Page 271 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

His nose pours blood onto the floor.

It feels broken.

One eye is already closing, not that it matters, but he searches with both hands, sweeping through dust, broken concrete and fragments of wood. Kade searches farther, fingers cutting themselves on shattered glass.

Cool metal brushes his thumb. Kestrel.

Dim light floods the space.

Mercifully, it’s not the hideously bright flash from before, but lights coming on automatically from backup generators. Front soldiers crowd the staircase and upper walkway, weapons raised but trapped behind the risk of shooting their own people. Blaire stands beneath them, while Riley fights a man in black beside the storage-room door.

Lachlan is on his knees, facedown.

His face is smothered beneath dust, dirt and blood. His jacket has been torn open. One shoulder sits lower than the other and the arm beneath it hangs uselessly. The tunnel collapse seems to have buried him alive because he looks like he just crawled out of a grave.

The man standing over him is pale, black-haired and terrifyingly calm.

Kade gets up despite how badly it hurts to do so.

Across the space, Riley breaks the neck of his attacker in a way that would make Luca proud.

On the ground beside Lachlan lies a matte-black field injector no larger than Kade’s palm, its recessed trigger depressed and the glass ampoule inside drained empty. The same shit that left him paralysed at the Estate when Riley got shot, Kade guesses.

He’s only got one chance at this.

He closes his good hand around Kestrel, gets his feet beneath him and runs. Every injury protests. His broken wrist burns at even the slightest movement, his ribs bleeding sick pain into every breath, but the man is still facing Lachlan, his back to Kade.

Kade raises the blade.

‘NO!’

Vasily’s voice tears across the space.

The man turns.

Kade’s advantage vanishes.

It’s the first time he sees him.

Dark hair tapered close at the sides and left long on top, swept back from the ruthless architecture of an otherwise attractive face. Skin pale beneath dirt and blood, dark brown eyes fixed upon Kade with no recognisable emotion beyond a hunger for victory. He’s tall and powerfully built, but there’s something almost aristocratic in the sharp cheekbones that reminds Kade of Vasily Sorrenko. For one bewildering second, Kade can’t decide whether he wants to stab him or stare.

The man decides for him, and reality snaps back hard when he spins into a kick that catches Kade across the face.

The knife falls again, but this time Kade sees where it lands.

Vasily reaches the man alone.

Blaire is yelling in English and Russian, ordering the Front not to shoot. Riley has collapsed against a steel support several feet away, one arm wrapped around ribs that aren’t broken, the other hand curled uselessly against his chest in a perfect mirror of Kade’s.

Every injury passing through the Knot seems to have hit him at once.

Vasily catches the man’s arm, but his grip is quickly broken and a retaliatory strike is delivered with the flat of the man’s hand into Vasily’s throat. No man on earth can withstand a throat punch, Kade knows.

Vasily drops like a puppet whose strings were cut, but he pulls out a gun and aims it at the man, who laughs softly as he stares down at him.

‘Kill him!’ Riley shouts, voice cracked and broken. ‘Fucking kill him!’

Kade goes to Lachlan, who doesn’t seem able to move.