Chapter 14 #3
Spinning around, he raked his eyes over the crowd around him.
Kyle caught a flash of blonde hair and the profile of a face he recognized from seeing it through his scope in Los Angeles.
No hat this time, but that was definitely Oksana with Stanislav by her side, racing up the stairs to the food hall that linked to the street.
“Motherfucker,” Kyle snarled.
He got about five steps in their direction before the sound of fire erupting in the air had him diving for the ground, taking the people in front of him down with him.
Twin pillars of fire burned through the air and the people unlucky enough to be in its way.
The smell of cooked meat hit Kyle’s nose, and he gagged as he pushed himself to his knees, gun in hand.
The metahuman had arrived the same way he had, from the tunnel linking the station to the museums. Dressed in military gear rather than evening wear, Kyle pegged him as a Reborn IRA member, though which faction he didn’t know and couldn’t care.
Sweat beaded on his forehead as the fire twisted through the air in unnatural ways.
Knowing he only had seconds to respond, Kyle sighted down his gun, aiming for the metahuman’s face over his well-protected body.
A headshot was always more difficult to achieve, but Kyle had been doing this for a decade.
The fire cut out at the same instant Kyle’s bullet found its target, a red mist erupting from the man’s head as the body fell to the ground.
Kyle blinked sweat out of his eyes as he scrambled to his feet, making a run for the exit he’d seen Oksana use, shoving past people standing around in shock at what just happened.
Kyle was halfway up the stairs to the hall when one of Oksana’s bodyguards rounded the corner, gun drawn, but Kyle was quicker on the trigger.
He shot the man in the gut, even as he threw himself to the side, getting out of the way of the bullets that peppered the spot he’d just been in.
Running up the stairs, Kyle slammed the other man against the wall and rammed his knee into the bleeding wound in his midsection.
The man didn’t scream so much as vomit blood all over himself before Kyle quickly let him go. He slid to the ground, body splayed on the stairs. Kyle ran, too focused on the targets getting away to care about the bodies he was leaving in his wake.
He made it to the hall and could see Oksana’s bright blonde hair in the crowd near the street exit.
Kyle shoved his way forward without apology, making desperately needed progress when the second of Oksana’s bodyguards came at him through the panicking crowd, a hulking figure with his own gun in hand.
Kyle moved in without thinking, grabbing the man’s hand and yanking it downward to keep the gun pointing at the floor, even as he rammed his forehead against the man’s face.
He howled in pain as Kyle pivoted away, wrenching the man’s gun out of his hand.
Kyle hit the release button, the mag popping out and onto the floor, and ejected the chambered round.
He tossed the body of the gun into the rapidly dissipating crowd.
“<>” the guy said in Russian as he closed in.
“>” Kyle retorted in the same language.
The split-second surprise and hesitation the guy had at hearing Kyle respond in perfect Russian was all Kyle needed to get the upper hand.
Weaving in close, he ducked a roundhouse kick aimed for his right hand and slammed his foot into the guy’s opposite thigh.
The blow disabled the leg he stood on, and he staggered in order to regain his balance.
Kyle spun, ramming his forearm into the guy’s throat.
He fell to the ground, choking hard. Kyle kicked him in the face hard enough to knock him out before stepping over the body and sprinting toward the exit.
He was mere steps from it when an ear-piercing noise rent the night. The sirens rose in volume before fading out and coming back in a loop, just as loud as ever.
A warning to shelter in place due to a Splice chemical bomb attack.
If people weren’t screaming before, they were definitely screaming now.
The crowd surged around him as everyone rushed back into the station.
Kyle had to fight his way free of the crush, elbowing people out of the way as he finally made it to the street.
The station was a shelter-in-place location—all Underground stations were—because all trains would be halted in the wake of the warning sirens.
With everyone running into the station, Kyle only had to find people running away from it. He knew they wouldn’t go far because if Oksana and Stanislav were only using the station as a distraction, their pickup had to be close.
He couldn’t let them make it out of the quarantine zone.
The MDF and other metahuman agencies needed to know what they were dealing with, and if that meant Kyle had to break his cover to a certain extent, then so be it.
Extricating himself from the crowd, Kyle made it to the edge of the street, head whipping from side to side as he searched for any sign of Oksana and Stanislav.
Squinting down the dark street to his left, Kyle thought he caught sight of a familiar blue evening dress.
He couldn’t make out much through the people running to take shelter in the station, but he took a chance that what he’d seen was his target.
Kyle ran, gun in hand, casing the street with a quick eye. It forked up ahead, and he opted for the road veering left instead of continuing straight. He’d almost reached the street in question when someone darted out from around the sharp corner.
Kyle didn’t immediately shoot because he wasn’t sure if the person was friendly or not.
Oksana probably counted on him not wanting to risk an innocent bystander.
It was the only explanation Kyle had for the bullet he took in his left thigh as he tried to twist aside.
White-hot pain tore through his leg as blood oozed out of the deep hole, stealing the breath from his lungs for a few seconds, even as his body reacted to the threat.
Kyle pushed aside the pain with long practice and got off his own shot with an accuracy drilled into him from years and years of fighting.
His bullet caught Oksana in the shoulder of her right arm, her dominant arm, and she screamed, dropping to her knees.
Her gun clattered to the ground as blood began to pour out of her shoulder.
She slapped her left hand over the wound, blood seeping between her fingers, her blue evening gown quickly becoming stained.
