colder now.

Twenty-seven minutes.

’Enough.’

Ethan watched the yard one final time, not because he doubted his decision but because he was a man who built safety into unstable structures by habit. One more sweep. One more assurance that he wasn’t about to stumble into flashing lights and angry tactical officers.

“Fuck,” Ethan breathed, the word torn out of him before he could stop it.

Movement finally stirred through the skeletal courtyard below. Figures crossed the open stretches with that movement he recognized far too well. Men in vests. Heavy boots. Harness belts. Equipment was slung with the confidence of people who did this for a living.

And then the wind blew into his face.

A chemical tang cut through the cold, sharp, and metallic air, threaded with the bitter bite of dust already disturbed beneath foundations. His chest squeezed, not because of the freezing wind but because his brain had already sprinted ahead of him and landed on the obvious conclusion long before he allowed himself to accept it.

Ethan’s pulse hammered so hard he felt it in his jaw. His first instinct was denial, a stubborn refusal to believe anyone would sign off on something like this while a person might still be inside. But the scene below him was too organized.

“Someone is going to demolish the building,” he whispered, and saying it only made it feel more solid, more inevitable.

He checked Leon’s location again even though there was nothing new to see. The pin sat there uselessly, pulsing on the screen as if it belonged to an object instead of a man. His hand tightened around the phone, and he forced himself to breathe, to think, to do something other than drown in the sudden rush of panic clawing at his ribs.

If Leon was still alive, he was somewhere inside those walls.

If Leon wasn’t… then the people who brought explosives to a forgotten industrial graveyard had made sure there would never be proof either way.

Ethan swallowed hard, dragging his focus back to structure instead of fear. He followed the lines of the frame with his eyes, tracing weight distribution, the connection points between beams, and the weak points someone would target if their goal was to collapse it fast. It was almost insulting how familiar the logic was. Human lives reduced to variables and obstacles.

He counted how many workers he could see. Thought about how many he couldn’t. Marked the blind corners. Catalogued risks the way he always did when something unstable threatened to come down on people who didn’t deserve it.

Reason said he should retreat and call emergency services again. Reason said he should wait and hope someone with authority showed up before detonation protocols were locked in.

But Ethan had never built his life around hoping other people did their jobs in time.

“All right,” he murmured under his breath, not because the wind needed to hear it, but because he did. “Then we’re going in before they finish.”

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