According to Braden, even a small house usually needed at least three or four well-trained cops working together to clear it safely. Doing it with two people, one of whom had never done anything like this, would have been considered suicidal in the real world. Here, it was just realistic training. She didn’t expect them to do very well in this event, at least not the first few times through.
“You good?” Braden asked.
Dreya nodded, her heart starting to beat faster.
Giving her a nod in return, Braden stepped forward and kicked in the front door. He went in first, sweeping his handgun from left to right across the room. Dreya followed at his heels, checking the hinge side of the door to see if anyone was hiding there, then quickly sweeping across Braden’s back to do the opposite corner of the room. If someone were there, they’d instinctively aim for her partner first, so while she moved carefully, keeping her finger away from the trigger anytime the weapon was pointed in Braden’s direction, she also moved quickly.
As soon as they confirmed the first room was empty, Braden led the way to the next door. The moment he kicked it in, Dreya felt a funny tingle along the nape of her neck.
Braden was already moving before she could say anything, though. She darted after him, not worrying about which side of the room she was supposed to cover but instead going with the tingle and her instincts.
She turned to the left the moment she got in the room, lifting her weapon at the same time, her finger already squeezing the trigger as she saw the man-shaped target pop up in that corner of the room. She hit it in the center of the chest with two rounds before it had even gotten all the way up.
Pulse racing, she spun and checked the right back corner of the room, then took three quick steps forward to check a small closet on that wall, even though her instincts seemed to tell her there was nothing there.
She glanced over her shoulder at Braden to see him nodding at her in approval. She gave him a quick smile, but he was already heading for the next room.
They continued moving through the house like that, Braden using his experience, Dreya trusting the instincts she’d honed through years of being a thief and avoiding cops, surveillance cameras, and alarm sensors. It was amazing how similar what she was doing now was to breaking into a well-guarded high-rise apartment complex.
It wasn’t long before her ears were ringing, even with the earplugs in, and there was a trail of brass cartridge cases, expended weapon clips, and bullet-riddled targets behind them. She didn’t honestly have any way to judge, but something told her she and Braden were smoking this exercise.
Then the lights went out.
Braden immediately stopped in front of her. Dreya halted, too, her eyes automatically shifting to let in more light.
“No shifter vision,” Clayne called out from above them. “We’ll be able to see the glow of your eyes, so we’ll know if you cheat, Dreya.”
She looked up to meet his gold gaze. “Then how are we supposed to get through the rest of the house?”
“You’ll have to figure out how to do it some other way.”
That was patently unfair, but she turned off her shifter version of night-vision goggles.
“I can’t see a damn thing in here, so I’m wide open to suggestions,” Braden said softly.
Dreya thought a moment. Just because she couldn’t use her night vision didn’t mean she couldn’t use the other talents available to her. Closing her eyes, she pulled up what she remembered of the house’s floor plan from their earlier walkthrough. When she had it, she put her free hand on Braden’s shoulder.
“The door is on our left.” She gently nudged him that way. “Just go where I guide you.”
Thankfully, Braden didn’t question her but instead turned and headed in that direction. They had to move a lot slower, and getting through the doors was more of an adventure than it would have been if she could have seen where they were going, but they did it.
Figuring out where the “bad guys” were positioned was harder. Without her night vision, the only way she could tell if there were any targets in the room was when she heard the slight creak of their gears as they popped up. The moment she did, she’d call out a general clock direction of the sound, and then she and Braden would fire in that general direction.
Unfortunately, it was hard reacting to the sounds fast enough, and the buzzers on the vests she and Braden were wearing went off a few times, indicating that one or both of them had been hit. But they kept moving from room to room, getting better and more accurate with each one they moved through.
Dreya was getting in the groove when Braden kicked open another door, and the late afternoon sun came bursting in.
“Time,” Clayne called from the catwalk above them. “Ten minutes, twenty-five seconds. You two were tagged three times, but you ended up with twenty-seven kills. Not frigging bad for a new team.”
Braden turned and gave Dreya a high five. “Not frigging bad, my ass. That was damn impressive. When those lights went out, I thought we were done.”
From the amount of pride surging through her, Dreya would have thought Braden had told her she’d won an Olympic gold medal. She started to thank him, but John interrupted her.
“Braden’s right. That was impressive.”
Dreya turned to see Danica, Clayne, and John coming down the steps from the catwalk, smiles on their faces.
“Considering this was the first time you’ve ever done anything like this together, you two were moving exceptionally fast,” the director added. “How’d you’d get through the rest of the course in the dark so easily?”
