The burner phone crunched under Xavier’s heel. Plastic and glass ground into the wet asphalt with a finality that felt good. Satisfying. Like maybe we were actually taking control for once.
Specific, crushing sound. Then silence.
“Dramatic. But effective.”
The air shattered.
Not a noise so much as a pressure change, a crack that slapped against my eardrums before I processed what it was. A chunk of brick near my head vaporized into red dust.
“Down!” Havoc barked the order with the annoyance other people reserved for spilled coffee.
Xavier was already in motion. His arm, a heavy bar of iron, swept my legs out from under me. I hit the wet pavement hard, the breath knocked out of my lungs, freezing slush instantly soaking my jeans. A second bullet sparked off the metal shipping container exactly where my ribs had been a microsecond before.
Xavier crouched over me, scanning the threat. He had a fishing knife. They had assault rifles. The math was bad.
“Sloppy.” Irritation, not fear. Havoc was crouched behind a concrete barrier. “You led them right to the doorstep. Amateur hour.”
“They tracked the phone.” I gasped, scrambling to keep my head down as another volley of shots chewed up the ground. “You didn’t tell us...”
“What am I? Your babysitter?” Havoc reached into his coat, the action so smooth it looked like a magic trick, and pulled out a matte black handgun. Didn’t look at it. Didn’t check the safety. Just tossed it through the air toward Xavier.
“Catch, Blackout.”
The weapon spun end over end through the rain.
Xavier didn’t fumble. Didn’t hesitate. His grip snapped up, snatching the gun from the air with terrifying familiarity. His fingers molded to the grip like it was a missing limb finally returned.
And then Xavier disappeared.
The man beside me vanished. The confused, silent, gentle man who let me hold him in the bath was gone. In his place was a machine.
Four figures emerged from the sleet, advancing with tactical precision that made my stomach drop. They weren’t street thugs. They wore tactical black, communicated with hand signals, and walked like soldiers in the movies. Just like Xavier.
Dresner’s people.
A bullet sparked off the forklift’s tines near my head. I curled into a ball, shaking, making myself small.
He rolled from cover, rising to a knee. Pop. Pop.
Two precise sounds. Two precise impacts.
Thirty yards away, a shadowed figure on a gantry jerked and fell, tumbling over the railing to hit the concrete with a wet thud.
I stared, my stomach twisting. I’d seen him kill the cops at the clinic. That had been desperate. Violent. Messy.
This was surgical. This was what Havoc had meant. The asset. The operative.
Xavier advanced, and I scrambled to follow, keeping low. He wasn’t running away. He shifted between cover points. Crate to pillar to dumpster. A rhythm that made no sense to my civilian brain but clearly made perfect sense to him. He was suppressing the shooters, drawing their fire, controlling the space.
“Stay down!” Havoc fired three rounds over my head to cover our advance. “Car’s two blocks east. The black SUV. Go!”
He surged forward, closing the distance on a shooter flanking us from the right. Terrifyingly beautiful. Fast. Efficient. He disarmed the man with a brutal wrist lock, his left hand doing the work, right shoulder still not quite right from the dislocation, spun him as a human shield, and...
Stopped.
Xavier froze.
Not a hesitation. Not a pause for breath. He simply ceased to function.
