novelraw Chapter 522: You Don’t Know?
Chapter 522: You Don’t Know?
When the first bolt slid back, Zubair didn’t wait for the second.
He drove his palm into the seam and forced the reinforced door inward with sheer intent, metal groaning as it surrendered. The lock mechanism protested with a grinding whine, then snapped hard enough to throw sparks. The door swung open in a jerking arc.
Luci surged through first. Not barking. Not charging blindly.
Instead, the dire wolf flowed into the darkness like it belonged there, head low, shoulders rolling, nose working in sharp pulls. His paws landed without noise, but his presence filled the corridor anyway.
Zubair followed so close he nearly clipped the wolf’s flank.
Heat shimmered around him in tight bands, contained and lethal, ready to be directed. He didn’t look at the door. He didn’t look at Hattie. His world had narrowed to one thing: whatever was on the other side of this threshold had taken Sera, and that made the threshold wrong.
Lachlan moved in on Zubair’s left, lightning flickering low along his fingers, not arcing wildly, not theatrical. It lived in him like a second heartbeat. Psycho drifted in on the right, frost whispering along the floor, eager and hungry, the kind of cold that didn’t comfort—it dismantled.
Behind them, Hattie stepped into the doorway and paused, as if she was savoring the moment. Her nine men followed without rush, taking positions without being told. Once again, one of them hovered too close to her shoulder, eyes bright, restless, scanning the dark like he expected to see something that belonged to him.
Hattie lifted her hands slightly, palms out, in an exaggerated gesture of innocence.
"Well," she said cheerfully. "Let’s see what they were so desperate to hide."
The corridor beyond was not built for comfort.
It was narrow, the walls thick, the ceiling low enough that even the air felt controlled. The lighting was dim and erratic, emergency strips throwing harsh angles across steel surfaces. The floor was clean in a way that felt wrong—no scattered papers, no dropped tools, no frantic footprints.
Only dead bodies.
They lay arranged by function rather than panic. Two technicians slumped against the wall beside a control box, hands still hovering near switches. A guard lay facedown at the far end, rifle under him, neck twisted sharply as if he’d been turned off mid-thought. Another body sat upright against the wall, head lolling, eyes open and vacant.
These weren’t people who had run.
These were people who had been hit... and fast.
They must have been the first people around Aerenyx when he snapped.
Zubair stepped over the nearest corpse without breaking stride. His gaze was locked ahead, jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped. He didn’t spare the dead a thought. They were not part of the equation.
Luci stopped at the first intersection, head lifting. His ears angled toward the left corridor. His body went still for half a second, then he turned decisively to the right.
Zubair followed immediately, without question.
Lachlan watched the wolf’s movement, understanding what Zubair was doing. Not trusting the animal because animals were noble. Trusting it because Luci’s instincts were aligned with what mattered. The wolf was a tool, and right now it was the best one they had.
"Keep up," Hattie called behind them, like they were on a casual tour.
Psycho laughed softly. "She thinks we’re slow."
Lachlan didn’t answer. He was counting exits, angles, ways the corridor could turn into a trap. Not because he feared being trapped. Because traps had to be accounted for, dismantled, used.
They moved deeper.
The lab doors here weren’t labeled with names. They were numbered. Coded. Reinforced with locks designed to keep out everything Hope Sanctuary pretended didn’t exist. Observation windows were shuttered from the inside, metal plates welded over glass.
Someone had built these corridors with the expectation that the thing inside them would try to leave.
Now it had.
Luci’s nose worked steadily, drawing in information the others couldn’t read. He paused at a door, sniffed the seam, then moved on. He paused at another, ears twitching, then continued. His pace never became frantic.
He wasn’t panicking. He was tracking.
A faint sound drifted down the corridor ahead.
Not a scream.
A cough.
Wet, controlled, repeated.
The kind of cough people tried to hide when they knew the sound would get them killed.
Psycho’s smile sharpened. "Someone’s still alive."
Zubair didn’t speed up. He tightened.
That was worse. It meant his restraint was thinning.
They rounded the next corner and found the source.
A man crouched in the shadow of a control alcove, one hand pressed to his mouth as he coughed into his palm. His eyes went wide when he saw them, and he scrambled backward, trying to put distance between himself and what he’d recognized.
He wasn’t a civilian.
He wore a lab jacket, but there was a security badge clipped to his collar.
He looked like someone who knew what these corridors were for.
"Wait—" the man rasped, voice breaking. "Please, I can— I can tell you—"
Lachlan’s lightning snapped out.
Not into the man’s chest.
Into the wall beside his head.
Sparks exploded, showering the alcove in white-hot fragments. The man screamed and threw his arms up instinctively, flinching away from the sudden light.
Lachlan stepped closer, face cold.
"You can’t tell us anything," Lachlan said. "Because you don’t matter."
The man’s eyes darted to Zubair, desperate. "She— she’s down here— they took her—"
Zubair was already moving.
His hand closed around the man’s throat with casual strength, lifting him just enough that his feet scraped the floor. Heat shimmered faintly, not burning yet, but present, making the man’s skin flush and sweat instantly.
"Where," Zubair said, voice low, and it wasn’t a question. It was a function demanding an answer.
The man choked, hands scrabbling at Zubair’s wrist. "I— I don’t— I don’t know—"
Zubair’s heat spiked.
The man screamed as his throat blistered from the inside. The sound became a wet gargle. His eyes bulged, then rolled back.
Zubair released him and the man dropped in a heap, smoking faintly at the mouth.
No one commented.
No one reacted.
Hattie stepped around the corpse as if it were furniture and peered down the corridor where Luci had already turned again.
"Mmm," she hummed. "They always say they don’t know. It’s funny how often that’s true."