“He has Elizabeth.” I deliver it without inflection. “I’m walking in alone. Your teams hold position until the signal.”
Silence.
“And, Alexei.” I pause. “If Landon Webb surfaces during the operation, keep him breathing. I want him last.”
“Copy.”
Two hours later, I step through the warehouse entrance.
The space unfolds before me in rusted geometries, corrugated walls climbing thirty feet toward a ceiling latticed with exposed steel beams and defunct industrial lighting. The air carries the metallic bite of oxidized iron and the subterranean chill.
Concrete pillars stand at regular intervals, casting angular shadows beneath the sparse fluorescent strips that remain operational. Pallets and crates line the periphery in disordered stacks. The floor is poured concrete, cracked and stained, stretching toward the center of the space where two figures wait.
I count fourteen weapons trained on me before I even finish crossing the threshold. Handguns, mostly. Two rifles positioned on elevated platforms to my left and right — snipers, angled to create overlapping fields of fire.
I keep walking.
Dushku occupies the center of the space, and Landon stands slightly behind and to his left, communicating everything I need to know about the hierarchy of this arrangement.
“Rolan.” Dushku opens his palms in a gesture of manufactured welcome. “I’m glad you came.”
“Where is she?”
He tilts his head with a yellow smile. “Of course.” He inclines his chin toward someone positioned behind me.
I don’t turn. I hold Dushku’s gaze and wait, and then, at the periphery of my vision I detect movement. Two men emerge from a doorway at the far end of the warehouse, and between them, Elizabeth.
Her wrists are bound behind her back. A cloth gag stretches across her mouth, cutting into the corners of her lips. She is upright, moving under her own power, and she’s fighting, twisting against the grips clamped around her upper arms.
Our gazes collide across sixty feet of stained concrete.
Her eyes flood. She blinks — hard, deliberate, the refusal to let them fall — but doesn’t sever the connection. Her chin elevates.
There she is.
The relief that cascades through me is a physiological event, loosening the knot in my chest so suddenly that it requires conscious effort to prevent it from registering on my face.
She’s not broken. Four days in the enemy’s hands, and she remains intact. Still resisting.
“I’m sorry for the bindings. Like I said, you have a fierce girl here.”
I return my attention to Dushku.
“What do you want?”
“Simple.” He clasps his hands behind his back. “You killed a member of my family. The debt requires your empire, your operations, your territory, your network. All of it, transferred to me.” He pauses with the timing of a man who has rehearsed this. “After which, I’ll release the girl, and you’ll be free to die quietly.”
“Interesting proposal.” I allow the silence to occupy the airfor precisely three seconds. “Here’s mine: I take Elizabeth, we walk out, and you and Landon don’t survive long enough to discover what I do with this warehouse afterward.”
Dushku laughs. The sound echoes off the corrugated walls, multiplied and distorted.
Landon produces a laugh half a beat later. The delayed reaction means he was monitoring Dushku’s face for permission before committing to the response.
“Bring her closer,” Dushku instructs.
The two men adjust their grip on Elizabeth’s arms and begin advancing her toward the center of the space. She resists, digging her heels against the concrete and wrenching her shoulders. The sound of her boots scraping across the floor is the last thing I hear before my thumb locates the face of my watch.
I press the button.
