“Come out, little mouse.” Kozlov’s voice echoes through the warehouse, distorted by the acoustics. “You think you can escape? This is my house. My territory. You will die here.”
I press my back against a container, controlling my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. My heart is pounding, but my hands are steady. They’re always steady when it matters.
A shadow moves at the edge of my vision.
I spin, knife leading, and catch the guard across the face before he can raise his weapon. He screams, clutching at the ruin of his left eye, and I silence him with a brutal strike to the temple. His skull makes a sound like a cracked egg. He drops.
Sorry,I think, but I’m not. Not really. He was going to kill me. He was working for a man who traffics human beings for experiments. He made his choices, and so have I.
Movement behind me. I whirl?—
—too slow?—
The blow catches me across the shoulders and sends me sprawling. My knife skitters away across the concrete. I roll,trying to get my feet under me, but a boot comes down on my wrist, pinning my gun hand to the floor.
Kozlov looms over me, his shaved head gleaming in the industrial light. He’s holding a pipe.
This is going to fucking hurt.
“There you are, little mouse,” he says, almost gently. “So much trouble from such a small thing.”
Can I spit on him? Hock a loogey from down here like a fucking Dilophosaurus and hope there’s enough upward trajectory that it gets in his eye?
“Bayo,” I gasp. “I need?—”
The pipe comes down.
I twist at the last second, taking the blow on my shoulder instead of my skull. Pain explodes through my arm, white-hot and nauseating, but I use the impact to roll, wrenching my gun hand free. I fire twice from the floor—one shot goes wide, the other catches Kozlov in the meat of his thigh—and scramble backward as he roars in fury.
“Suka!” He swings the pipe again, wild this time, and I barely duck under it. “I will break every bone in your?—”
I shoot him in the kneecap.
He goes down hard, the pipe clattering away, and for one precious moment I think it’s over. But then his men are flooding in from every direction, at least five of them, and I’m all out of options.
“Kat!” I’m backing toward the loading dock, firing at anything that moves. “Kat, I need you NOW!”
“Thirty seconds!”
I don’t have thirty seconds!
The first guard reaches me and I meet him with a front kick that sends him staggering, following up with a palm strike to the nose that sprays blood. The second comes from my left and Iduck his swing, driving my knee into his groin, then slamming his head into the nearest crate when he doubles over.
But there are too many. There are too fucking many and there’s only one me.
I’m not going to make it. I’m going to die here.
Keep going, keep fighting.
But a fist connects with my jaw and the world tilts sideways in an explosion of razor blade stars. I stagger, tasting copper, and someone grabs my arm—wrenching it behind my back, spinning me, and suddenly I’m on my knees with a gun pressed to the back of my skull.
“Enough!” Kozlov limps toward me, one hand pressing down and alternating between his bleeding knee and his thigh, his face twisted with rage. “You kill my men. You come into my house. Now you die like a dog.”
“Mia!” Bayo’s voice is frantic in my ear. “Kat’s still three minutes out! Can you hold?”
What happened to thirty seconds?I want to ask but I can’t find the words.
My shoulder is on fire. My jaw feels like it’s been hit with a hammer. There’s blood in my mouth and blood on my hands and the cold barrel of a gun digging into the base of my skull. I count the bodies around me—three down, maybe four—but there are still too many standing. Too many guns. Too many ways this ends with me dead on a warehouse floor in Brooklyn, another NOC who got too close to something too big.
