[POV: Sofia Lanka]

"If you pull that trigger, Elena, you aren't just killing a girl. You're detonating the only leverage you have left to walk off this mountain alive. Look at the scanners. My mother’s debt has been called, and the men outside don't answer to the Syndicate. They answer to me."

Sofia stood at the threshold of the sanctuary’s inner sanctum, her boots crunching on the frost-dusted obsidian floor. The air inside the mountain was ancient and stale, smelling of ozone and the heavy weight of secrets. Behind her, Kaelen Thorne and his Black-Scythe commandos stood like statues of shadow and steel, their weapons trained on the figures huddled...