“WE WERE NEVER PARTICULARLY CLOSE, but I wouldn’t have thought he’d outright screw us over,” Julius said as we stalked through the streets with the rest of the crew.
“Are you sure it is a trap?” I asked, glancing around. “Maybe he really does have something important to talk to you about.”
Garrison let out a huff. “And he really needed to talk to us about it in some random alleyway? If it’s a dead end, I say we leave without even sticking around to find out what mess they’re trying to pull us into.”
Earlier today, Julius had gotten a call from a guy he’d worked with briefly a few years ago, asking for a meet-up with only a vague explanation. Julius had agreed, but he’d suspected from the start that it was some kind of set-up. I guessed it was hard not to be paranoid about that kind of thing when our enemies had already turned several of the mercenary teams he’d once seen as colleagues against the crew.
We were all well-armed with both guns and knives, braced for a confrontation. My senses prickled with alertness as I scanned the buildings around us. We wanted to find out exactly what this was about, but we weren’t throwing caution to the wind, that was for sure.
“He sounded nervous,” Blaze said. “It could be that he needs help. And either way, we have to get to the bottom of it.”
“As long as we don’t end up in the bottom of a grave,” Garrison muttered.
Talon cast a baleful look over all of us. “Maybe we should shut up and focus if we want to avoid that outcome. We’re almost there.”
Julius nodded with a self-deprecating smile, and we fell into silence.
At the mouth of the alley, we paused in a defensive formation and peered down it. The passage turned farther in, just as Blaze had expected from the satellite imaging he’d pulled up. No one had blocked it off in any way that was visible from here.
Julius made a brisk motion, and we all followed him, spreading out even more as we strode along the cracked concrete between the looming brick walls. We didn’t want to make it easy for anyone to surround all of us at once.
The shadows wrapped around us like a damp sheet, and my nose itched with the sour smell trickling from a nearby dumpster. Julius and Talon rested their hands on their hips over their holsters. Blaze outright withdrew his gun, less confident in his quick draw than the others.
We paused at the bend, looking both ways to where the streets showed at either end. We definitely weren’t cut off. But there was no one here yet, and we were right on time. That didn’t bode well.
I stayed in the alley we’d entered through next to Garrison. Julius and Talon ambled a few paces down each direction of the longer alleyway. Blaze stopped right in the middle of the T, knitting his brow.
And we waited.
For a long stretch, nobody came—not to speak to us or to descend on us with guns blazing. I stayed tensed, conscious of every sound that came from the quiet warehouse district. Other than the distant grumble of passing traffic and the hiss of a plastic bag caught in the breeze, it was silent.
When it was twenty minutes after the meetup time, Blaze shifted on his feet. “Maybe he got ambushed on his way to meet us.”
“I don’t think we should stick around any longer,” Julius said grimly. “If he’s got something to say, he can reach out again.”
At the same moment, a faint scraping sound reached my ears from behind a door in the side of the building next to me. I stepped closer, my fingers curling around the hilt of one of my knives—
And the door burst right off its hinges into me, slamming into my body and knocking me onto my ass.
Sudden footsteps and gunshots thundered all around me. I shoved at the heavy metal slab that was pinning me down and then squirmed to maneuver myself out from under it.
“Keep her down!” someone shouted, and a figure that I realized was braced on top of the detached door stomped on my hand, making my fingers release my knife before he kicked it away.
Clenching my jaw against the jab of pain, I aimed a punch and managed to clock the guy in the groin—hard. With a strained noise, he swayed on his perch, and I wrenched myself out from under his and the door’s weight.
The scene I escaped into was total mayhem. Bullets ricocheted off the walls, bodies heaved this way and that, and voices hollered back and forth. I couldn’t tell which were from my men and which from the enemy. Grabbing my gun, I moved to charge into the fray—when yet another opponent charged into me.
I lashed out at him, smacking him in the head with the butt of the gun, kneeing him in the gut. He shoved me backward, barely touching me other than that. Like he was just trying to get me out of the way rather than attack me.
A few more men converged on me. I raised my hand to shoot, and the nearest one knocked my aim off course. Several fists flew at me, but none of them hit me that hard—except the one I couldn’t quite manage to dodge amid the barrage, which lost me my pistol too.
For fuck’s sake. I whipped out my other knife and fell into a fighting stance, glaring at my four attackers. But they just stood there, equally poised but not closing in. Again, I had the sense that they were trying to keep me out of the fighting rather than drag me into it.
Just like the men during the attack at the hotel had hesitated to fight me.
An uncomfortable chill pooled in my gut. I took a few testing swipes at the blockade, and the men simply fended me off with their own blades. A couple of them had guns at their hips that they weren’t even trying to use. But there were too many of them together for me to make a full attack on one without leaving myself vulnerable to too many others.
I peered past them at the rest of the battle and spotted Julius ducking to the side as he fired his gun. He hurtled backward toward me, and then stopped, his head jerking to the side and his eyes widening as he stared at someone farther down the alley.
“Petrov?” he said. “What the hell—”
He cut himself off to fire another couple of shots and swing his knife with the other hand as two more men rushed at him. Behind them came a stern, bulky guy with a broad forehead that had a scar angled across it. He was looking at Julius with a strange expression too.