Kyle ignored his own wound, having mentally evaluated it as not life-threatening since she hadn’t nicked his femoral artery, and sighted down his gun again. He aimed not for her head but for her chest.
“Guess you’re not just a pretty fuck,” she spat out furiously.
“Guess I’m the one with the better aim,” Kyle said right before he pulled the trigger.
Blood erupted from her chest as his bullet found its mark, dead center, right in her heart.
Oksana was dead before she hit the ground, but Kyle didn’t have time to be grateful for that.
A car pulled around the corner, coming to a hard halt mere feet away from where Oksana’s body lay in the street.
Kyle kept his gun trained on the vehicle’s driver before readjusting his aim to the man who got out, waving for his people to stay put.
He stepped over Oksana’s body on the way toward Kyle, the casual disregard shown to her corpse telling Kyle without words how little the man cared about her.
“I honestly didn’t see tonight ending like this, though I can’t be angry about the results,” Stanislav Pavluhkin said as he approached with an unhurried stride. “Thank you for killing her.”
Kyle stared at Stanislav incredulously over his gun, hand steady despite the blood sliding down his leg. “What? You couldn’t stab her in the back yourself?”
“She wasn’t one of mine. Getting rid of her now instead of last week required some finesse.”
Kyle could only think about the bomb in Los Angeles, and the implications of it made him go cold. He shifted, forcing back a wince as his left leg protested taking his weight. Kyle knew he needed to dig out the bullet soon before he healed around it. Digging it out later was never fun.
“You knew the Reborn IRA would crash the gala. Were you hoping they would get rid of her for you?” Kyle asked.
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Kyle kept his gun trained on Stanislav. “Of course you don’t. Deniability.”
“Is very important,” Stanislav agreed easily. “But tonight was just business.”
“I take offense to your business almost getting my friends killed.”
Stanislav didn’t stop moving forward until Kyle’s gun was pressed right up against his chest. The Russian had a few inches on him, but that didn’t stop Kyle from glaring murderously at the bastard.
“Almost. You truly believe they are alive?”
“They’re Marines. Of course they fucking are.”
“Jamie Callahan is a man who inspires a shocking amount of loyalty. Most people don’t send their pet to track me down out of revenge. You are…unpredictable, to say the least.”
The flicker of irritation in his voice had Kyle filing away the cause of anger to unpack it later when he wasn’t bleeding all over a London street.
“I’m a lot of things,” Kyle said flatly. “Just not anything Oksana accused me of being.”
“And what is that?”
“I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
“Considering I’m interested in dealing with the man whose bed you warm, I would say it is.
” At Kyle’s faint, angry twitch of his mouth, Stanislav chuckled.
“I always vet my business deals. Which means I know you are everything Oksana said you were, but what she didn’t understand is that men like me?
Like Jamie Callahan? We can do whatever we want with the people under our command.
But no one else has the right to touch them. ”
Kyle wasn’t surprised to feel strong fingers grip his chin and jerk his head up. Stanislav stared at him even as Kyle dug the muzzle into the other man’s chest.
“Hands off,” Kyle growled.
“Or what? You will shoot me and ruin a business deal before it even begins?”
The smirk on Stanislav’s face said he didn’t believe Kyle would pull the trigger—and he would be right, but not for the reason he so obviously believed.
Kyle didn’t have the green light to kill the bastard.
They still needed to know where the Splice labs were, and the only way to get that information was to play along.
There was a reason Kyle hated spy work. The long game was never as satisfying as a bullet finding its target with brutal immediacy.
“No,” Kyle said, thumbing the safety on his gun and aiming it at the sky. “I’m not going to shoot you.”
Stanislav’s smirk widened into a smile that Kyle wiped off his face with a satisfying punch to the mouth.
“That’s for fucking with my family,” Kyle snarled, ignoring the pain from his bad leg.
Kyle hopped a little to regain his balance, trying not to keep so much weight on his injured leg. Stanislav looked absolutely furious for several seconds, spitting blood out on the asphalt, before he threw back his head and laughed.
“You are loyal. That is a trait I favor above all others.” Stanislav gripped Kyle by the lapel of his tuxedo jacket and dragged him closer.
Kyle kept the gun between them as a warning, but Stanislav didn’t seem to mind.
He leaned down, talking directly into Kyle’s ear.
“Tell your Jamie I will be in touch, da? We will see where his loyalty to me will take him.”
Stanislav patted Kyle on the cheek hard enough to sting before walking back to the car.
He got in the front passenger seat, and the driver revved the engine.
The car didn’t wait for him to get out of the way, and Kyle ended up throwing himself to the side, landing hard enough to jar his leg and lose all the air in his lungs.
It took him a few seconds or so to remember how to breathe, gritting his teeth against the sharp pain of the gunshot wound as he struggled to sit up.
Staring down at Stanislav’s blood on his knuckles, Kyle raised his hand and carefully rubbed the blood onto his white dress shirt.
“Got something for your lab rats, Knight,” Kyle said over the comms.
“About fucking time you checked in, Reaper. Where are you?” Liam replied.
“Outside South Kensington Station.”
“That commotion was you?”
“Yeah.” Kyle glanced at where Oksana lay, blood pooling around her body. “I’m gonna need a medic and a body bag.”
“Medic we can spare. Body bags are spoken for.”
Kyle closed his eyes, doing his best to ignore the fiery pain in his leg. “That bad?”
Liam didn’t immediately reply. When he did, his voice was tired, subdued—how they all sounded when the worst days weren’t over yet.
“Yeah. That bad.”