Chapter 12
twelve
EZRA
“Are you all in position?” I hear Raphael’s voice in the earpiece—don’t like it. I don’t kill in groups.
“Yeah, standing by.” I hear Gabriel. I grunt as the rest of the team gives a similar reply—almost all of them.
“Fuck no. I’m not having a fucking ball here!” Ramiel hisses.
“Monkey-jumping your way up a building doesn’t sound so bad,” Raphael taunts him. He’s waiting with Hunter near one of the back doors on the north side of the hotel.
Ramiel is climbing up the building next door using his parkour skills.
The fucker didn’t mute his mic, and I’ve been listening to every grunt and groan he’s uttered for the past few minutes.
He needs to reach the top and jump onto the hotel roof next.
He has only thirty seconds to lower a jammer inside the hotel skylight before Nine’s mega-advanced security system detects him.
The jammer will disable the system for thirty minutes, Bluetooth peripherals, and any kind of wireless communication—scrambling the frequencies so that Nine won’t be able to communicate with her men.
“Why don’t you do it, dickface!” Ramiel hisses. “This fucking building is covered in pigeon shit. I need five.”
“Use a pair of your old, pretty gloves,” Bezaliel scoffs from his street position.
We are all here thanks to the connection I made between the poisoner’s comment about Nine smelling like artificial strawberries and my memory of Red Vines boxes piled up in a storage room at the facility.
As soon as I told him, Ramiel looked for large purchases made in the last few months.
Serena confirmed some of the buyers’ identities until Ramiel was left with a bunch of suspicious names.
After a cross-reference to law enforcement databases, they narrowed it down to ten people.
The team went to check the addresses where the purchases were dropped off, prioritizing places in sparsely populated areas, secluded, abandoned industrial buildings—Dare took care of hacking into the records departments for Chicago, real estate sites, that sort of thing.
After I left Sully at Michael’s, only two locations still needed to be checked: a mall under construction—which was halted two months ago—in West Garfield, and this abandoned hotel in Englewood.
There are only two other businesses nearby, both open during the day, with a closing time well before sunset.
This is Nine’s hideout. The air around it reeks with her heinousness.
Her stench. The Marge is an ancient hotel, which was supposed to be torn down and rebuilt since the last two floors are not in use because of an underlying structural failure.
Six months ago Nine forced the owner to sell.
The whole building should be evacuated or better yet crumble on top of her.
“I counted thirty-three bodies inside the hotel,” Uriel lets us know, from his vantage point in the warehouse in front of the hotel. He’s using thermal scopes to detect invisible infrared radiation—body heat.
“Thirty-three? Mendez talked about fifty.” Rague grunts next to me, sounding disappointed by the lower number.
He’s huffing and puffing, eager to start the fight, and groaning about the tunnel’s narrow space.
I don’t mind them at all. I’ve been using them since I moved to Chicago, even slept here a few times.
They are handy and easy to move through—after learning which ones are still navigable.
I even left little signs on the walls that help me remember which area of the city each tunnel corresponds to—since the signal comes and goes down here.
“Piece of cake, then,” Oliver states sarcastically, patting his husband’s arm. I can feel his glaring gaze making a hole in my head, and decide to ignore it.
“Jammer is in place,” Ramiel confirms. “Looking for Nine, now.”
“Good job, Red,” Hunter praises his boyfriend.
“She is in,” Ramiel states. “Well, her tablet is.”
Fucking finally!
“On my way to the electrical room.” Raphael is accessing the building from the south back door with Hunter.
“I have Old Betsy’s eye on you.” Uriel is pointing his rifle at them in case they need to be covered. I find it ridiculous that my brother likes to give names to his guns.
I hear a grunt before Hunter says, “Two guards down, we are in.”
Something feels off. I can sense it in my bones. I’m about to voice my concern and delay Raphael from inducing the blackout when I hear Gabriel cussing.
“What’s wrong?” Uriel asks.
“Lori is here,” he states.
“Little Wasp, what the fuck?” Bezaliel’s growl reverberates inside my ear.
What the fuck is right. What is Lori doing there? Does that mean…? I grab my phone to check Sully’s location, but the jammer has disabled it. Fuck! Only the earbuds we are using must be protected from the interfering signal.
“Guys!” Lori pants. “We have a problem.”
“What is Michael doing on the street?” Uriel cuts him off.
Michael too? Fuck no!
“I told him to stay inside the penthouse!” Raphael hisses.
“Shhh!” Hunter shushes him. They need to get to the electrical room without raising any alarm among Nine’s men.
