Page 11 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Vale finally broke the silence. “We deploy tomorrow morning.”

***

Matt slept badly, though not because he was nervous. That would have been easier to explain. The real problem was the monastery. Once the briefing ended and the adrenaline finally faded enough for exhaustion to settle in, his brain had apparently decided that replaying fragments of the mission file all night qualified as productive behavior. Ancient tunnels. Collapsed catacombs. Something breathing in the dark.

By three in the morning, Matt gave up on sleep entirely and rolled out of bed inside the small apartment Valker had assigned him three levels beneath operations. Apartment was probably being generous. The room looked like somebody had tried to make a military barracks less depressing by adding softer lighting and an expensive coffee maker, though the concrete walls, minimal furniture, and complete lack of windows still left the place carrying the quiet oppressive weight of being underground.

Matt rubbed a hand across his face before wandering toward the kitchen counter in gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt that still smelled faintly like detergent and Colorado. The thought of home landed unexpectedly hard for a moment before he shoved it aside in favor of more immediate priorities. Coffee first. Existential crises later.

The machine hissed softly while Matt braced both hands against the counter and stared at the dark surface in front of him. His instincts had been restless all night, though not exactly agitated. Interested. Somehow that felt worse. Whatever waited had triggered something instinctive inside him that he still did not fully understand, and every thought he had kept circling back to the same uncomfortable realization. Something had stirred the predator beneath his skin, and it had not felt like prey or threat.

A quiet knock sounded against the apartment door, automatically pulling Matt from his thoughts. He frowned toward the hallway because nobody sane visited people voluntarily before sunrise. Crossing the room barefoot, he opened the door to find Keene standing in the hallway holding two folders and looking exactly as emotionally invested in being awake as he always did, which was to say not at all.

Matt stared at him. “Do you ever blink or sleep?”

“Yes.”

“You hesitated.”

“I did not.”

“If this is a surprise psychological evaluation, I’m reasonably confident none of us are passing.”

Keene walked inside without reacting. “Noted.”

Matt shook his head. “I have no idea whether you’re joking anymore.”

Keene handed him one of the folders. “Updated mission briefing.”

Matt accepted it with a sigh before wandering back toward the coffee maker. “You know, normal organizations email documents.”

“Emails can be intercepted.”

“So can people.”

“That is significantly harder underground.”

He poured coffee into two mugs before pausing halfway through the second and looking toward Keene suspiciously. “You drink coffee?”

“Yes.”

“You continue to be deeply upsetting.”

Keene accepted the mug anyway.

Silence settled between them for several quiet moments while the low hum of the facility vibrated faintly through the apartment walls. Matt opened the folder and found additional structural scans layered beside partial psychological evaluations from recovered operatives, while narrow handwritten notes from Soren crowded the margins with clinical observations and warnings. One sentence had been underlined twice hard enough to indent the paper beneath it.

“Prolonged exposure amplifies the wolf’s most instinctive behaviors.”

Matt rubbed the back of his neck. “That sounds concerning.”

“It is concerning.”

Matt glanced up. “You guys really need a slogan less terrifying than that.”

Keene leaned against the counter with his coffee untouched in one hand. “You should be aware of the risks before deployment.”

Matt studied him for a moment longer than necessary, increasingly aware that something about Keene felt different down here than it had upstairs during the briefing. The change was subtle enough that Matt could not fully explain it, but some of the cold institutional distance had slipped just enough to notice. “You actually think this mission’s a bad idea,” he said cautiously.