The three of us searched the dead bodies around us for firearms. I replaced my missing knife. Lucas found a single handgun with ammo left. He gave it to me.
I checked the magazine. Three rounds.
“Use them wisely.” He coughed against the rising smoke.
Glass shattered several rooms away, and we hurried toward the main stairs. On the ground floor, the flames ate through the plaster and wood like hellfire. The cloistering heat suffocated me as we rounded the last flight. We ran for the French doors to the patio, all three blown wide open.
Vaulting into the nippy night air, we paused. Shadows shrouded the raging battle. Dozens of soldiers fought from the patio clear down the sloping, overgrown gardens to the gazebo at the far end of the museum. Sporadic bullets popped.
The fight swallowed us, and we lost Adam in the fray.
I treaded Lucas’s heels as he flew down the cement stairs, ignoring the fighting soldiers around us. We wound up on a stone path near the wild gardens. We made it to the decorative pond when I caught sight of Devon battling for his life between two Hunters.
“No!” I slid over some rocks in my way and headed toward him.
“Sophia!” Lucas yelled.
Skidding underneath the swerve of a blade, I bypassed an enemy, burying my knife into one of Devon’s attacker’s legs. I stabbed over and over again, and he fell, twisting to thrash me. The tip of his blade sailed across my throat. Fire seared through the shallow cut. He swung again, but Lucas slid behind him. Grasping either side of his head, Lucas wrenched to one side. The man’s neck snapped.
As Devon unsheathed his knife from the other Hunter’s abdomen, he turned wide eyes on me, then Lucas. “How did they find us?”
“The interview,” I said. “Listen. We have a safe house on Evanston. If we can get out, we can hide there.”
“Alright—”
Isaac appeared, bleeding and limping. He grabbed Devon’s hand and dragged him toward the gazebo.
“Come on.” Lucas pulled me along the stone path.
Running with a limp, Lucas took us by the largest pond and branched off onto another dark path leading away from the fights, toward the parking lot. He guided us off the stonefootpath and into the wooded area beside it, using the trees as camouflage.
Peering through the trunks toward the gazebo, I froze.
Lucas jerked on my hand, but my feet had turned to lead.
Because there, on a bench inside the gazebo, surrounded by at least six guards, sat Jack Miller.
40
Ultraviolent
He wore our colors. He saluted our flag. All the while, he was sharpening his knife behind our backs. When we find this traitor, we will let him live long enough to watch everything he fought for burn. And then he will die like a coward—slow and in pieces.
—JACK MILLER
Acid dissolved my insides, eating through everything until it uncovered a core of hatred. My hands clenched into fists as I fantasized about sinking a knife into Jack Miller’s throat.
He sat with his legs crossed, lording over the chaos.
Lucas followed my gaze, and his body stiffened. His expression was one I’d never seen before. Animosity and resignation warred there, and he dropped his head. “I need to get you somewhere safe.”
“I’m not leaving you. I’ll do whatever else you say, but not that.”
His eyes flashed in the darkness, then locked on something back toward the house. I analyzed the details of his face. A new plan was forming in his head, and I was ninety-five percent sure I wouldn’t like it.
My nails dug into his skin. “You look like you’re doing math problems.”
“I’m trying to remove you from the equation.”
