She moved to the door. “We never looked in the door at the end of the passage.”
Hal’s lips thinned. “Be careful.”
She nodded, detached her silver rod, and opened the door.
As she stepped into a room that was clearly the kitchen, someone else stepped through the door opposite.
Fee just caught a glimpse of a back parking area and a hover before the Balcoan woman stepping inside closed the door with a bang and then froze at the sight of her.
“Have you got two of my friends in that hover parked out back there?” Fee asked.
“I told Hal what’s happening. He’s going out the front and he’ll circle around.” Eazi’s voice was a quiet whisper in her ear, as if he didn’t want to distract her.
The woman’s eyes widened. “Who are you?”
Before Fee could respond, there was the sound of shouting beyond the back door, and the woman spun back and flung it open.
She had been holding a shockgun close to her side, and she raised it.
Fee launched herself across the kitchen, shouting as she went.
The distraction worked. The woman half-turned to her, swung the weapon around and fired.
The shot went straight back at her and she reeled, then slid down the door frame, dazed.
Fee scooped up the shockgun and checked the setting. Winced. “Shoot to kill, is it?” The only reason the woman was alive was because of her shockgun protection.
Fee dialed down the shockgun’s lethality and wedged herself into the doorway, looking out.
A Balcoan was edging back toward the door, his shockgun aimed at the corner of the building.
Fee shot him in the back.
He spun, surprise clear on his face. He took a step toward her.
Unlike the Balcoans at the warehouse, he wasn’t wearing a ski mask, and as he took a second step toward her, shockgun fire flared at the back of his head. He crumpled to the ground.
“I had it on the lowest setting,” Hal said, walking out from behind the side of the building. “He’ll have a headache, but he’ll survive.
“Well, that was pretty decent of you,” Fee said. “Theirs were set to kill.”
CHAPTER 22
General Olna came herself.
Hal had the feeling she was enjoying the excitement, while simultaneously dreading the fallout.
He was just getting tired of all the people trying to hurt Fiona.
Not that she wasn’t actively putting herself in the middle of things, and he had to accept that she felt justified in doing so.
It didn’t mean he had to like it.
Trayla and Natta were indeed inside the hover.
They were both drugged, so they’d been taken away along with Lieutenant Grogan, and now the team General Olna had brought with her were moving through the building, looking for any clue that would tell them what was going on.
“We need to wrap this up quickly,” Olna said, her gaze going once again to the path that ran past the back area toward the warehouse. “Security might decide to expand their search area, and then I will have some explaining to do.”
