“She stays,” he snaps.
I dig my heels into the concrete. It buys me almost nothing. My shoulder slams into the frame as he hauls me into the corridor, pain flashing down my arm before the adrenaline swallows it. Behind me, I hear Lila trying to move faster than her body can manage, the uneven stumble of her steps followed by a sharp inhale when the wound in her side catches up with her.
“Rowan!” she cries.
I twist hard enough to look back once. She’s halfway off the cot, one hand gripping the mattress while the other presses against her bandage as blood begins to seep through it again. The enforcer yanks my arm again before I can say anything to her.
The corridor outside is chaos. The stillness from earlier is gone, replaced by smoke, echoing gunfire, and men running in both directions with weapons drawn. The overhead lights stutter in uneven pulses, turning the hall into a sequence of harsh brightness and shadow. Dust hangs in the air thick enough to catch in my throat. Somewhere nearby, an alarm has started, not a shrill siren but a low mechanical pulse that blares through the warehouse in repetitive bursts.
The enforcer drags me forward so quickly that my boots skid on the concrete more than once. I can smell him now; sweat, gunoil, stale cigarettes, and the bitter tang of panic he can’t quite hide. His breathing is rough, and his grip is rougher.
“This way,” another man shouts from farther ahead.
“Move the vehicles!”
“Where’s Ivan?”
No one answers that.
The corridor opens into the warehouse, and the scale of the chaos hits all at once.
The place looks completely different from the loading bay where Maria died, even though it’s the same building, the same cold industrial skeleton that has already seen too much violence.
Men are moving between the rows of storage pallets, some crouched behind cover, some already down on the floor and not getting back up. Shell casings skitter across the floor. The smell of hot metal and burned powder is so thick it coats the back of my tongue.
My captor drags me farther into the open and then, without warning, shoves me down. My knees hit the concrete hard enough to send pain straight up my legs. Before I can recover, the muzzle of a gun presses against the side of my head.
The steel is cold against my temple, and for one suspended second, everything inside me goes still. Not calm, but alert with awareness that comes when the body understands before the mind does that one wrong movement could be the last one.
“Back off!” the enforcer shouts, his voice cracking hard enough to reveal how close fear is riding underneath it. “Everybody back the fuck off!”
The warehouse doesn’t go silent exactly, but the noise around me rearranges itself. Gunfire farther off. Men shouting new commands. Footsteps scattering around the edges of my vision. The pulse of the alarm. The rough drag of the enforcer’s breathing above me.
And then I see him.
Kiren.
He appears through the haze and broken light, coat open, weapon in his hand, every part of him focused and controlled. Two of his men move near the crate row to his right while more spread out behind him with quiet coordination, nothing like the frantic scrambling of the enforcers still trying to hold the warehouse together.
He sees me and stops. The gun at my head forces him to hold still while the man behind me presses close enough that his knee nearly touches my shoulder. Every instinct in Kiren’s body must be telling him to pull the trigger anyway. I can see it in the way his grip tightens on the weapon, in the tension building through his shoulders beneath the coat, and in the hard concentration that takes hold of his face.
“Drop it!” the enforcer screams.
Kiren doesn’t move.
Men are still fighting around us. I hear another burst of gunfire from somewhere to the left, followed by someone collapsing hard enough to echo through the warehouse. One of Kiren’s men returns fire from behind a stack of crates. Another shouts something in Russian that I don’t understand.
But Kiren’s attention never leaves me.
The enforcer presses the gun harder against my temple, enough that the pressure begins to ache.
“Blyat! I’ll do it!” he yells.
His voice breaks on the last word. And that tells me what I need to know. He’s frightened. He’s not in control of this room. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at Kiren, the men closing in around him, and the certainty that whatever happens next ends badly for him unless he forces something desperate into existence.
Kiren sees it, too. He senses the same fear I do, which means he knows this man might fire by accident before he fires on purpose.
My pulse pounds against the barrel at my head.
