Silence tore through the aircraft's control room like scissors through fabric, sharp, abrupt, and suffocating in its intensity. Neither Rider, Bringer, Bryan, nor Tiara could believe what they had just heard.
They doubted their own ears; they questioned their own minds, each of them wondering if their perception had somehow betrayed them. They didn't dare to think or believe that Anthony was joking or playing around. If he had said it, then he was serious about it, and that alone made the weight of his words far heavier than anything else.
They weren't shocked at the thought of killing someone, nor were they unsettled by Anthony killing someone he had never met or who had done nothing wrong to him. Each person here had taken lives without hesitation, had crossed that line long ago, so none of them cared about the concept of murder itself. What left them truly shaken, what gripped them in an invisible tension, was the target; Drake Bloodmoon.
