He pulled his weapon with his right hand and brought it up, doing the count his brain had already started without him: two armed operatives in his immediate quadrant, a third moving toward the northwest corner, Raines pulling back toward the far wall. The sedated quality of Sabin’s movements had shattered with the gunshot—he was turning, gun still in his hand, and Vivi was five feet to Dom’s left, still standing, breathing hard but unhurt.
She was alive.
He’d gotten in front of her in time.
“Dom!”
“I’m okay,” he rasped, but she didn’t hear him because three entry points blew inward simultaneously—the loading bay doors, the fire exit beside the defunct conveyor system, and somewhere up in the rafters, the sound of glass shattering as Liam came through what remained of a high window. Griffin was first through the loading bay, low and fast, and the Praetorian operative nearest the door went down before he even raised his weapon. Davey came in hard on Griffin’s heels, already shouting commands in the clipped, no-bullshit cadence that cut through even a firefight.
Muzzle flashes strobed across the concrete walls, turning the warehouse into a stuttering nightmare of light and shadow. The acrid bite of gunpowder hit Dom’s nose immediately, layered over the mildew and salt and old fish that had seeped into the bones of this place over decades. He tasted blood at the back of his throat—he’d bitten the inside of his cheek when the bullet hit—and spat, never taking his weapon off the nearest threat.
The Praetorian operatives were scrambling. Their tactical radios were dead; he could see it in the hands going to earpieces and finding nothing, the heads turning to each other for direction they weren’t getting. The security screens on the portable monitoring station near the east wall had gone black.Every advantage Raines had built into this exchange had just evaporated, and his people knew it, and they were starting to feel it in their movements—half a second too slow, half a beat behind, working from instinct rather than coordinated command.
Daphne had come through perfectly.
Dom pushed off the column and moved, putting himself between Vivi and the operative tracking toward their position. His left arm hung mostly useless at his side—he kept it pressed against his ribs to minimize the swing of it—but his right arm was steady. He fired twice. The first shot forced the operative into cover behind an overturned industrial crate. The second shot, adjusted for the cover, hit the man’s shoulder as he leaned out to return fire. He went down, and Dom was already moving again.
The shoulder wound was insistent. It sent sharp, rhythmic pulses up into his neck and down into his elbow with every step, like something in there had been knocked loose and was complaining about it. He breathed through it the way he’d learned to breathe through things—in through the nose, out through the mouth, steady rhythm, don’t let the body panic. Pain was information. Pain wasn’t a reason to stop.
He tracked Raines across the warehouse floor. The man was moving with purpose despite the chaos around him, working toward a door in the far wall that Dom hadn’t identified in the schematics—a secondary exit, maybe, or an office passage. Two of his operatives fell in around him automatically, and Dom raised his weapon, calculated the shot across seventy feet of smoke and strobing muzzle flash, and then caught a burst of movement in his peripheral that forced him to redirect.
Sabin.
The conditioning had reasserted itself the moment the firefight started. He stood in the middle of the floor with the gunstill in his hand, and everything about his posture had shifted from the vacant stillness of before into something active and lethal. He raised the weapon toward Weston, who was moving toward him.
“West, down!” Dom shouted.
Weston hit the floor, and the shot went high and wide, sparking off a hanging chain above his head. Then Griffin came in from the right, and the warehouse floor around Sabin turned into a wrestling match that had no clean resolution, because Sabin moved like a man who had been specifically trained to fight off exactly the kind of three-person takedown Griffin was attempting.
Dom tracked it while holding the line against two more Praetorian operatives pressing from the east side, firing controlled bursts that kept them pinned in the shadow of a collapsed section of overhead track. His shoulder screamed every time he adjusted his stance. He ignored it.
The metallic taste of blood was constant now, pooling in the back of his throat. His left side felt wrong—wet and heavy, the fabric of his shirt soaked through and starting to cool against his skin. He’d need Tessa soon. But not yet. Not until Sabin was secured and Raines was contained and every last Praetorian operative in this building was on the ground or running.
Gunfire crashed from three directions at once, and Dom pressed forward into the smoke.
He found Cade by the east wall—not by searching but by the particular way the man moved through chaos, economical and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and the world owed him the courtesy of waiting. Praetorian tactical gear. ISS plate carrier in flat black. Every piece of kit chosen with the kind of care that came from years of doing this for real.
Dom stopped moving.
Across forty feet of smoke and gunfire, their eyes met.
He didn’t know what he expected to feel—rage, maybe, or that hollow grief that had taken up residence in his chest the day they learned the truth about Cade. What he felt instead was… pity.
Cade stood like a shadow made flesh, the controlled violence of a predator in every line of his body. But there was no programming in his eyes, no blank stare like Sabin’s. Just cold calculation and something else. Regret, maybe. Regret without remorse.
Cade had always been more like another brother to him than a cousin. He’d been his mentor. His friend. The man who’d taught him how to handle himself in a firefight, how to maintain his cool when the bullets started flying.
Now they were on opposite sides of a war neither of them had started.
Cade raised his weapon and aimed at Dom’s center mass. Clean line. No obstructions. The kind of shot Cade had been making since he was seventeen years old, hunting in the Virginia hills with their fathers, never missing, not once.
Dom didn’t move.
Cade fired.
The bullet hit the concrete support column a foot to Dom’s right, throwing up a spark and a puff of dust, and Cade was already turning before the sound finished echoing, moving away, leaving a gap in the Praetorian line that opened a clear path to the nearest exit.
Not a miss.
