A door near the end of the hall slammed open, and a man stepped out only feet from Gray, his stance planted wide as he began to swing his rifle up. The narrow hallway effectively functioned as one long choke point, and all he would have to do to mow them all down was close his eyes and fire.
Gray kicked the rifle’s muzzle aside then followed it with a hard blow to the man’s sternum. His breath left him in a cracking whoosh, and he stumbled back, bouncing off the wall and flailing back toward the door he’d just exited. Gray caught the edge of it and swung it around hard, banging it into his opponent’s helmet hard enough to rattle his brains.
And that was it. End of the line.
“Where to now?” Mace muttered.
“Up.” Nina nodded toward a door indicating a stairwell.
“Stairwells are bad,” Dani protested, even as she was moving to haul open the door. “Easy for them to keep the high ground, and they can hear you coming a mile away.”
“Watch my back,” Ava ordered, striding past Dani. But Dani just stood there, dumbfounded, as she disappeared up the stairs, her boots silent.
Ten seconds later, a thud echoed down, followed by a hoarse scream. A body plummeted to the cement floor, the limbs splayed and eyes staring up, unseeing. Five seconds later a second followed, his screams echoing all the way down.
Dani sighed, a long-suffering, entirely put-upon sound. “At least she’s effective.”
“And not trying to kill us.” This time. Gray kept that last part to himself as he took the stairs two and three at a time.
The doors on the second and third landings weren’t just locked or chained, they were fully boarded up. Something about that rankled at Gray, like a sore spot on the roof of his mouth he couldn’t stop worrying with his tongue. Why go this far, this deep, into a derelict building if you didn’t have to? With abandoned buildings, lower wasn’t just quicker and more convenient, it was safer.
Then he reached the fourth-floor landing and didn’t have time to think about it anymore, because another security squad had already converged on their location. Ava fought viciously, holding one flailing man in front of her as a human shield as she fired on his comrades.
Nina’s favorite trick. He remembered that one well.
Dani broadsided one of the soldiers—that’s what they are, soldiers—and his submachine gun fired an arc of bullets in Nina’s general direction as he went down. She hit the floor, and Knox dove after her before catching her hand signal that she was fine.
As he straightened, he never saw the pistol aimed at the back of his head.
“Knox, down!” Gray shouted.
Knox dropped, and Gray fired, a dead shot to the heart. The man who’d drawn a bead on Knox went down, but he must have been armored, because he still struggled to roll to his knees.
Mace was on him, knife in hand, before he managed it.
Ava’s human shield went over the balcony with a weak scream that ended in a dull crash far below, and she stood in the doorway with a confiscated pistol pointed at the floor and her brow furrowed as she stared down at the sprawl of bodies.
“Something is off,” she said, rolling a body over with the toe of her boot. “You said the guards they had before were mediocre and poorly equipped. This is quality armor, custom fitted.”
“They were.” Gray slid a hand roughly through his hair. “Something is worse than off. They should have shut us down in the lobby, but instead they let us get all the way up here. Drew us up here, like—”
“Like rats in a maze.” Dani frowned.
Ava crouched next to the body, frowning at his wrist. She yanked the knife from the dead soldier’s boot and used it to slice the sleeve on his jacket, revealing a tattoo.
It had a distinctly military feel, reminding Gray vaguely of some of the unit and squad insignia he’d seen during his tenure with the Protectorate—a bleeding shield inscribed with what looked like Latin. But he didn’t recognize it.
Nina brushed Knox’s sleeve. “I think we have a problem.”
“No shit, we have a problem.” Dani shoved past Gray, yanked the dead man’s arm up, and waved it at them. “He’s Ex-Sec.”
“Are you sure?” Mace asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. It’s not an official insignia, and they’re not supposed to mark themselves like this, but some of the real dedicated company fuckers get the ink anyway.”
Knox looked at Gray, who stared back at him in horror. He wanted nothing more than to blot out Knox’s words. “Executive Security deployed off the Hill means Tobias Richter is here.”
Then Nina made it worse. A thousand times worse. “I can’t raise Conall and Maya on comms.”
Richter. A couple of Ex-Sec squads. Blocked communications. Gray could see the vague outline of the trap now … but not who it was meant to ensnare. Only a few short days ago, he would have assumed Richter was after the Silver Devils, that he’d finally found the perfect bait to flush them out. But now there was Mace to consider, even Ava, for Christ’s sake.
And Maya.
He tried to calculate how long it would take them to get from here back to the van. Even at a dead run, with a clear path and no resistance, it was too long. Too fucking long.
“I’m going to the van,” he said flatly. “If Richter’s here…”
“Maya’s a target,” Knox finished. “Rafe, back him up.”
“Got it.” Rafe dropped the empty magazine from his pistol, loaded a full one, and shot Dani a look. “Watch his back.”
Dani regarded him mildly. “Nina might get jealous.”
He winked at her and swept up another discarded weapon from a fallen soldier on his way to Gray’s side. “Let’s do this.”
He and Rafe hurried down the stairs, the thump of their boots echoing loudly in the stairwell. It seemed to mimic the blood pounding in Gray’s ears, each thud spiking through him with painful possibility.
So many reasons Richter would come for them. And only one that could close his throat with sheer panic.
“We should have killed him before we left, Rafe. Even if it meant we wouldn’t all make it out.”
“Maybe.” Rafe shook his head. “And maybe this is the best chance anyone will ever have. He’s outside of his base of power. And he won’t see Nina and Dani coming. We sure as hell didn’t.”
“Maybe. But that’s—” Gray stopped short as he entered the long hallway they’d fought their way through before. It was deserted, exactly the way they’d left it … except for the heavy blast door closing off the far end. “Fuck.”
Gears ground behind them. Rafe spun, bolting back the way they’d come. He caught the blast door with six inches of clearance, the muscles in his arms straining as he fought the machinery with everything in him.
Running footsteps filled the narrow space as soldiers started to file out of the rooms, and Gray finally saw the whole trap.
Isolate. Divide.
Conquer.
He turned. The six inches of clearance had shrunk to four, the tendons standing out under Rafe’s skin in harsh relief. He wouldn’t be able to hold it for much longer, but that was okay.
This part of the trap was for Gray.
“Go,” he whispered. “Hurry. Find Conall.”