“He’s with Linda,” Uriel keeps going.
“How about Sully?” I ask. I fucking expected he would follow my order. But I have the dreadful feeling that he didn’t, since they are all here.
“He’s in.” Linda’s reply turns me fucking speechless. Then I start seething, fuming, burning with rage.
Oliver’s incredulous, high-pitched words come next. “In? As in inside the hotel?”
“Why the fuck are they here, Linda?” Bezaliel spits out.
“We needed bait. It didn’t turn out as I planned, but…”
“We were bait?” Lori interrupts her.
“What the fuck did you just say? You used my brother as bait?” Oliver sounds livid, but nobody is more furious than me. I curl my lips over my teeth and let out a raging growl.
“Lori, I told you to protect him!” Oliver scolds him.
“We got separated inside the tunnels,” Lori explains with a weak voice I’ve never heard from him. “I tried to look for him, but he was gone. I quickly found an exit to the street and called Linda. She told me where to come.”
“I see him! They have him. Ouch!” Uriel says.
“What?” Raguel asks.
“He tripped on the stairs and fell. But he still looks in one piece.”
They have him. Nine has him.
“Fuuuuck!” I need to get to him! The urge to have him safely in my arms overpowers any other thought.
“Ezra, wait!” Linda’s words don’t stop my advance toward the tunnel exit that will take me inside the hotel’s underground parking garage, but Raguel’s heaving body does—for a moment.
“It’s a lobster trap, easy to get in but impossible to get out.” Linda continues. “There are more than one hundred men inside the hotel.”
“Wrong. I see only around thirty people,“ Uriel corrects her.
“They are underground in the TARP tunnels, ready to come out and jump you.”
Tarp tunnels?
“The sewer system designed to prevent flooding? Those tunnels are much farther below the freight ones,” Michael says.
“Piglet, if you set foot in this hotel, you won’t be able to walk outside the penthouse for a year!” Raphael states coldly.
“How do you know they are waiting there?” Ramiel asks Linda.
“An informant. Nine is hated like most people in power, but also feared. It was tough; I’ve been trying to flip one of them for months, and I finally did it.
You really thought I would just hold Meg’s hand without doing anything to avenge her?
” Her words are filled with anger and disappointment.
Like they should have predicted her actions.
“I taught you everything you know, boys.”
“Not me,” I remind her. “If something happens to Sully, you are going to pay for it, Linda.” My statement is infused with the shadow of a dark threat. I grab my bow and a knife.
“Sully wasn’t supposed to get caught. I’ll do my best to protect him. But Nine needs to be dead before the moon shines.” Her regretful voice does shit to me.
“You used us and fucking sent Sully to his death!” Lori yells.
“Is your revenge more important than him?” Oliver’s voice is shaking with outrage and desperation. He’s looking down, shoulders trembling, fists tight. An unstable Raguel goes to him.
“I…”
I cut off whatever kind of reply she was about to voice. “He won’t die. Not under my watch,” I let the words come out between my gritted teeth.
“Not on our watch,” Ramiel states, followed by the rest of the team.
“We are in the electrical room. Hundred and thirty men is a suicide mission.” Hunter is not wrong. Some of us will die, but getting Sully out is my only priority.
“It won’t be suicidal when my squads arrive. They are ten minutes away.” Linda is only now letting us know. I’m really going to make her bleed.
“Ten minutes?” Oliver gasps.
“Motherfucker!” I hear Ramiel swear, followed by Lori.
“Fuck you, Linda,” Hunter states.
“Twenty seconds to blackout,” Raphael adds. They went against her, knowing too well Sully doesn’t have ten minutes.
They must have positioned the device Ramiel gave him on the electrical panel.
It will fry the circuits and turn the building dark for two entire minutes before the generator turns on.
Perhaps just enough time to cut down Nine’s men before I reach him.
The team is all wearing night goggles while I’m using the ones inside my mask.
“Ezra, please.” Oliver slides in front of me just as I’m about to move, eyes pleading. “Please bring him back to me.”
My nostrils flare as I inhale deeply. I’ve never been this irate in my life—at Linda for putting my little chick in danger, at Sully for not following my orders, at Oliver for talking about Sully as his, at Nine for existing.
“I will bring him back, but not to you.” I let the dark promise sink in before continuing. “Sully will go home with me.”
“Fine!” His face is red, saliva flying out of his mouth. “Just fucking save him.”
“Now!” Raphael’s sudden scream springs me into action.