Her shoulders are squared. Her chin is up. Even now, even like this, she’s not begging.
“Tell them I was still fighting.”
I hear that. Hear the steel in her voice. The defiance.
She’s going to die.
The thought cuts through everything else—the rage, the betrayal, the howling darkness that’s been building since I saw her pull that knife. She’s going to die, and part of me thinksgood, let her, she deserves it for what she did to you, she’s a liar and?—
But my body is already moving.
I drop from the beam, still invisible, and land behind the man with the gun. His skull cracks against my fist before he even knows I’m there. The one beside him turns, confused, and I grab his face andsqueezeuntil something gives way beneath my fingers and it all crumbles away, choking out his scream.
Too much force,an inner voice yells.You’re using too much force.
Good, I think, and I grin.
The darkness is singing now, a symphony of violence that drowns out everything else. Two more guards rush toward the sound, toward their fallen comrades, and I meet them with fists and fury. One goes down with a shattered jaw, nose, brain. The other I throw, like he weighs nothing at all, into a stack of shipping crates that collapse on top of him with a satisfying crash.
The bald man is screaming orders, but his men are panicking. They’re firing blind, bullets chewing up the air around an enemy they can’t see. I move through them like ascythe through wheat, breaking bones and ending their lives with mechanical efficiency.
She lied to you.
A man’s arm snaps in my grip like a twig.
She used you.
Another one drops, gasping, clutching his crushed windpipe.
She made you feel like a person, and it was all just pretend.
By the time I’m done, the warehouse floor is littered with bodies. Pretty sure all of them are dead.
And Mia is gone.
I catch a glimpse of her through the shattered loading dock—running, limping, disappearing into the night with someone else, a dark-haired woman I don’t recognize.
Good. You run along now, darlin’.
I’ll find you.
I find their rendezvous point in a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up and hover just outside of it, totally invisible, and listening. My enhanced hearing picks up everything—the hum of electronics, the distant wail of sirens, and the voices inside. There are three of them. Mia and two others.
A man’s voice, accented, furious says, “That wasn’t the plan, Mia. You were supposed to do recon, not start a bloody war.”
“I had a shot at the laptop, at the files.” Her voice is tight, pained. “I had to take it.”
“And look where that got you! You nearly died in there. I lost your feed for three minutes—three minutes, Mia. Thermal went to shit the second the shooting started. Too many heat signatures, too much chaos. I still don’t know what happened in there.”
“I handled it.”
“You got lucky.” A woman now, her voice sharp and clipped and Russian, or at least Slavic, probably the one who extracted her. “This isn’t Tehran. You don’t have deep cover backup this time. You haveus, and we are not equipped to pull you out of a firefight with the Russian mob.”
Silence. Then Mia, quieter, says, “I’m sorry. I should have stuck to the plan.”
“Damn right you should have.” The man again. “Now we’ve got Kozlov’s people on high alert, Marsh knows someone’s onto him, and we still don’t have the files we needed. SOE is going to have our heads.”
Marsh. Wait a minute.ConradMarsh?