Did Julius know that guy? Petrov wasn’t the name of the contact we’d been expecting to talk to. What the hell was going on?
“Someone get to Dess!” Talon’s voice hollered from a spot I couldn’t see.
I squared my shoulders and prepared to take care of myself. These pricks might want to keep me out of the fighting, but we didn’t always get what we wanted. A lesson I was happy to teach them after how many times I’d learned it.
I eyed my opponents again and identified a flaw in their formation. My fingers tightened around my knife. Then I sprang into action.
As if I meant to try to stab a guy in the middle, I lunged forward. But just as he moved to deflect me, I swerved in the opposite direction. My slashing blade cut across another man’s arm—not enough to take him out of commission, but significantly weakening his stronger hand.
The men shifted to adjust their positions to compensate, and I flung myself at the nearest wall. Using momentum and speed, I rebounded off it and leapt right over the pricks’ heads.
They definitely hadn’t expected me to end up behind them. Before they could do more than grunt in surprise, I’d punctured two of their hearts from behind. The third guy whirled around, and I slit open his throat. He crumpled into a pool of blood.
That was what they got for thinking they could contain me.
The constraints of the alley had worked against our enemies as much as ourselves. They must have been hoping to take us more by surprise. Bodies littered the concrete around me, and thankfully none of them belonged to the Chaos Crew. I saw Blaze get in a shot that caught one guy in the head, and Talon wrenched his favorite knife through another opponent’s belly.
A man sprang at Garrison, the closest of the four to me. I yelped a warning and sprang to help as Garrison leapt out of the way with his gun hand jerking upward. The guy raked a knife across Garrison’s forearm, and then ducked and rolled just as Garrison fired at him. Before I could make the attacker pay for the injury, he backed away, panting.
He wasn’t the only one retreating. They must have realized they weren’t winning this fight. Only three of our attackers were still standing, one of them the bulky guy with the forehead scar. He waved his own knife, smeared crimson, and they took off down the one route open to them without obstacles.
I would have charged after them, but as I raced around the corner, my gaze caught on Blaze, who’d fallen back against the wall with his hand pressed against a cut on his chest. My heart lurched with concern. I dashed to him instead.
“It’s okay,” he said in a voice that was only slightly strained. “Just a minor flesh wound.”
When he lifted his hand, I saw he was right—it was a long cut, but shallow. Maybe not even bad enough to require stitches. When I spun around, our remaining attackers had vanished.
Julius cursed. All four of the men gathered around me, watching the shadows warily in case there’d be another attempt.
“You knew one of them, didn’t you?” I asked Julius. “You said his name.”
“There’s no time to talk about it,” he said brusquely. “People will have heard the shots and called the cops. We need to get out of here fast.”
With him in the lead, we hustled out of the alley and made it to the rental car we’d arrived in just as sirens pealed in the distance. We dove inside, Garrison behind the wheel, and peeled away from the curb.
Squashed in the back between Blaze and Talon, I kicked the back of Julius’s seat. “We’re out of there now. Who was that guy you called Petrov?”
To my surprise, it was Talon who answered. “Former special ops. We were on a base with him for a while during our military days.”
I stared at him. That was an even bigger coincidence than I’d have imagined. “And he just happened to show up with a bunch of jerks trying to kill you?”
“It obviously wasn’t by chance,” Julius said, anger thickening his already deep voice. “Whoever’s behind these attacks, they know more about us than they should. And they’re using every tactic they can against us.”
“He won’t know much about our current abilities,” Talon pointed out, but his tone was somber too.
“Who would know about your connection to him?” I asked. “How do the people who sent him even know that you were in the military?” It wasn’t like the Chaos Crew kept a business website with a list of its members and their biographies.
Blaze grimaced. “If these are people who’ve come at us before, they may have seen enough of us that they could have been able to use their own facial recognition software, or fingerprints, or something like that to make a connection.”
Garrison coughed from where he was sitting behind the wheel. “I’m more interested in the fact that they tried to shove Dess off to the side. They didn’t do a thing to hurt you once they had you out of the way, did they?”
A flush that was mostly frustration coursed under my skin. “No. Not until I forced their hand, and then they didn’t get away with much.”
“And who would care so much about keeping you safe while slaughtering us?”
It wasn’t hard to see what he was getting at. We’d already discussed this theory the last time.
I rubbed my face. “It could be Damien Malik. I know. But there are other explanations too.” Even if I couldn’t think of them off the top of my head. The enemies who’d come after us back in the crew’s hometown hadn’t treated me so gently.
All this had started when I’d reached out to my birth father. Where did it end?
I had no idea, and every passing day brought more questions without answers. The Hunter had told me to dig deeper. I didn’t want to follow his instructions—but it was starting to seem like that was the only possible route I could take if I wanted to get through this with my other family alive.
An idea twined through my thoughts until it felt solid enough for me to speak out loud. “I need to crack open all the Malik family secrets—and none of us has found any way we can do that on our own. I think it’s time I set up another job to exchange a favor.”
