The gurgling sound the mercenary made as he collapsed was a sound I would carry in my memory for the rest of my life. A wet, rhythmic aspiration that lasted four seconds and terminated in silence.
The main room was a kill box now. Every angle from the doorway covered. Axel behind the table with the captured rifle, Kai beside him, both aiming at the entrance. Tank and Tyler at the hallway junction, covering the corridor that led to the back rooms where Maria and the twins had been sent. Ghost behind a concrete support pillar, his knee no longer bouncing, his entire body locked into the focused stillness that combat demanded. Declan beside me, his Sig reloaded, his body positioned between me and every possible angle of approach.
And Blade. At the doorframe. Knife wet. Waiting.
They were drawing them in. The yard was open ground, indefensible against a force of equal size with automatic weapons. But the clubhouse interior was a labyrinth of hallways and rooms and blind corners, every inch of it mapped in the Phoenixes' muscle memory, every choke point and ambush position learned through years of walking these corridors.
The gunfire from the courtyard was tapering, the last Phoenixes pulling through secondary entrances, taking positions in side buildings and corridors. The dust and smoke drifted through the open doorway in pale tendrils that caught the last amber light of the sunset.
I crouched behind the workbench that Declan had positioned us behind, the pistol in my hands, the safety off, the barrel aimed at the doorway, my heart at 180 beats per minute. The counting had returned. The framework reassembling itself from the wreckage because the framework was the only thing between me and the formless terror of not knowing whether Irish was alive.
180 beats per minute. The numbers climbed.
Somewhere outside, in the settling dust and the fading light, engines idled. Men shouted in a language I didn't recognize. Boots crunched on gravel, moving toward the building. Coming inside.
The trap was set. The hallways waited. And somewhere in the chaos between the gate and this room, in the smoke and the crossfire and the probability curves I couldn't stop calculating, Irish was either alive or he wasn't, and the next five minutes would determine which variable resolved to truth.
Declan's hand found the back of my neck. One second. The anchor. The pressure that saidI'm herein the only language he'd ever needed. Then his hand was gone, back on the Sig, back on the war.
I held the gun. I held the numbers. I held on.
The first shadow crossed the doorframe.
18
INFERNO
IRISH
Hawk winked at me.
One eye. A fraction of a second. A gesture so small that nobody outside the Steel Phoenixes would have recognized it for what it was, and everyone inside the compound understood it meant something final:We don't hand over our own. Get ready.
The blood hit my veins like liquid fire. Every nerve ending in my body ignited at once, the adrenaline converting terror into fuel with a speed that felt chemical, my heart slamming against my ribs, my muscles tightening under the zip ties, my vision sharpening until the courtyard looked like a photograph taken at too high a resolution. I could see the triggers. I could see the knuckles. I could see the angle of every rifle barrel aimed at my bro∏thers and the men I loved, and underneath the fear and the fury, a single blazing thought:Hawk is not letting Nolan walk into this. Nobody is.
I jumped.
Both feet off the ground, knees driving upward, and I slammed my boots down onto Kolev's foot with every ounce of force my rebuilt body could produce. The impact traveled through my heels into the bones of his foot, and the sound he made was enormous, involuntary, a bass grunt of pain that loosened his grip on my throat for one fractured second.
The volley hit like a physical wall. Not sound. Pressure. Twenty-five weapons firing in a cascade that merged into a single sustained detonation, the muzzle flashes strobing in the amber dusk, the noise so massive it stopped being audible and became a vibration that lived in my chest cavity, in my teeth, in the fluid of my inner ear. Brass casings sang off concrete. The air filled with the acrid bite of cordite and the mineral taste of pulverized stone.
I dropped.
Not a decision. An instinct. Every muscle in my body releasing at once, my full weight collapsing downward, and the dead weight of a hundred and eighty pounds yanked Kolev off-balance, his arm wrenching loose from my neck, his massive frame staggering sideways. I hit the ground hard. My shoulder took the impact, the concrete slamming through my shirt into the muscle, the jolt traveling up my neck into my skull. My hands were still zip-tied behind my back. My face was a ruin of blood and bruises. And above me, the air was alive with bullets traveling in every direction at once.
I rolled. Not toward Kolev. Away. Sideways, prone, my body rotating on the axis of my spine, the asphalt scraping against my arms and chest as I moved. The bullets cracked overhead in a continuous stream, the supersonic snaps of rounds passing through the space I'd occupied half a second ago. I rolled again. Again. The world a spinning blur of concrete and sky and muzzle flash, my ears roaring, my lungs burning.
I crashed into legs. A mercenary, standing, rifle up, firing toward the Phoenixes at the garage wall. The collision took his ankles out from under him and he went down hard, his weapon clattering, his elbow hitting the ground beside my head. I didn't think. I rolled onto my knees, found my balance despite the bound hands, and drove my boot into his gun hand. The crunch of small bones against steel-toed leather. His fingers spasmed open. The rifle skidded away.
I staggered upright. The courtyard was chaos. Smoke and dust rising in plumes, the gate half-obscured, mercenaries firing from behind the Jeeps while Phoenixes returned fire from the garage and the building entrances. Bodies on the ground. Some moving. Some not.
Another mercenary. Ten feet in front of me. His back to me, rifle shouldered, firing at the main building's entrance. He hadn't seen his friend go down. He couldn't have heard it through the wall of gunfire.
I charged. Low. Three running steps and I launched into a roundhouse kick that caught him at the knees, my shin connecting with the back of his legs, the momentum of my body sweeping his feet from under him. He went down sideways, flat, the rifle discharging into the sky. I landed on top of him. Both knees dropping onto the side of his head with my full weight behind them. The impact jarred through my legs into my hips. He went still.
I rolled off him, grunting, the zip ties cutting into my wrists. My hands were numb. My ribs screamed where Kolev had broken something hours ago. My face was a mask of dried blood and fresh dust. And I was alive, and moving, and the main building was twenty yards ahead.
Through the smoke, I saw Dec. His arm around Nolan, his Sig firing controlled shots over Nolan's shoulder, pulling him backward toward the main entrance. Nolan was resisting, hisbody straining toward the courtyard, toward me, and Dec was hauling him with the brute force of a man who'd decided that getting his partner to safety was the only variable that mattered.
