Andrei shrugged. “No.”
The man blinked. “No?”
“I prefer actions to words,” Andrei said.
He moved then, fast and fluid. His elbow caught the first guard across the jaw in one precise snap, sending him stumbling into the wall. In the same motion, his hand dropped to the man’s sidearm, stripping it clean from the holster. He pivoted, firedonce, a clean shot right into the second guard’s shoulder before the muzzle even leveled fully.
The man hit the wall, gun tumbling from his fingers.
Viktor whistled low. “Little brother has been practicing.”
Dmitri didn’t waste the opening. He raised his gun and fired, dispatching the third guard with a swift, brutal combination of a shot to the knee and another to the head.
Kara, slinking along the wall and apparently unnoticed in the mayhem, swiftly got behind the fourth guard, grabbed his baton off his belt, and cracked it across his head with a satisfying thud. He went down hard.
“Okay,” she said, breathing deeply. “That felt good.”
Roman moved through the half-open door like a storm. “My turn.”
The server room was massive, the ceiling soaring high above long, silver rows of electronics, their bodies blinking with tiny LED lights like a field of mechanical stars. The noise inside was constant, that faint, low vibration that comes from concentrated, humming power. It felt like walking into the nerve center of a giant, very angry beast.
There were six more guards inside.
They turned when the door swung open, weapons already halfway raised. Revenant trained their people well. If we’d hesitated, we would’ve been minced.
We didn’t hesitate.
Lev moved and took the left flank. A single shot to the first guard’s chest. A second shot to the next one’s shoulder, crippling him. Clean, efficient violence. Nothing wasted.
Roman barreled straight through the center, gunfire answering the guards’ bullets. He moved with that reckless, infuriating grace that said he trusted everyone else to clean up whatever he broke. His shoulder clipped a rack, he ducked under a shot that should have taken his head off, and he threw his weight into a full-body tackle that sent one of Revenant’s men crashing into a server cluster hard enough to knock systems loose.
Dmitri stayed a step back, every shot he took deliberately calculated and remarkably accurate.
Kara slid in behind the nearest server bank, using it as cover, popping up just far enough to fire and drop a guard who’d aimed at Dmitri’s exposed side. Her face was pale, streaked with sweat, but her hands were steady.
Viktor passed me at a run, grabbed hold of a guard trying to flank us, and slammed his face into the edge of a console with enough force to shatter plastic and bone. He leaned close as the man slumped. “Tell your commander that’s for the grenade, sweetheart.”
I took the last guard. He saw me coming and fired wildly, the bullet grazing my arm. I swallowed the pain—I’d had worse—and put a knife in his groin, wrenching it sideways as he dropped. Then I slammed his head sideways into the floor and took his keycard.
I took a breath as it all went quiet.
The room was ours.
For the moment.
Breathing hard, I scanned the rows. These towers were Revenant’s real treasures, more valuable than any cell or gun. Their operations. Their secrets. Their deals. The proof they existed where they swore that they didn’t.
And tonight, we were going to ruin them.
“Can you handle this?” Dmitri asked, eyes on me.
“Yes,” I said, already moving toward the central control console. I’d always been good at coding and computers, much more than enough to be considered dangerous.
The main interface was a curved bank of screens and keyboards situated at the far end of the room, slightly elevated. It pulsed with lines of code and layered security prompts. I slid into the chair, fingers moving on instinct. It was almost muscle memory, after all those late nights being indoctrinated into Revenant’s systems.
They thought they’d taught me enough to serve them.
They’d taught me enough to destroy them.
