“WE’RE TAKING YOU SOMEWHERE,” Julius announced, and took a swig of his morning coffee.
I considered him from my perch at the kitchen island, where I’d just finished a bowl of cereal I’d again insisted on pouring myself. His expression gave nothing away, but then, it never did.
The fact that I might be getting another opportunity to see something beyond the confines of this apartment had to be a good thing. “Where?” I asked, picking the imaginary lint from my shirt as if his answer didn’t matter to me all that much.
Garrison arched his eyebrows at me from where he was sitting on the other side of the island, savoring a typical mug of hot chocolate. It was just close enough for a trace of its creamy scent to reach my nose, and I started salivating even though my stomach was perfectly full.
“Do you really think you have a choice, sweetheart?” the younger guy asked. “This isn’t a city tour, even if you tried to treat it like one yesterday.”
I ignored him, fixing my attention back on the man in charge.
Julius gazed back at me evenly. “Do you want to help with the case or not?”
I made a face at him. “I’d kind of like to know where we’re going first, that’s all. Is that so much to ask after you’ve basically taken me prisoner?”
Julius frowned. “You’re not a prisoner.”
“Really? Then what would you call it?”
“You know you’re here for your own protection. We’re keeping you safe.”
I shrugged and carried my bowl over to the sink. “And protecting your covers. I haven’t seen any reason yet that proves I need this level of protection.” Tell me more about what you’re up against, what kind of people you think I should be scared of. Give me some details.
Julius looked at the ceiling as if he needed a moment to regain his composure. It wasn’t my fault. I tried to ask the necessary questions to get right to the point, but he and the others repeatedly deflected. I didn’t want to play a game of back and forth with the guys, but I didn’t have another choice if I wanted to get anything out of them.
“You could just tell me where you want to take me,” I suggested. “How hard is that?”
I could tell that he’d decided to appease me before he opened his mouth. He took a deep breath, but before the first word came out, the window above the kitchen counter burst inward with a crash of shattering glass.
As I spun around with a lurch of my heart, two smoke grenades careened inside and thumped on the floor. A dense fog billowed through the room, prickling into my eyes and obscuring everything around me from view. All I could rely on were my ears—which picked up the screech of the front door’s hinges being slammed apart by some massive force and another crash of glass from the living room.
Footfalls thudded from all three directions. Gunshots boomed. I dropped to the ground, my pulse still racing but falling into a familiar rhythm that steadied me.
This was the kind of moment I was made for. Every instinct quivered on the alert. All my attention narrowed down to the simple goal of staying alive—and taking down anyone who wanted me to be otherwise.
More shots were ringing out. Was it enemy fire or the cops shooting back? There was no possible way to distinguish friend from foe with the suffocating smoke.
I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth, gaining little relief, although my lungs were now prickling along with my eyes. At least the smoke didn’t taste like it’d contained anything outright toxic. I’d experienced pretty much every awful hand weapon known to humankind over my years of training, and there were plenty worse than this.
Of course, most of those were only used in the middle of a warzone. What the fuck was going on here? Who would have wanted to attack a bunch of men most people shouldn’t even know were cops?
Did it have anything to do with the massacre at the household?
The shots had fallen away into grunts and the fleshy smack of fists landing blows. They must have realized only a fool would fire into a room where they couldn’t tell whether they’d hit an enemy or an ally. The sounds didn’t tell me how many attackers we were facing, but from my initial impressions, two or three had come in through each access point, maybe a couple more than that through the front door. We were outnumbered as much as twice over.
We? What was I even thinking? I didn’t owe the cops anything, and I wasn’t in any position to take on as many as a dozen attackers whether they were related to the household’s murders or not. It was the cops’ job to handle these assholes. I’d seen how capable they were at that job. They didn’t need me anyway.
This was the perfect opportunity to escape and never look back.
I army-crawled in the direction of the door, careful to make no noise as I went. Here and there I had to adjust my course to squeeze around a piece of furniture or dodge stomping feet. More punches and kicks thudded around me; a bone cracked. Someone groaned.
It sounded vaguely like Julius.
I hesitated next to the sofa. I had to keep going, didn’t I? It was a tough world, and I wouldn’t risk entering a fight that had nothing to do with me.
