The fire was getting closer. I could feel the heat building behind me, the smoke thickening at the ceiling, pushing lower. The building groaned. We were all running out of time.
Sera’s eyes found mine through the haze. She was terrified, hurt, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
But maybe there was.
“I’m the Ghost.”
The words came out steady. Calm. The most important words I’d ever spoken, delivered with a control I did not feel.
Kindt’s expression shifted. Subtle, but I caught it. Interest.
“Yep.” I forced myself to pop the P like it wasn’t taking every bit of my control not to break down. “Every disrupted transport for the past eighteen months? That was me. Every intercepted courier. Every route that went dark. Every child your people lost. Me. One person. Working alone.”
His grip on Sera hadn’t loosened, but his focus had shifted. He was recalculating. I could see it happening behind his glasses, the operational math that had built his pipeline being applied to this new variable.
“The Ghost.” He said it like he was reading a line item on a balance sheet. “Do you have any idea what you’ve cost my organization in replacement inventory alone?”
“I could probably give you a rough estimate. Got a calculator I could borrow?”
His eyes narrowed at my flippancy. Good. Maybe he would make a mistake.
“That’s right. I’m the one who’s been tearing your operation apart, one transport at a time. You’ve been looking for me, haven’t you? But I’ve always kept one step ahead.”
“Until right now when it’s your one weapon versus me and three men. Why are you admitting you’re the Ghost?” Something shifted in his voice. Not surprise. Curiosity. The way a man examines a piece of equipment that performed beyond its specifications.
“Because I want you to let the woman go. Take me instead.”
The fire popped and hissed behind us. A section of ceiling tile fell somewhere down the corridor, trailing sparks. One of Kindt’s men shifted his weight.
“You’re offering a trade,” Kindt said. Now he was a little surprised. No doubt the thought of doing something for someone else’s good was a foreign concept to this asshole.
“That’s right. Take the trade or we can all burn to death together.”
He looked at his men. Looked at the smoke crawling along the ceiling. Looked at me.
“Put your weapon on the ground,” he said. “Slowly.”
I crouched. Set the gun on the floor. Straightened.
“Hands up. Walk forward. If you reach for anything, she dies first.”
I raised my hands and walked toward him. Every step was a commitment I couldn’t take back. My anonymity. My safety.The compound, the systems, the life I’d built in isolation to keep functioning in a world that had tried to destroy me.
None of it mattered more than Sera breathing.
I stopped a few feet from him.
“Turn around.”
I turned. His men moved in. Hands on my shoulders, forcing me to my knees. They took my backup sidearm from its holster at my back, patted me down, found the knife on my ankle and the backup magazines in my vest pocket. Stripped all of it.
I expected a bullet then. Quick and efficient. The way Kindt ran his organization.
“You think I’m going to shoot you right here? I don’t think so,” Kindt said behind me, as though he’d heard the thought. “I don’t need a calculator to know that you’re going to suffer before you die.”
The first blow came from my right. A fist into my kidney that whited out my vision and buckled me forward against the hands holding me up. I clenched my jaw and swallowed the sound that tried to come out. The deal was Sera goes free. Fighting back ended the deal.
The second blow came from the left, a closed fist across my face that snapped my head sideways and filled my mouth with blood. I spat it onto the floor.
