15.
Raphael glanced at the van and the half-open bay doors.
Moonlight trickled in through the crack between them, wide enough for two men to walk through shoulder-to-shoulder. The Bratva men had not finished closing the doors when Piotr began his little show. They had left their duties to watch Raphael’s execution.
Footprints marred the dirt where the girls had been standing, where large-soledboots had trampled the gravel and dirt around them into complex swirls.
Raphael snapped his head up and diverted his gaze away from the few clues as to what had happened. He stared straight ahead and tried not to grin.
10.
While the Monegasques had stormed in with their enormous operation involving perhaps a hundred men with high-power weaponry, creating a disturbance and a diversion, RogueSecurity had quietly snatched the girls to freedom.
Raphael wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. He had no real information about Magnus’s operation for Piotr to beat out of him before he shot him in the head, and there was no use inviting him to torture Raphael longer under the mistaken assumption that he did.
Piotr turned back to him and pointed a pistol at his forehead.“Where are my damned girls?”
The inside of the handgun’s barrel was a silver tunnel into the darkness above.
5.
Raphael drew a breath to deny all knowledge of what had transpired.
Something clattered on the cement floor behind him.
Ticking.
He knew that sound.
Piotr was lifting his gaze, and the pistol drifted away from Raphael’s eyes.
3.
2.
1.
Raphael grabbed his ears just as the first flash-bang grenade blastedthe air out of the warehouse.
