“She cried out in the dark, and I was the only one who listened.” A beat of silence. “You want to keep her safe. I want to know what she sounds like when she isn’t afraid.”
Valen cuts through us both. “Three minutes out. North bay. Don’t make noise to wake the dead.”
The van slows.
The industrial district opens around us, warehouses rising like tombstones against the black water.
Zero counts down.
The lights die.
I jump out before the door is fully open, boots hitting gravel, the cold air a full-body slap. The adrenaline is a wave that takes everything.
I walk straight for the north loading bay, brass catching the moonlight.
Sokolov thinks he’s dealt with monsters before. He’s never dealt with someone who has nothing left to lose.
Saint
The first kick takes the lock.
The second takes the door off its hinges.
I step into the red emergency light of the warehouse floor, and the world narrows through the black glass eyes of the plague doctor mask.
Inside it, my breath comes back hot and damp. Leather. Old disinfectant. The copper taste of blood from where I bit the inside of my cheek in the van and didn’t notice until now. The beak of the mask distorts sound, turning every shout into something distant and animal.
Good.
Distance helps.
Distance keeps the rage organized.
A flashlight cuts across me.
“Who the hell?—”
He comes from behind a stack of crates, gun up, eyes wide with the confusion of seeing a nightmare walk upright. That half second is all I need.
I’m across the floor before he pulls the trigger. Left hand takes the barrel and wrenches it skyward. Right hand—the one wearing brass—comes across in a hook that catches his jaw with a sound I feel through my knuckles.
He drops.
One.
Counting keeps the rage from scattering.
One body. One breath. One problem at a time.
Two more rush from the machine shop.
I roll under the first sight line and come up fast, taking the nearest guard by the ankles and putting him down hard. The second fires. The shot grazes my forearm in a hot stripe that makes the room sharpen instead of blur.
Pain is useful. It tells me where I am.
I catch him by the throat and pin him to the boiler.
“Second floor,” he gasps.