Or did it have everything to do with me?
Julius had claimed that they were protecting me, and while I’d assumed it was an unnecessary precaution, maybe I’d been overly skeptical. What if this attack wasn’t an attempt to capture or kill them, but to do those things to me?
A sharp cry of pain split through the air. Was that Blaze?
Logic told me to continue forward, but my body balked. Even highly skilled fighters could be overwhelmed when they were greatly outnumbered and taken by surprise. I might be able to make a break for it, but the four men who’d brought me here wouldn’t necessarily survive this attack.
They’d held me here, refused to let me leave… but they’d also helped me after the car crash. Patched me up. Made sure I was reasonably comfortable and well-fed. They’d even catered to my request to walk around the mansion and then go buy those damn cookies yesterday.
It might be because of me that whoever was attacking them had even identified this apartment as theirs.
I hadn’t been able to save anyone in the household. I hadn’t even known the massacre was happening until every single one of them was dead or as good as it. This time, it wasn’t too late to step in.
I didn’t have to let another group of people die around me. I could save someone.
My chest clenched around a sudden rush of determination. I didn’t second-guess the emotion. This was what I’d trained for. This was the one way I knew I could make a difference in the world, and I wasn’t going to fail again.
Springing to my feet, I took in the room. As I swiveled, I made out thinning patches in the smoke.
There—that guy with the ski mask was one of our enemies.
I dove at him, reaching for his head. He didn’t even see me coming. My fingers dug into his jaw, and I wrenched his face around so sharply his neck snapped even as he made his first movement to buck me off.
As he crumpled to the ground, Garrison scrambled up from where he’d been knocked down at the attacker’s feet. He stared at me, but I didn’t have time to worry about what he thought of my kill. There were more sounds of fighting all around me.
Another masked man hurtled out of a thicker patch of smoke. I struck first, knowing that my advantage would come from the man’s shock.
He swung at me with a knife. I ducked and snatched his wrist with my left hand to prevent him from using the blade. At the same time, I swung my brace around, pummeling his temple with its stiff surface. The throb of the impact ricocheted up my arm, and my ribs groaned with the effort, but the man stumbled to the side, slightly stunned.
He lashed out at me again, but I had already moved, yanking his body off balance. I squeezed his wrist, twirling it around his back in a maneuver that I knew would jerk his shoulder out of its socket. A pop sounded through the room, and a groan spilled from his mouth.
“The fuck,” he screamed, the knife dropping from his twitching fingers. I kicked the back of his knees, and he collapsed forward, a strange sobbing gasp coming from his lips.
In an instant, the knife was in my hand. I plunged it straight into his back, angled perfectly to ram between his ribs and into his heart.
I knew I’d hit home when the body beneath me sagged.
The smoke was clearing more, drifting out the shattered windows and the open doorway. A hint of a fresh breeze tingled in my throat.
As I spun around, I noted the three other bodies already on the floor—all of them masked, to my unexpectedly intense relief. One of them was bleeding out from a deep slash across his throat. Another had a bullet wound in his chest. The third might have only been unconscious, but these cops clearly didn’t hesitate to fight to the death when their lives were on the line.
Exactly as it should be. Hopefully that’d mean they wouldn’t get too judgy about the bodies I’d added to the collection of corpses.
On the other side of the sofa, Julius and Talon were fighting side-by-side. For the first time, seeing them from the sidelines rather than as their opponent, I could observe the way they worked in sync. Talon moved with swift but powerful precision, and Julius was the direction to his storm, leading with pure strength and skill as he smashed his knee into one attacker’s face and jabbed out his gun hand to put a bullet in another.
Together, they were a force of nature. Outnumbered two-to-one, they still maintained the upper hand in the fight. I’d never seen anyone fight quite like that. It was almost beautiful to watch.
But not so beautiful that I didn’t notice the man charging at me from the direction of the kitchen, wielding a switchblade in one hand and a butcher knife in the other.
I turned to meet the guy head-on. As I swiveled, I glimpsed Blaze holding his own against another assailant with a skill that I hadn’t anticipated from the tech expert, even though his movements were slowed by a wound bleeding on his side. To be a cop, of course he needed to be somewhat physically adept, but it still surprised me.
