Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Can I spit on him? Hock a loogey from down here like a fucking Dilophosaurus and hope there’s enough upward trajectory that it gets in his eye?
“Bayo,” I gasp. “I need—”
The pipe comes down.
I twist at the last second, taking the blow on my shoulder instead of my skull. Pain explodes through my arm, white-hot and nauseating, but I use the impact to roll, wrenching my gun hand free. I fire twice from the floor—one shot goes wide, the other catches Kozlov in the meat of his thigh—and scramble backward as he roars in fury.
“Suka!” He swings the pipe again, wild this time, and I barely duck under it. “I will break every bone in your—”
I shoot him in the kneecap.
He goes down hard, the pipe clattering away, and for one precious moment I think it’s over. But then his men are flooding in from every direction, at least five of them, and I’m all out of options.
“Kat!” I’m backing toward the loading dock, firing at anything that moves. “Kat, I need you NOW!”
“Thirty seconds!”
I don’t have thirty seconds!
The first guard reaches me and I meet him with a front kick that sends him staggering, following up with a palm strike to the nose that sprays blood. The second comes from my left and I duck his swing, driving my knee into his groin, then slamming his head into the nearest crate when he doubles over.
But there are too many. There are too fucking many and there’s only one me.
I’m not going to make it. I’m going to die here.
Keep going, keep fighting.
But a fist connects with my jaw and the world tilts sideways in an explosion of razor blade stars. I stagger, tasting copper, and someone grabs my arm—wrenching it behind my back, spinning me, and suddenly I’m on my knees with a gun pressed to the back of my skull.
“Enough!” Kozlov limps toward me, one hand pressing down and alternating between his bleeding knee and his thigh, his face twisted with rage. “You kill my men. You come into my house. Now you die like a dog.”
“Mia!” Bayo’s voice is frantic in my ear. “Kat’s still three minutes out! Can you hold?”
What happened to thirty seconds? I want to ask but I can’t find the words.
My shoulder is on fire. My jaw feels like it’s been hit with a hammer. There’s blood in my mouth and blood on my hands and the cold barrel of a gun digging into the base of my skull. I count the bodies around me—three down, maybe four—but there are still too many standing. Too many guns. Too many ways this ends with me dead on a warehouse floor in Brooklyn, another NOC who got too close to something too big.
I failed.
“Any last words?” Kozlov asks. He’s enjoying this now, the sick bastard. His men are closing in, forming a loose circle, wolves around wounded prey. “Any message for your people?”
I could tell him to go fuck himself, spit in his face, try one last desperate move, knowing it would only buy me seconds at best.
Instead, I force myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way I was taught. The way I’ve done a hundred times before when death was close enough to taste. At least if he kills me now, I’ll be spared from the worst that they can do.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice steadier than it has any right to be. “Tell them I was still fighting.”
Kozlov laughs. That gravel-in-cement-mixer sound. “Fighting. You are on your knees, little mouse. No more fighting. You are finished.”
He’s right. I know he’s right.
But I also know something he doesn’t.
That I’m not the only predator in this warehouse.
I’ve spent my whole life learning to sense things that don’t want to be sensed and right now, in this warehouse full of killers, someone else is here.
Someone watching.
Someone waiting.
Kat? That better be you.
CHAPTER 32
VANGUARD
I’m standing at my penthouse window, watching the city bleed into night, when the alert comes through my watch. Not the priority klaxon that means someone important needs saving, just a standard notification, the kind that usually gets routed to local authorities, the kind that doesn’t normally alert me.
Shots fired. Red Hook industrial district. Multiple casualties reported.
I almost dismiss it. The NYPD handles this kind of thing, not me. Anything to do with gang violence, drug deals gone wrong, or just the everyday brutality of a city that’s still healing from the Dark Decade is not my jurisdiction.
Not my problem.
But something makes me hesitate.
Maybe it’s the location—Red Hook, down by the waterfront, the kind of place where things happen that never make the news. Or maybe it’s because these police reports don’t normally show up on my watch, or else I’d be bombarded by them all the live long day.