Dante is in the back and doesn't comment, just checks his gun with the methodical focus he always has before we walk into something that might go sideways.
The factory appears ahead, dark and silent, and something about the silence feels wrong immediately.
I pull into the lot and kill the engine and we all sit there for a moment, looking at the building, reading the same wrongness in the air.
"Thoughts?" Rafael asks quietly.
"It's too fucking quiet," Dante says. "Attack was an hour ago. There should be sirens. Police. Something."
"Unless someone cleaned it up fast," I say. "Or unless it wasn't actually an attack."
"You think it's a trap."
Well, fuck yeah.
"I think the O'Rourkes have been one step ahead of us for weeks and showing up exactly where they want us to be is a bad idea."
Rafael pulls his gun and checks the chamber. "So what the fuck do we do?"
"We go in. Carefully. And we don't separate for any reason."
We get out of the car and approach the building with weapons drawn, moving in formation, covering angles the way we've done a hundred times before.
The front entrance is unlocked.
That's the second thing that's wrong.
I push through and the interior is dark except for emergency lighting casting everything in red, and the silence is so complete I can hear my own heartbeat.
"Spread out or stay together?" Dante asks.
"Together. Always together when it feels like this."
We move through the main floor, checking corners, clearing rooms, and everything is exactly as it should be except for the wrongness underneath it all, the feeling that we're being watched, that we're walking into something deliberately.
We're halfway across the factory floor when I hear it.
The smallest sound. Metal on concrete. A scuff of a boot.
"Down!"
I drop and pull Rafael with me and the bullet passes through the space where his head was, slamming into a support beam behind us with a crack that echoes through the building.
Then chaos.
They come from everywhere at once, from behind machinery, from the catwalks above, from doors we'd already cleared, and there are too many of them, at least eight that I can count in the first three seconds, and this was absolutely a trap and we walked right into it.
I fire twice at the closest attacker and he goes down but two more are already moving to replace him, and beside me Rafael is engaging with someone who came from the left, their bodies locked together, struggling for the control of a knife.
Dante is pinned down behind a piece of machinery, returning fire, keeping three of them occupied, and I move toward him because separated is how we die, separated is how they win.
A man comes at me from the right with a crowbar and I duck under the swing and put two bullets in his chest before he can recover, and then someone tackles me from behind and we hit the concrete hard enough that my gun skitters away across the floor.
He gets his arm around my throat and starts squeezing and I drive my elbow back into his ribs once, twice, three times, until something cracks and his grip loosens and I roll and get on topof him and finish it with my hands because I don't have time to find my gun.
Rafael shouts something I don't catch and I look up to see him surrounded, three men closing in, and Dante is trying to get to him but there's someone between them with a shotgun and it is all falling apart faster than I can process.
I grab my gun off the floor and move toward Rafael, firing as I go, dropping one of his attackers, then another, and he takes advantage of the opening to put a knife in the third one's throat.
