"None. I'm going alone."
"No, you're not."
I look up.
Claudio walks to the wall and pulls a rifle from the rack. Checks the action. Grabs a vest.
"Aurelio told you to stand down," I say.
"Aurelio told you to stand down. He didn't say anything to me." He slings the rifle over his shoulder and meets my eyes. "Besides. You're shit at breaching doors. You always go left."
A sound escapes me. Not quite a laugh. Something rougher. Something that acknowledges the insanity of what we're about to do without pretending it isn't necessary.
Emilio appears behind his brother. Already geared up. Already armed. That permanent grin replaced by something flat and cold and nothing like the man who cracks jokes in the car.
"I called in a marker with my contact at the port authority," he says. "The black van crossed the south bridge forty minutes ago. There's a Castillo safehouse in the industrial district, half a mile from the bridge exit. Active for the last six months. Twelve to fifteen men on rotation."
I look at the twins. Claudio, calm and tactical. Emilio, vibrating with quiet fury. Neither of them was asked. Neither of them was ordered. They're here because twenty years of standing beside me has earned a loyalty that exists outside the chain of command.
"If this goes wrong," I say, "Aurelio will bury all three of us."
Claudio racks his rifle. "Then let's make sure it doesn't go wrong."
Emilio grins. Not the warm one. The other one. The one that means someone is going to have a very bad night.
"Twelve to fifteen men?" He slaps a fresh magazine into his weapon. "I've had worse odds before breakfast."
I look at the gear on the table. The weapons. The magazines. The vest that will keep me alive long enough to reach her.
Alexandra is somewhere in that safehouse. Surrounded by armed men in a building controlled by the Castillo’s, taken by mercenaries funded by a shadow organization that has been playing us all like pieces on a board.
She's scared. Or angry. Probably both.
She's waiting for me. I know this the way I know the feel of a trigger and the sound of a suppressed round and the exact distance between a man's temple and his brain stem.
She's waiting for me.
And I have never in my life failed to reach the thing I was hunting.
I grab the vest and pull it on.
"Let's go get her back."
Chapter Twelve: Alexandra
Icountthehoursby the light.
The room they're keeping me in has one window, high and narrow, caked with grime. When I woke up, the light coming through it was yellow. Midday. Now it's turning amber, sliding toward orange, which means I've been here five or six hours.
Five or six hours since someone put a bag over my head in Leone's room.
I remember the sound first. The door crashing inward, not kicked but breached, the lock blown clean off the frame. I was on my feet before I processed what was happening, the chair already in my hands, swinging it at the first man through the door. It connected. I felt the impact travel up my arms, heard him grunt, saw him stagger. Then there were more. Three, four, moving fast and silent in black tactical gear, faces covered,gloved hands grabbing my arms, my waist, lifting me off the ground while I kicked and bit and screamed.
I got one of them good. Sank my teeth into the meat of his hand until I tasted blood through the glove. He backhanded me hard enough to make my vision spark, but I kept fighting. Threw the coffee. Clawed at someone's face. Got a knee into someone's ribs before they pinned my arms and shoved the bag over my head and everything went dark.
The van ride was forty minutes. I counted seconds when I could, between the jolts and the turns and the hands holding me down. Nobody spoke. No accents to identify, no names, no careless conversation. Professionals. Training, not panic.
When the bag came off, I was here.