My attacker was coming too fast for me to completely dodge him. I caught a blow to my shoulder and stepped back from the force of it. Shaking off the impact, I deflected the next one with my bare forearm. Up close, catching sight of my face in a way none of the invaders before had gotten a chance to, he jerked backward with startled eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”
It wasn’t me they were after, then. They hadn’t expected some chick to be fighting alongside the cops, let alone kicking their ass. Too bad for them.
His hesitation was all I needed to swing back and execute a perfect roundhouse kick that rammed into his head. I landed with bent knees, and the man toppled to the ground, unconscious without an ounce of fight remaining in him.
I glanced around the room with a nearly clear view now. All the guys were fending off other assailants, even Garrison, though the motions of his right arm looked awkward, as if he’d been injured too.
When I looked at Julius and Talon, I found Julius’s motions were slowing. In the time I’d confronted one man, he’d taken down two, and Talon had incapacitated another. But Julius was favoring one side. The bottom of the left leg of his jeans was dark with blood—his.
Shit. Another attacker stepped into view from the dispersing smoke, his gun aimed at Julius, and I leapt toward the masked man without a second thought.
This guy was taller and broader than the others I’d fought. With only one fully usable arm, I knew I had a challenge ahead of me. I didn’t allow myself to glance at the bodies that littered the floor. I didn’t bother acknowledging anything around me but my opponent.
He might be bigger than me, but I was born for this.
I fell into the rhythm of the fight, using my fists and legs brutally and efficiently enough that it didn’t feel like I was impaired in any way. In fact, the brace over my wrist acted as a blocking tool rather than a burden. Using the footwork that Talon had adjusted yesterday, I found myself ducking, weaving, and punching with greater intensity—just as rapidly as I would have with my right arm fully functional.
The man’s size didn’t matter as he succumbed to my attack, careening to the floor with my assault.
The gun spun away from his hand, but he fell within reach of a discarded knife. He noticed it at the precise moment that I did. I stood no chance of reaching it before him.
So when the man jerked forward and snatched up the serrated blade, I did the only thing I could do. I veered right, clutched his wrist with my left hand, and slammed his forearm into my bent knee.
The first time, he didn’t release it, though a groan of pain fled from his lips. I turned my back to his body’s mass and used my right arm to add more force to the blow this time. The knife finally clattered to the floor. I pushed him away from the blade, and he held my leg like a lifeline, attempting to drag me alongside him.
I caught the cool leather grip of the knife and whipped it around as the man pulled me closer. With a jerk of my hand, I plunged it into his chest.
He slumped, his breathing sputtering and then halting completely, leaving the room just a little quieter.
I glanced toward Talon first, my eyes drawn to him automatically. He still moved like a storm—quick, brutal, and relentless. He left nobody unaffected in his path of skillful strikes. He looked to be enjoying his last opponent—taking his time with him. I saw the way the man tired, and I could tell that Talon was playing with him.
A yearning in the pit of my stomach arose as I watched him move. He was absolutely extraordinary.
But there were only two attackers left, that one and the one Julius was just heaving into the edge of the kitchen island. The cops could handle the situation from here. I’d done my bit, and now I needed to get going.
As I dashed toward the open doorway, Talon cracked his opponent’s skull. I still could have made it, but just a few steps from the blasted-up doorframe, Garrison and Blaze stepped from opposite sides to block my way.
My fists jerked up, and in the same instant, Talon strode over to join them. He didn’t seem to notice the blood trickling down the side of his face from a scratch on his forehead.
Garrison smirked at me, the effect only slightly weakened by the tensing of his jaw against the pain he was in. “Where do you think you’re going, sweetheart?”
Fuck. I’d waited too long. I swiveled in the other direction, just in time to see Julius marching over.
He took in the room as he approached, limping just a little, and I got the sense he could pick out exactly which kills were mine, though that didn’t make any sense when several of them had happened when it was too smoky to see where anyone else was. When he came to a stop a couple of paces away from me, he nodded approvingly.
“Thank you. We might have been in a tough spot if you hadn’t stepped in.” He gave the apartment another glance and sighed. “We can’t stay here after this. Maybe it’s time we take you home.”
