1
BLACKJACK
Deafening sound hit first as an explosion tore through the building. I was out of the chair and under the table before the first slab of stone reached the floor. The hand-carved oak held when another piece slammed into it. A third struck hard enough to crack the wood, but the table didn’t give.
A smaller chunk clipped my shoulder as I crawled clear of the edge, and dust rolled in so thick the hall disappeared. I dragged my shirt over my nose and got to my feet.
The ringing in my ears faded, and I could hear again—a structural groan from overhead, debris falling somewhere to my left, and horrible, gut-wrenching screaming that I had no idea where it could be coming from.
The floor shook with another blast deeper in the building, and a third hit a second later.Spaced charges.Somebody had mapped this building and placed themto bring it down on everyone inside. I needed to get the fuck out of here, but I couldn’t. Not without first finding every survivor I could.
The dust was too thick to see more than at arm’s length. I found the first body by almost stepping on a man’s hand, and when I crouched to check his pulse, I found nothing. The second was three feet farther on, half-buried under a collapsed section of masonry, and gone the same way.
A woman was sitting upright near the far wall, awake and bleeding from her ear. I crouched in front of her.
“Can you hear me?”
She nodded.
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
Her name was Rovena Basha, aka Magnolia. I’d seen her in the hall before the blast.
“The entrance is that way. Get outside and find a medic.”
She got to her feet and moved toward the exit without looking back. I went in the opposite direction and almost stepped over Katarina Stepanova, code nameBeacon. She was flat on the ground under a crossbeam that had dropped from the ceiling supports. She was speaking, but I couldn’t hear most of it, and when I caught a word here and there, it was in French.
The beam had jammed into rubble at both ends, and the angle was wrong for a clean lift. I got my feet under me, gripped the underside where it met a chunk of stone, and drove upward with everything my legs had. It rose three inches, then four.
“Try to move if you can,” I said through gritted teeth.
Beacon dragged herself clear, and I let the beam drop, causing the nearest support column to crack from the impact. She rolled over and got up on her feet before I could give her my hand.
“There are others in there,” she said, pointing deeper into the hall.
Stone blocks and the ceiling were shifting under the redistributed weight. Load-bearing walls were compensating, and that wasn’t what they were designed for. The third blast had done something to the foundation, because everything on the far side was settling.
“I’ll go. You get outside.”
“No.” She was ten feet ahead of me before I could argue. Her left arm hung wrong. She wasn’t using it, hadn’t reached for it or braced it, and she favored her right side without seeming to realize it.
The dust had thinned enough to see maybe a dozen feet. She crossed to the nearest shape on the floor, checked it, and moved on. I worked the opposite side of the hall, and the building groaned above us the whole time.
The first two I reached were dead, and a man pinned under a slab of masonry had no pulse by the time I got to him. A few feet away, Beacon crouched near another body. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. She pressed two fingers to the person’s neck, then dropped her arm and head at the same time. Her cry of anguish had me torn between going to her or continuing my search for survivors.
“We have to get out of here,” I said when a loud crack above us shook the walls.
“There could be more,” she argued.
“We stay, we die in here.”
When she opened her mouth to answer, voices sounded from outside the rubble. Running footfallsgot increasingly closer. My brother, Kingston, came through first, his flashlight scanning the debris. Charity, his wife, code name Amaryllis, was right behind him, followed by Killian Curran, aka Dagger.
“Bishop, thank God.” Kingston ran over to me, and I stood. There was no time for an embrace, but we managed one that lasted a couple of seconds anyway. “How many were in here?”
“Twelve council, plus support staff. Five council confirmed dead so far. One survivor already made it out. The rest are unaccounted for.”
