He stands. Walks to the door.
“One more session,” he tells his men. “If she still won’t talk, prepare her for transfer.”
The door closes behind him.
The men approach with the pipe again.
39
CASSIAN
The door explodes inwardand I’m through it before the smoke clears.
Gunfire erupts immediately. Muzzle flashes in the dark. Bullets tearing through drywall and ricocheting off metal beams. I drop low, weapon up, and put three rounds into the first guard before he can adjust his aim. He goes down hard.
Marcus is on my left, Declan on my right. We move as one unit, clearing the entry corridor while Julian’s team hits the front with enough firepower to wake the dead.
“Two more, ten o’clock!” Marcus shouts.
I pivot and fire. The guards are using a forklift for cover. My shots punch through metal and one of them stumbles back. Marcus finishes him with a head shot.
The second guard breaks and runs deeper into the warehouse.
“Leave him,” I say. “We go down.”
The schematics showed stairs to the basement in the southeast corner. That’s where she is. That’s where we’re going.
We push forward. The warehouse floor is chaos. Julian’s team has engaged the main Petrov force at the front entrance. Heavy automatic fire shakes the building. Voices shout in Russian. Grenades detonate in sharp cracks.
A guard appears from behind a storage rack, too close for me to bring my weapon around. I drop the gun and go for my knife instead, burying it in his throat before he can pull the trigger. Blood sprays hot across my face and hands.
He drops and I’m moving again. Pick up my weapon. Keep going.
The basement stairs are exactly where the schematics said they’d be. Metal door, heavy lock. Declan shoots it off and Marcus kicks the door open.
More gunfire from below. Bullets chewing up the doorframe. I lean around and return fire blind. Someone cries out, and the shooting stops.
We descend fast. Twelve steps down into darkness that smells like mold and old blood. At the bottom, a hallway. Concrete floor. Exposed pipes running along the ceiling. Three doors. The one at the end is the southeast corner.
Two guards block our path. They’re ready for us, weapons raised, using the narrow corridor to their advantage.
Marcus tosses a flashbang. The explosion is deafening in the confined space. The guards are blind and disoriented. We move in before they recover. I put two rounds in the first guard’s chest. Declan takes the second with a shot to the head.
We’re at the door now.
It’s locked from the outside with a heavy padlock. Marcus pulls bolt cutters from his vest and cuts through it. The lock hits the floor with a metallic clang.
I push the door open. The room is exactly what I expected and worse than I imagined. Concrete walls. Single hanging bulb. Blood on the floor. And Aurelia tied to a metal chair in the center, head down, not moving.
“Clear the room,” I tell Marcus.
He and Declan sweep the corners while I move to her.
There’s so much blood. On her clothes, her face, the floor beneath the chair. Her hands are bound behind her back with rope that’s cut deep into her wrists. Her ankles are tied to the chair legs.
“Aurelia.”
She doesn’t respond.
