Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 61469 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61469 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
The final sequence initiated a cascading shutdown—cameras first, then motion sensors, finally the communication arrays. The soft hum of electronics died away, replaced by an eerie silence. For thirty seconds, maybe a minute, Berkut Station would be blind.
“Impressive.”
I spun around, my heart hammering. Horakovsky stood at the tunnel entrance, a strange device in his hand—something like a metal detector but more sophisticated, with a digital display that cast green light across his scarred face.
“I wondered how long it would take you to make your move,” he said conversationally, stepping closer. “Though I admit, I expected something cruder. Attempting to steal a weapon, perhaps. Not this.” He gestured at the dead panel. “You actually knew the codes. The real codes, not the dummy sequences we give to staff.”
He raised the device, sweeping it over me like he was checking for weapons at an airport. When it passed over my lower abdomen, between my legs, it erupted in sharp electronic squeals. The display lit up with readings I couldn’t understand, but Horakovsky’s expression shifted from amusement to something darker.
“What is this?” He moved the wand again, more slowly. The device screamed louder as it passed over my pelvis. “You’re carrying something. Some kind of transmitter? A recording device?”
His free hand shot out, gripping my throat and slamming me back against the tunnel wall. “Who sent you? The FSB? The Americans? The fucking Chinese?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I gasped, clawing at his hand.
He released me only to backhand me across the face, the impact sending me sprawling onto the grating. Before I could recover, he’d grabbed my arm, hauling me back toward the main corridor.
“We’ll see how long you maintain that innocence,” he growled, dragging me through passages I hadn’t seen before. These weren’t the luxury areas—bare concrete walls, industrial lighting, the smell of oil.
The room he brought me to made my stomach clench. It was clearly purpose-built for interrogation, or worse. Chains hung from the ceiling, various implements lined the walls, and in the center stood a wooden frame that made my blood run cold—X-shaped, with manacles hanging from its extremities. A medieval device in a high-tech context that made it seem all the more frightening.
“Now, Fru Norquist,” Horakovsky said as he began to secure me to the frame, my front to the wood and my back to him, “let’s see how long it takes to make you tell me what I want to know. This will be even more fun than I’d imagined you’d provide.”
CHAPTER 22
Aksel
The alarm roused me from a fitful sleep at the controls in the safehouse’s surveillance center. The neural implant detector’s signature. Unmistakable. I pulled up the feed from the micro-drone network I’d seeded throughout a thousand square kilometers of the Arctic weeks ago. The timestamp showed 03:47 local time where the signal from the Freya’s Bridle located between Lorna’s vagina and anus had popped up, in a location that no state had laid any solid claim to.
Lorna’s biometrics had shown a spike of stress hormones and adrenaline, but she was alive. More important, she’d successfully triggered the security shutdown exactly as her visions had shown her, which had led to what amounted to a broadcast in the clear not just of the data from her implant but of a stunning amount of information about what lay under the permafrost at the site.
With three keystrokes, I activated the strike team. A squad of Pretorian Guard agents who had flown in from Rome, with Henrik, one of my brothers in the Sons of Odin, as a liaison, had been in position for the past eighteen hours, waiting in a reinforced shelter just beyond my best guess at Horakovsky’s sensor range.
With the data that the drones had captured and sent to me, I could provide the team’s operations officer with exactly what he needed to jam the station—Berkut Station, as it seemed to call itself. The strike force would need time, especially given what I could see about the depth of Horakovsky’s lair beneath the tundra, but they would be able to get in undetected.
“Operation Ymir initiated,” I said into the encrypted comm channel, my voice steady despite the rage burning in my chest at what the surveillance feed from the station was showing me from the past few hours.
I adjusted the video so that it unfolded at 3x speed, but, even so, watching my vǫlva endure such degradation represented a severe trial of the evenness of my temper. Knowing I’d commanded her to submit to it made it worse despite my certainty that she could endure and triumph. The sight of her tied to the bed, violated again and again, simply tested my control in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
You love her, said the calm, simple voice in my head. You’ve never loved anyone this way.
“Primary breach in four minutes.” Henrik’s voice seemed so clear in my ears that I could scarcely believe he was hundreds of kilometers away, in the frozen wastes.