“Station men in the meeting room for an ambush and to protect our gear! Get moving!”
Adrenaline hums under my skin as I pause at the bottom of the steps, running through the plan my lieutenants and I set in place.
We don’t know enough about our enemies and their tactics to plan every step, but we have options and plan Bs at our disposal.
We just need to react quickly and communicate with each other.
I adjust the earpiece on my right ear that’s connected to the portable radio in my jacket pocket. If we can somehow organize ourselves among chaos, we might actually have a chance at winning this thing.
“Three trucks heading down the private road toward us. They’re commercial moving trucks,” one of my scouts reports.
“They’re either carrying a lot of weapons or a lot of people,” I say, watching the foyer clear out as everyone hunkers down in the connected rooms and in their doorways.
“Or both,” Matvei says through the radio. “We don’t see anything in the sky yet.”
We assumed they would send in a few spy drones but so far, they haven’t done any recon that we know of. Hopefully that means they’re overly confident.
Matvei is one of my snipers up on the roof. Aside from the traps we set around the perimeter, he and the other two men stationed up there are our first line of defense.
“They’re coming,” I reply before heading back upstairs where another group of my men are stationed.
We’re spread throughout every floor, and we’ll hit them in waves.
“Incoming! Incoming!” the snipers announce.
I reach the lounge and look out of the window just as the three trucks plow down the gate. As it crashes down, explosions rock the house, the chandelier above me shuddering violently.
“What the fuck,” I mutter under my breath as I rush to another window that faces another side of the property.
Holes have been blown through the fence surrounding the property, and I can see shadows streaking across the yard toward the house. Gunshots go off as the snipers pick some off, but there are too many targets for only three men.
A few step onto the small mines planted in the grass and are blown sky high, pieces of them raining down across my yard. Heads snap back and bodies crumble as the snipers continue setting to work, barely thinning out the crowd surging ahead.
“There’re too many!”
“The trucks aren’t slowing down!”
“What the fuck are they doing?”
“Get out of the way!”
The first moving truck slams through the front door, making the entire house shudder. Gunfire rings out from the foyer, and I’m out of the lounge in a second, rushing to the top of the staircase.
“Pakhan, you should stay out of the way!” one of my guards calls out to me.
I ignore him and head down to the halfway point of the staircase, my eyes falling upon utter chaos.
The moving truck is in the goddamn foyer, its front nearly touching the staircase. The glass of the front windshield has bullet holes in it, and I can already see that the driver sustained a headshot from one of my faster acting men.
“They’re jumping out the back of the truck!”
My chest tightens as I see more enemies spill out of the truck once the door is rolled up. I can’t even tell who is who. The Irish, the Armenians, and the other unknown group meld together into one lethal force.
My men fire from the doorways and the staircase, bullets raining down. But there are so fucking many of them, and theyfire back with the same intensity, making my men crumble to the ground or fall over the banister of the stairs and hit the floor below.
I fire at the head of a man rushing up the staircase toward me. I swivel to the left, my hand steady as I aim and fire again.
One man drops. Then another.
