Kara moved up on my other side. “Any idea how many guards we’re dealing with?”
“Too many,” I said. “But some of them are very dead right now, so numbers are in flux.”
Dmitri’s voice cut in. “Viktor. Focus.”
“Right.” I scanned the next intersection, listening for movement. “Two doors ahead on the left. They walked me by it when they first captured me. It’s security control. If we can get in there, we can pull down internal cams, kill some of the locks, and give ourselves a path out of this joint.”
Lev nodded once. “Then that’s our first stop.”
We reached the security door, but it was still securely sealed. There was no visible handle or knob. It needed a badge and code. I had a badge, but no code. This was the kind of lock that usually took time and finesse.
I didn’t have patience for finesse.
“Roman,” I said. “You up for breaking things?”
He grinned like I’d complimented him. “Always.”
He looped his fingers together and made a stirrup. “Up?”
“Up,” I said.
He boosted me so I could get enough leverage to slam the rifle butt down on the access panel. Once. Twice. Sparks flew. The keypad shattered. Lev reached past us, jammed the barrel of his gun between the door and the frame, and leveraged it with quiet, powerful force.
The lock gave with a hydraulic wheeze.
We slipped inside the security room, guns up, anticipating guards.
It was empty.
Banks of monitors flickered on the far wall, some dead, some looping static, some still streaming grainy footage of other floors. I moved immediately to the nearest console, fingers flying across the controls.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Let’s see what you bastards are hiding.”
The siren changed pitch again, shifting to a deeper, more insistent wail.
On one monitor, I caught sight of armed squads moving toward sublevel three. On another, emergency shutters were dropping across one of the upper atriums.
And on the third, my youngest brother, Andrei.
His hair was tousled, and he was wearing stolen gear and a look that said he’d been having entirely too much fun getting to this point. He was moving down a stairwell with that signature Dragunov speed, like he wasn’t sprinting, but somehow the world was still struggling to keep up with him anyway.
And he wasn’t alone.
Katya was with him.
She was right beside him, cheeks flushed, eyes blazing. There was a pair of knives strapped to her thigh. Andrei had clearly armed her himself.
Good boy.
“There,” I said, stabbing my finger at the monitor. “North stairwell. They’re coming up.”
Roman squinted. “Is that?—?”
“It is,” Kara breathed.
Dmitri’s gaze flicked between screens, tracking their path, attention locked. “Look. Revenant sent three teams to intercept them. They split across sublevel two. They’re trying to trap them in the stairwell.”
My fingers flew over the console. “I can cut cams on their route, drop doors behind them, reroute the guards for a minute or two. But someone is already trying to override me.”
