"You should probably stop talking now."
The words landed like ice water on the fire in my veins. Ortiz was pale. His hands at his sides, his breathing fast and shallow, his eyes fixed on the barrel of the gun pointed at his sternum. Decades of road behind him, looking at the possibility of no road ahead.
I stopped talking. The silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.
Kolev lowered the pistol. The blankness returned. He studied me the way a scientist studies a specimen, cataloguing responses, measuring variables.
I should have been watching the second Jeep. I should have been tracking the rear approach, the vehicle that had boxed us in from the south. But Kolev and his eight riflemen and the body of Mendez still settling on the pavement had consumed every ounce of my attention, the way a bonfire consumes oxygen, and the threat in front of me had blinded me to the one walking up behind us.
Then a gunshot cracked the air behind me.
Not Kolev. No recoil from his weapon, no shift in his stance, no movement at all. The sound came from behind. From the direction of the second Jeep. A sharp, flat report that was different from the rifle crack that had killed Reeves, smaller caliber, closer, the report of a handgun fired at point-blank range.
I turned my head. Slow. Already knowing what I'd see and not wanting to see it.
Ortiz was looking down. His hands had come up to his chest, fingers pressing against the fabric of his T-shirt, and beneath his palms, spreading outward in a dark bloom that soaked the cotton and ran between his fingers, blood. The entry wound was center mass. The bullet had come from behind him. From behind all of us.
His mouth opened. No sound came out. His knees buckled and he fell forward onto the ground, and the weight of him hitting the ground carried a finality that didn't need a name.
I turned fully.
Four mercenaries had materialized from the second Jeep while I'd been focused on Kolev. They stood in a loose arc behind where Ortiz had fallen, rifles shouldered, their positioning covering every angle I might have run. And in front of them, the man who'd given the order that put them there.
The man standing behind Ortiz's body was wearing a black suit. Not tactical gear, not desert camouflage, not the functional clothing of someone who'd been living rough. A suit. Tailored, pressed, the fabric expensive and cut to a frame that was shorter than Kolev's but dense with a compact, athletic power. A Kevlar vest was visible beneath the jacket, the plates pressing against the fine fabric. His hair was dark, cropped short, parted neatly to the side. His face was clean-shaven, symmetrical, the features sharp and composed, and his eyes were the color of slate and carried the warmth of it too.
He extended his arm lazily to his right, the pistol dangling from his fingers like something that had outlived its usefulness, held away from his body as if the proximity to the weapon was beneath him. A mercenary stepped forward and took it. Holt let it go the way you set down a fork after a meal, his fingers uncurling without urgency, without even glancing at the transfer. His hand returned to his side, and he straightened the cuff of his jacket with a precise, habitual motion that told me he ironed his suits on the road.
Raymond Holt.
I'd never seen him in person. The files had photographs, official portraits, the polished headshots of a Deputy Assistant Attorney General who attended galas and signed warrants and ordered men killed over conference calls. The photographshadn't captured the temperature of him. The cold that radiated from his presence like a weather system, the crippling frost of someone who had just shot another human being in the back and adjusted his cuffs afterward.
He looked at me. The slate eyes moved across my face, unhurried, with the systematic attention of an auditor reading a balance sheet.
"Sean Callahan." His voice was measured. Pleasant. The voice of keynote speeches and Senate hearings and the quiet words spoken into telephones that made people disappear. "The treasurer. The one helping Nolan Mercer dismantle my life's work."
"Your life's work is a weapons trafficking ring that murdered federal agents, you delusional piece of shit."
The words bounced off him like rain off stone. Not a flicker. Not a twitch.
"I know about you through the communications we intercepted. The hacked devices in your church room were quite informative." He stepped closer. Over Ortiz's body. Without looking down. Without breaking stride. "You've been helping Mercer trace the financial architecture. The shell companies, the surplus contracts, the serial numbers. Very thorough. Very damaging."
He stopped. Five feet away. Close enough that I could see the weave of his suit, the thin chain of a watch disappearing into his cuff, the absence of anything human behind the slate eyes.
"Nolan Mercer will die for what he's done to me. That is not a threat. It's a scheduled event."
My chest detonated. The rage and the fear colliding in a place behind my sternum that felt like a grenade going off in slow motion, and my face must have shown it, must have cracked open for a fraction of a second, because Holt's gaze sharpened.
He looked up. Slow. The slate eyes narrowing. Assessing the reaction with the precision of someone who'd been reading people for decades.
"Interesting." The word was quiet. Clinical. "He matters to you. Mercer. More than a colleague."
I lunged. Couldn't stop myself. Two steps toward the man who'd just named the thing I would die to protect, the thing I'd spent weeks building, the man I'd held in a shower and kissed on a rooftop and?—
A boot hit the center of my back. Hard. Between the shoulder blades. The impact drove the air from my lungs and sent me face-first into the asphalt, my palms barely catching me, the rough surface tearing the skin, the world tilting sideways as my chest slammed the road.
Kolev. I hadn't heard him move. The same silent, military-trained approach I'd only ever witnessed from Dec, the footwork of someone who could cross open ground without making a sound. Dangerous. More dangerous than I'd calculated.
I lay on the asphalt. Tasted blood from a split lip. My palms burning where the pavement had stripped the skin. Holt's polished shoes were in my peripheral vision, motionless.
