The tracker in my pocket vibrates in warning pulses.
“Kiro?” I whisper.
“Two minutes. Maybe less.”
Inessa rises with ballroom grace. She brushes a fingertip across the polished table… and I see it only when she steps back:
Words etched into the wood, razor-thin but unmistakable.
Endings are for the naïve.
My blood chills. Glass shatters somewhere in the distance, Kiro’s voice snapping like a wire tearing loose. “Go! Harper, go—now!”
Glass shatters and people drop. Tables overturn as if the floor itself tilts sideways. A bullet carves through the air above me, a clean metallic hiss that passes so close I feel it kiss the edge of my hair.
I dart away from the table, Kiro’s voice is in my ear, sharp and unfiltered.
“Left corridor—go, go, go!”
My boots skid against the marble. My pulse is a drumbeat in my ear, louder than the alarms piercing through. Smoke thickens the air as the world shrinks to a tunnel of motion and instinct.
When I look back at the table, Inessa is gone. She vanished as easily as a shadow stepping into a deeper shadow.
I shove past a falling light fixture and sprint toward the corridor. A man in Anton’s colors steps out from behind a column, raising a weapon.
My blood freezes—he’s too close, I won’t make it.
A flash of movement to my right—and a body slams into him with brutal precision.
Kiro.
He tackles the man to the floor, disarming him in a single twist of his wrist. Blood spatters across the wall like a red punctuation mark. Kiro shouts at me without looking back.
“Harper!Move!”
I don’t need to be told twice.
Another gunshot ricochets off the ceiling. A chandelier crashes like shattered ice. I slide across the floor, ducking behind an overturned marble counter. Footsteps pound behind me—heavy, coordinated, hunting.
My tracker buzzes again.
“Ten seconds to extraction,” Kiro says in my ear. “Can you make it to the side entrance?”
“I’m trying,” I rasp.
There’s no breath left in my lungs, no time to feel the shaking in my hands. No time to think about anything but Damian.
He’s coming. I know it.I feel it.
The corridor narrows. The emergency lights flicker red, casting the hallway in a pulse that mirrors my heartbeat. A shadow lunges from the left—another attacker. I throw myself sideways, feeling the swipe of his arm skim my shoulder.
A loud crack splits the air.
The man drops.
Damian.
His presence fills the hallway before I can fully see him. The outline of his shoulders, the deliberate steadiness of his stride, the way the smoke coils around him.
