I failed.
“Any last words?” Kozlov asks. He’s enjoying this now, the sick bastard. His men are closing in, forming a loose circle, wolves around wounded prey. “Any message for your people?”
I could tell him to go fuck himself, spit in his face, try one last desperate move, knowing it would only buy me seconds at best.
Instead, I force myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way I was taught. The way I’ve done a hundred times before when death was close enough to taste. At least if he kills me now, I’ll be spared from the worst that they can do.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice steadier than it has any right to be. “Tell them I was still fighting.”
Kozlov laughs. That gravel-in-cement-mixer sound. “Fighting. You are on your knees, little mouse. No more fighting. You are finished.”
He’s right. I know he’s right.
But I also know something he doesn’t.
That I’m not the only predator in this warehouse.
I’ve spent my whole life learning to sense things that don’t want to be sensed and right now, in this warehouse full of killers, someone else is here.
Someone watching.
Someone waiting.
Kat? That better be you.
CHAPTER 32
VANGUARD
I’m standingat my penthouse window, watching the city bleed into night, when the alert comes through my watch. Not the priority klaxon that means someone important needs saving, just a standard notification, the kind that usually gets routed to local authorities, the kind that doesn’t normally alert me.
Shots fired. Red Hook industrial district. Multiple casualties reported.
I almost dismiss it. The NYPD handles this kind of thing, not me. Anything to do with gang violence, drug deals gone wrong, or just the everyday brutality of a city that’s still healing from the Dark Decade is not my jurisdiction.
Not my problem.
But something makes me hesitate.
Maybe it’s the location—Red Hook, down by the waterfront, the kind of place where things happen that never make the news. Or maybe it’s because these police reports don’t normally show up on my watch, or else I’d be bombarded by them all the live long day.
Or maybe it’s the restlessness that’s been crawling under my skin all night, the need todosomething instead of standing here marinating in my own guilt over Mia.
It’s been four days since I last saw her, since she left my penthouse with my fingerprints on her neck, and I’ve been doing nothing but wallowing in self-pity, torn between needing to see her and talk to her, but also giving her all the space she needs, because I certainly don’t deserve to be in her presence, not after what I did.
So this alert is certainly a good distraction.
I tap the watch. “Show me.”
The holographic display blooms to life, painting the air with satellite imagery and police scanner chatter. The warehouse in question is a dark rectangle at the end of a pier, and the thermal overlay shows heat signatures moving inside—some running, some stationary, some cooling rapidly.
Those people are dead. This isn’t your normal gang shoot-out, I can tell.
You should go.
The thought arrives without explanation, a gut-level certainty that cuts through the noise. I’ve learned to trust that instinct. It’s what has kept me alive in the past more times than I can count.
“Danny,” I say into the comm. “I’m heading out. There’s an altercation at Red Hook, gun fight I think. Something doesn’t feel right.”
