Page 98 of Marrying the Savage

For half a second, the warehouse freezes.

Then the windows explode. Gunfire tears through the building from the upper catwalk and the loading bay at once. Men shout. Crates splinter. One forklift jerks sideways and crashes into a stack of pallets. The overhead lights flicker as bullets chew through metal and glass.

We’ve been ambushed.

Mikhail grabs my arm, pulling me behind a concrete pillar as another burst of fire cuts across the space where I stood.

“Antonov?” he shouts over the noise.

“Too sloppy,” I say, drawing my gun. “Sokolov.”

Nikolai returns fire from behind a stack of crates, calm as ever, dropping one man near the upper railing. My men scatter into position, disciplined but caught by the first strike. We were expected. Not completely, or I would be dead already, but enough.

The late trucks were bait.

Dmitri, then. Drugged or not, humiliated men give orders from sickbeds if pride hurts worse than bullets.

A round strikes the pillar near my face. Concrete chips cut my cheek.

I smile.

Finally. Something simple.

Across the warehouse, a man in a dark coat moves along the catwalk, signaling with two fingers. Not Sokolov. Not one of Dmitri’s regular captains.

Mercenary.

Interesting.

“Mikhail,” I say.

“I see him.”

“Take the left.”

“You?”

“I am going up.”

“Damir—”

I’m already moving.

The wanting from the shower is gone now, burned clean by gunfire and cold purpose. This is a language I have spoken longer than desire. Angles. Cover. Breath. Trigger. Movement. The world narrows into bodies, bullets, and decisions that can’t be reconsidered after they are made.

I shoot one man through the throat near the stairs. Another through the knee before he can turn his rifle toward Lev. The warehouse fills with smoke and shouting.

Somewhere above, the mercenary captain sees me coming. Mikhail swears behind me, but I don’t stop. The metal stairs rattle under my weight as I take them two at a time, the railing cold against my wounded palm when I grab it to turn the corner. Pain flashes up my arm, bright and clean, but there’s no time to care. A man leans over the catwalk above me with a pistol, his mouth open in a shout I can’t hear over the roar of gunfire below.

I shoot first.

He drops hard against the railing, his weapon clattering through the bars and spinning across the concrete floor beneath us. One of my men kicks it away before a wounded attacker can reach for it.

The warehouse below becomes a shifting map of bodies and muzzle flashes. Nikolai is behind the second forklift, using the engine block for cover while he fires in short, efficient bursts toward the loading bay. Lev has dragged Anton behind a stack of crates and is pressing him down with one hand while returning fire with the other. Mikhail moves left the way I told him to, low and fast, disappearing behind a row of metal shelving.

My eyes lift to the office windows overlooking the warehouse floor.

The glass is already shattered. Inside that office are route books, delivery codes, payment ledgers, names that don’t exist on official paper, and enough information to start three private wars if the wrong hands take it.