I fire into the mass of bodies, dropping one attacker, then another. The air fills with the crack of gunfire and the screams of wounded men. Blood sprays across the concrete. Cordite burns my nostrils. The world narrows to targets and triggers and the desperate mathematics of survival.
Kon takes a round to the shoulder but keeps fighting, his good arm swinging a metal pipe he snatched from the floor. The sound of it connecting with skulls punctuates the gunfire like a drumbeat of destruction.
I lose track of how many men I kill. Three. Five. More. Bodies pile around us, but more keep coming, and I feel the tide turning against us with every passing second.
A blow from behind sends me staggering. I spin and fire point blank into the chest of a man I barely see, then take an elbow to the jaw that makes stars explode behind my eyes. Blood fills my mouth. Pain screams through my ribs where someone's boot connects with devastating force.
Jonah's voice cuts through the chaos, clear and cruel.
"You should have just let me have her, Drake. She wasn't worth all this. She was just a toy I wanted to play with and break and then you had to go in and take what I left behind. It’s your fault I was triggered."
I find him through the smoke and blood, standing at the edge of the melee with his arms crossed, watching his hired army tear us apart. The satisfaction on his face makes the last thread of hope and brotherly love unravel inside my chest.
"What did you do?" The words rip from my throat, raw with a fury that transcends the physical pain wracking my body. "What did you do, Jonah?"
He splays his arms wide as if daring the Universe to try and strike him dead. "I made a deal." His smile widens. "Victor was very interested when I told him I knew how to get Katriana back for him. Very interested, indeed."
My world stops.
Victor. Katriana. The trip to New York.
"Where is she?"
"By now?" Jonah checks his watch with theatrical casualness. "Victor's men intercepted her at the airport about forty minutes ago. Your guards are dead. And Katriana..." He savors the name like poison on his tongue. "Katriana is exactly where Victor always wanted her. Paying her debt the way he intended from the beginning. I’m not the only one who likes to play with toys, big brother."
No.
The denial roars through me, drowning out the gunfire and the pain and everything else. Not her. Not Katriana. Not the woman who trusted me to keep her safe.
"I'll kill you." The promise comes out quiet, calm, utterly certain. "I'll kill you, and then I'll kill every man who touched her, and then I'll burn Victor's entire world to ash."
"You'll have to survive first." Jonah gestures to his men. "Finish them. We have shipments to get out and I can’t have more cargo die on me. The Society only pays for living, breathing sellable bodies, people. Let’s hustle."
Cargo. The Society. Does he mean Society 69? No fucking way. He’s been trafficking people out of my own port under my damn nose. The webs of lies start to tether together. He’s the onebehind the women in the containers. And Sergei’s most likely working for Jonah.
Bullets whiz by my head and I leave the gut-wrenching disgust gripping my gut to deal with later.
Shadows move along my peripheral. Jonah’s men converge on us with renewed fury.
Kon goes down under a pile of bodies, his roar of defiance cut short by blows I cannot see. I fight with everything I have, fists and elbows and the gun that clicks empty in my hand. A knife appears from somewhere, and I slash and stab until the blade breaks on someone's body armor.
They are going to kill us. The math is clear. Too many of them, not enough of us, and the tide has turned beyond any hope of reversal.
But I refuse to die without taking my brother with me.
I bull through the mass of bodies, taking hits that would drop a lesser man, driven by a fury that transcends pain. Jonah sees me coming. For the first time, fear flickers across his face. He stumbles backward, reaching for a weapon he does not have.
My hands close around his throat.
"You sold her to a monster." The words grind out through clenched teeth. "Your own obsession with destroying me led you to feed an innocent woman to a human trafficker."
"She was never innocent." Jonah chokes against my grip. "She played us both. Used us both. You're just too stupid to see it."
I squeeze harder. Feel the cartilage flex beneath my palms. Watch his eyes bulge, his face darken, his lips turn blue around gasping breaths that do not come.
"Drake!"
Kon's voice breaks through the red haze. He is on his feet again, bloodied but breathing, a stolen rifle in his hands. Bodies surround him like fallen soldiers in his wake.
