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What I do know is that I’m not simply waiting anymore. I bought myself something tonight: chaos, uncertainty, a crack in the assumption that I’m nothing more than a body to be contained, and I intend to stay ready for whatever opening comes next, however long it takes to arrive, however many more nights like this one it costs me before it does.

37

ARTEM

We cut the headlights three blocks out, rolling the last stretch in near darkness, engines low enough that the warehouse ahead shows no sign of noticing our approach yet.

The building sits dark against the night sky, only a handful of windows lit along the upper floor, nothing that betrays what’s actually being held inside its walls. A dog barks somewhere off in the distance, the only sound breaking the quiet as we roll to a stop.

Twelve men fan out into position around the perimeter, exactly the way we rehearsed it in the garage, each one finding his mark without needing further instruction.

Yuri crouches beside me at the north entrance, weapon steady, eyes fixed on the building’s dark outline against the night sky.

My own pulse stays level, though nothing about tonight actually feels like every other night that came before it—some current running underneath the calm that I’ve never quite felt in this exact way until now.

“On your signal now,” he says, voice low enough to carry only to me, steady in the way I’ve come to rely on more than almost anything else in this business.

I don’t wait long at all tonight. Every second we spend in this quiet is a second she spends inside that building not knowing help has arrived, a second I refuse to spend standing still when I don’t have to.

I give the signal now.

The first breach goes fast and clean, our men through the north entrance before the two guards stationed there fully register what’s actually happening around them.

A shout goes up somewhere deeper inside the building, an alarm I hadn’t accounted for, and within seconds the quiet approach collapses into exactly what I trained for and hoped to avoid tonight.

Gunfire erupts suddenly from the east stairwell, and I drop low on instinct, returning fire toward the muzzle flash before conscious thought fully catches up to my body’s response.

A man goes down across the room, and I don’t have time to confirm whether it’s one of ours or one of theirs before I’m moving again, pressing forward into the building’s interior, the smell of gunpowder already thick in the air around me.

Nothing in me hesitates for even a second. Every calculation I’d normally run, every measured risk assessment that’s kept me alive for years in this business, narrows down to a single directive.

Move forward. Clear the path. Get to her.

I’ve never fought with this little regard for my own personal safety in my entire life, and some distant part of me registers that fact even as the rest of me refuses to slow down long enough to examine it.

Yuri covers my flank as we push through the first corridor, taking down a guard who steps out from a side room with his weapon already raised.

The exchange happens too fast for fear to fully register, training carrying both of us through motions we’ve drilled more times than either of us could count.

“Two more ahead,” Yuri says, already moving toward the next junction. “Stairwell to the lower level. That’s where they’d hold something they didn’t want found easily.”

We take the stairs fast, weapons raised and ready, and the resistance thickens the deeper we go, exactly the pattern I expected going into this.

Whatever they’ve thrown at the outer perimeter was never meant to hold. It was meant to slow us down long enough for whoever’s actually guarding her to prepare.

Each level down brings more coordinated fire, more men who clearly understood their actual role wasn’t to win, only to buy time for someone else deeper in the building.

A door ahead bursts open, two men emerging with weapons already trained on our position, and the exchange that follows happens in seconds, brutal and close, nothing like the controlled distance of the entry point above us.

I take a graze along my forearm that I don’t fully register until after the immediate threat’s down, blood already soaking through my sleeve, the pain arriving late and secondary to everything else demanding my attention.

My ears ring from the close-quarters gunfire, the sound reduced to a dull, muffled echo. One of my men goes down hard behind me, a cry cut short, and I don’t stop to check how bad it is.

Marek’s voice crackles over the radio a second later, confirming he’s got him, dragging him back toward the extraction point, and that has to be enough for now.

I can’t carry two priorities through this building. I can only carry one.

I file the sound of that cry away somewhere I’ll have to deal with later, once this is finished, once there’s room left in me for anything beyond the single objective driving every step forward.