Swift. Efficient. Brutal in the way that fucking school had trained me to be.
The closest suit went down first, never saw it coming despite his training. Knee to the groin to double him over in automatic response, then elbow to the temple while he was already dropping. He hit the floor hard and didn't get back up.
The second one pulled his gun—finally, too slow—but I was already inside his reach, moving on pure muscle memory and instinct. Twisted the weapon away, joint lock, redirected his momentum using his own weight, slammed him face-first into the concrete wall hard enough that something cracked audibly—bone or wall, didn't matter which.
The third one actually got a shot off, the sound deafening and echoing in the enclosed space.
Missed. Too rushed. Too panicked by how fast his partners had dropped.
I took him out with three shots from the second man’s gun, brains exploding out the back of his skull.
Three armed men down in under ten seconds.
The fat men had just stood there frozen in the doorway, gawking, too shocked to move or help or even think about running.
I'd grabbed my jacket from where they'd made me leave it by the door and run.
Out of the building. Down stairs two and three at a time, barely touching the railings. Through streets I was still learning, navigation half instinct and half desperate improvisation. Checking behind me constantly for pursuit, for cars, for anything that looked wrong or out of place.
On the run again.
I walked through Paris now, hours later and miles away, keeping to well-lit streets with witnesses and security cameras, watching reflections in shop windows for followers, tracking cars that appeared more than once in my peripheral vision, noting faces that lingered too long.
No tail that I could spot with certainty.
But that didn't mean they weren't there.
Just meant they were better at surveillance than I was at spotting it.
St. Paul's had found me.
After years of thinking they were dead, of being careful, of never putting down roots anywhere long enough to be tracked—they'd found me, anyway.
The question now was how.
I could blame myself for fighting last night. For being visible and memorable. For doing exactly what Connor had warned against—drawing attention in a city where we were trying to build something permanent, something that mattered.
But seriously, what were the actual chances that the organization hunting the nine of us just happened to know the fat men who ran underground fight clubs in Paris?
What were the odds that they'd connected those dots that fast—one night of fighting to identifying me to setting up a meeting?
Minuscule.
Statistically impossible, almost.
Unless it wasn't coincidence at all.
Unless—
No.
Connor was right.
He'd said something fundamental had changed. That St. Paul's wasn't the same organization we'd escaped from eighteen years ago.
And he was absolutely right.
St. Paul's hadn't grown into this on their own. They didn't have the resources or infrastructure for that kind of expansion. Didn't have the sophistication or international reach. The old St. Paul's—the one we'd burned to the ground after killing Thorne—had been brutal but ultimately contained. A sick experiment funded by a small group of sadists who wanted perfect soldiers they could use for their underworld deeds.
