Page 14 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Baptiste watched him over the rim of his coffee mug. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Thinking too loudly.”

“That is not a real thing.”

“It absolutely is for predators.”

Matt looked back toward the helicopter while operatives loaded the last equipment crates into the rear compartment beneath the growing thunder of the spinning rotors. Around them, the hangar had settled into that familiar pre-deployment tension where everybody moved with purpose and nobody wasted energy pretending they were relaxed.

Matt kept his eyes on the aircraft when he finally spoke. “You ever get the feeling something’s waiting for you specifically?” he asked.

Baptiste was silent for a moment longer than usual.

“Yes,” he said eventually. “The important question is whether it wants you alive when it finds you.”

Matt glanced sideways. “You are spectacularly bad at reassurance.”

“I prefer honesty.”

“That feels like a design flaw.”

The helicopter engines rose into a deafening mechanical roar that vibrated through the hangar walls and drowned out nearly everything else. Operatives moved automatically, hauling the last equipment cases into the aircraft while tension tightened across the room with the familiar certainty of a deployment finally becoming real.

Commander Vale looked toward the team. “Move.”

And with a single word, the mission stopped feeling like a briefing and became something real enough to survive or die inside.

***

The helicopter lifted through darkness.

Matt felt it before he fully saw it.

One second the aircraft vibrated against the concrete confines of the launch tunnel, and the next the weight beneath them vanished as the transport climbed sharply into open air. The sudden transition pressed Matt back into the harness while pale morning light flashed briefly across the cabin interior before thick cloud cover swallowed the landscape beneath them.

The ascent lasted less than twenty minutes before the pilot’s voice crackled across the headset system announcing rendezvous coordinates. Moments later, a much larger aircraft emerged through the clouds ahead of them, its dark silhouette cutting across the storm layer like something military enough to make Matt instinctively suspicious.

The transfer happened quickly and with the kind of efficiency that suggested Valker personnel did this often. By the time Matt climbed aboard the larger transport aircraft alongside the rest of the deployment team, the smaller transport had already peeled away into the clouds behind them.

The inside of the aircraft settled into the familiar rhythm of military transport almost instantly. Engines droned through the reinforced fuselage while red cabin lights painted everyone in muted shadows. Across from Matt, two wolf operatives checked weapons with efficient silence while a raven shifter near the rear compartment reviewed something on a tablet without ever looking up.

Nobody inside the aircraft wasted movement or spoke unless necessary, and the atmosphere carried the same focused tension Matt remembered from military deployments. His body slipped into old habits automatically before his mind fully caught up, narrowing his attention toward secured gear, exit routes, personnel placement, and potential threats throughout the cabin. The only unusual complication was that several of those threats were fully capable of turning into animals.

Matt shifted the headset resting against one ear and glanced sideways toward Baptiste, who sat against the fuselage looking perfectly calm despite the turbulence violently shaking the aircraft. “You always this relaxed before missions?” he asked over the headset.

Baptiste looked up from cleaning one of his pistols with deeply unnecessary precision. “No.”

Matt waited.

“That was honesty,” Baptiste added after a moment.

“That somehow feels more alarming.”

“It should.”

Matt sighed and settled back against the seat harness while heavy storm clouds drifted past outside. Hours still remained before they reached Romania, leaving him with entirely too much time alone with his own thoughts. Unfortunately, those thoughts kept circling back to the same thing. The thermal image buried in the mission file replayed in his mind again and again, the shape curled into itself beneath collapsed stone in a way that looked isolated rather than dangerous.