I was halfway down the stairwell when the explosion hit. The building shuddered, a deep concussive force I felt in my teeth and my chest before I heard it. Then heat, rolling up from below, and the unmistakable chemical smell of accelerant. Someone had set this building to burn deliberately, and the placement had been planned to spread fast.
Kindt. Destroying his own operation rather than let it be taken.
Above me, the children screamed. I stopped. Every instinct I had told me to go back up those stairs. That’s what Sera would want.
But goddamnit, I would not survive if Sera didn’t. Ghost, no Ghost, I knew that for a fact.
“Travis, keep moving.” Beckett’s voice on comms, hard and certain. “I have them.”
“We’re on the second floor,” Hunter said. “We can see Beckett and his little posse. Go get Sera.”
I stood on that stairwell for one second with the building shaking around me and smoke starting to curl up from below and the sound of a four-year-old’s scream still hanging in the air above my head. My team was up there. The children were up there.
And Sera was out there. In Kindt’s hands.
I kept going.
The first floor was already thick with smoke. The accelerant had been placed in multiple locations, a planned destruction meant to erase everything Kindt had built here before anyone could catalog it. Walls, records, evidence.
Children, if they’d still been locked in that room.
I moved through the smoke with my weapon up and my shirt pulled over my mouth, navigating by the layout I’d memorized from satellite imagery and recon. The nearest exterior door was forty meters ahead.
Hunter’s voice cut through the smoke on comms. “The kids are out. We’re?—”
A figure came out of the smoke on my left. He was swinging before I saw him clearly, a metal baton that caught my left forearm and knocked my gun to the ground and my comms unit off my vest. I closed the distance before he could swing again, drove the heel of my hand into his nose, grabbed the back of his head, and put him into the wall. He went down, and I didn’t wait to see if he stayed.
I picked up my weapon from where the impact had knocked it loose and reached for my comms. The earpiece gave a burst ofdistorted static and went silent. I pulled it out. The housing was cracked, internal components crushed from the baton strike.
I was on my own. But at least the kids and the team were out safe.
The smoke was thickening. The fire was spreading through the walls now, eating through drywall and insulation, and the heat was building toward something I could feel pressing against my skin. I had minutes before this floor became unnavigable.
I moved toward the west corridor, the direction Kindt would go if he was heading for the access road vehicles. The smoke thinned slightly as I turned the corner, the fire not yet reaching this section of the building, and I saw them.
Kindt was dragging Sera down the corridor toward a fire exit at the far end. He had one arm locked around her upper body and a handgun pressed against her temple. Her feet were barely touching the ground. Blood ran from a gash above her left ear, dark against her skin.
She was conscious. Barely. Her eyes were open but unfocused, her body limp in his grip. Whatever had hit her had hit hard.
I stepped into the corridor, weapon raised. Sightline clear to Kindt’s position but no clean angle. Sera’s body shielded his. The gun at her temple made every trajectory lethal to her.
“Stop.”
Kindt stopped. His men stopped. The fire crackled behind me, throwing shifting orange light down the corridor. Smoke curled along the ceiling above all of us.
He pulled Sera tighter and pressed the gun harder into her temple. She made a sound. Small. Involuntary.
“Put your weapon down,” Kindt said.
His voice landed differently in person than it had through the intercepted video. On a screen, the calm had been chilling. Here,in a burning corridor with a gun to the head of the woman I loved, it was something closer to obscene.
“Let her go,” I said.
“I don’t think I will.” He adjusted his grip on Sera, casual and proprietary, the way a man handles property. “Doesn’t seem like that’s in my best interest, does it?”
My weapon was up. My arms were steady. I had no shot. Sera was in the way, and his gun was against her skull, and if I fired and missed by a fraction of an inch, she was dead. If I didn’t fire and he decided she was expendable, she was dead. If I waited for a better angle, his men would shoot me first.
Every scenario I ran ended with her body on the ground.
