“Stay close to me,” I murmur roughly against her lips, the monster inside me purring in approval.
“Where the King goes, the Queen goes.”
23
KONSTANTIN
The freezing, salty wind off the North End coast bites at my face, but I don't feel a thing.
Through the green thermal optics of my night-vision goggles, the abandoned Moretti oil refinery is a rusted graveyard. We're crouched in the tall, dead grass outside the fence.
To my left, Ivan is a shadow with his suppressed rifle raised and perfectly still. Behind us, fifty of my best men are fanned out in total silence, melting right into the dark.
A mile down the dirt access road, my armored command vehicle sits idling in the dark behind a thick grove of dead pine trees. Inside it is my entire world, guarded by ten of my absolute best shooters, led by Yuri. Leaving her in that truck was the hardest thing I've ever done, but my mind is ruthlessly focused now. The King is at war.
Through the scope, I watch two Italian guards standing near the chain-link gates. They're smoking cigarettes with their assault rifles hanging lazily from their slings, thinking they're completely unseen.
"Watchtowers are locked," Ivan whispers through the comms in my ear. "Snipers have the angles."
"Take them," I order.
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.
Three muffled cracks echo in the freezing air from the hills behind us. The two guards at the gate drop to the dirt alongside the sniper in the western watchtower.
"Move," I command.
We erupt from the grass. There's no more creeping around. Two of my breaching specialists sprint forward, slapping bricks of C-4 to the rusted hinges of the main gates and the concrete pillars holding them up. We stack against the barricades, pressing our backs to the cold stone and bracing ourselves.
"Going loud in three... two... one."
The explosion is deafening. The iron gates blow off their tracks, twisting into jagged shrapnel and flying fifty feet into the compound in a blinding flash of orange fire. The shockwave rattles the teeth in my skull and kicks up a haze of concrete dust.
The Italians' illusion of safety shatters instantly. Sirens begin to wail across the refinery. Floodlights snap on and sweep the cracked asphalt, but the wolves are already inside the cage.
"Push!" I yell, dropping my night-vision goggles and bringing my rifle to my shoulder.
We flood the main courtyard, our boots pounding the asphalt. But the Italians are dug in, and they don't roll over. The second we cross the threshold, the courtyard turns into an absolute battleground.
Automatic gunfire rips through the night from the rusted catwalks and industrial silos above us. A machine gun opens up from a reinforced bunker on our right, spitting a stream of tracer rounds that chew through the concrete right at our feet.
"Contact right! Suppressing fire!" Ivan yells over the chaos.
A young soldier next to me takes a heavy-caliber round directly to the throat. His blood sprays across my tactical vest as he collapses, dead before he even hits the ground.
Two more of my men are cut down instantly, their armor shattering under the sheer volume of the Italian crossfire.
"Spread out! Get off the X!" I scream, diving behind a rusted fuel tank as bullets spark and ping violently off the metal inches from my head.
The smell of gunpowder, diesel fuel, and fresh blood fills the ocean air. It's absolute chaos. I lean out from cover, letting the red dot of my sight find the muzzle flash on the catwalk above.
I squeeze the trigger.
The Italian soldier flips over the railing and falls thirty feet, crashing into a stack of steel pipes.
"We're pinned down by that heavy gun!" Ivan shouts into the comms. He reloads his rifle behind a concrete pillar while chunks of stone are blasted away by the machine gun. "We lost six men! The courtyard is a kill zone!"
"Ivan, take Alpha Team and spray a wall of fire on that bunker!" I order, letting my training override the adrenaline. "Bravo Team, on me! We're flanking through the pipes!"
