Chapter Thirteen Leone #2
Third man. Coming out of a side room, fully armed, eyes clear.
He wasn't in the hallway when the flash went off.
He sees me and fires. The round hits my vest, dead center, and the impact knocks me back a step.
The ceramic plate cracks but holds. I feel the bruise blooming across my sternum, a deep, nauseating throb, and I return fire on instinct.
Three rounds. Two in the chest, one in the head. He drops.
Claudio is past me now, moving down the corridor.
The fourth man has taken cover behind an overturned table at the far end.
He fires blind, rounds punching into the walls, the ceiling, sending chips of plaster and concrete raining down.
Claudio slides low, almost on his belly, and fires upward beneath the table's edge.
Two shots. The man's legs buckle. He falls sideways, and Claudio puts a final round through the table into his chest.
Silence.
My ears are ringing from the flash grenade.
The hallway smells like cordite and plaster dust. Eight men down on this floor and the ones below.
My hands are steady. My breathing is controlled.
But underneath the discipline, underneath the training and the muscle memory, there's a sound building in my chest. A frequency I've never felt before.
Not rage. Not fear. Older. Something that predates language.
The sound a man makes when the only thing that matters is on the other side of a door.
I walk down the corridor. Past the bodies. Past the shell casings and the blood and the cracked plaster. Claudio falls in behind me, covering our six, but I've stopped thinking about threats. I've stopped thinking about anything except the door at the end of the hall.
Steel. Locked. A dead man is slumped against the wall beside it. The heavy guard, based on his build. Claudio's work, from the angle. There's a second body a few feet away. Lighter. Younger. A hole in his chest and a look of surprise frozen on his face.
I crouch beside the heavy guard and search his pockets. Keys. A ring with three on it. I try the first. Wrong. The second.
The lock clicks.
My hand rests on the handle. For one fraction of a second, one tiny sliver of time between heartbeats, I'm afraid.
Not of what's behind this door. Of what I'll become if she's not there.
If they moved her. If I'm too late. If I fought through fourteen men and three floors and my own organization's orders and she's gone.
I push the door open.
She's standing against the wall beside the doorframe.
She's holding a broken chair leg raised above her head like a weapon.
Her hair is wild. Her face is bruised, purple and swollen along her left cheekbone.
Her shirt, the one she was wearing this morning, is torn at the collar.
Her wrists are ringed with raw red marks.
She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Her eyes find mine. Wide at first. Scanning me, reading me the way she reads everything. Taking in the blood, the vest, the cracked plate, the rifle, the bodies in the hallway behind me.
Then her hand drops. The chair leg clatters to the concrete floor.
"Who hit you?" The words come out before I can stop them. Quiet. Calm. I don't recognize my own voice.
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me. Who hit you?"
"One of the extraction team. Lorenzo said his name was Luca."
Luca. I file the name into the place where I keep debts. It sits beside the names of the men who killed my sister, beside the face of the man who betrayed Aurelio eight years ago, beside every outstanding balance I've yet to collect. That folder never empties. It only grows.
"Are you hurt?" I ask. "Besides the face."
"Wrists are raw. Nothing serious." She holds them up. The marks are angry, inflamed, but the skin isn't broken. "I'm okay."
I look at her. She looks at me. The hallway behind me is a graveyard.
The building below us is silent except for the distant sound of Emilio clearing the last room on the ground floor.
I'm standing in front of the woman I defied Aurelio for, the woman I slaughtered my way through three floors to reach, and my hands are shaking.
"I found you, love, you’re safe." I say.
She crosses the room in three steps.
Her hands grab the front of my vest, fisting the Kevlar, pulling herself against me.
Her face presses into my chest, and I feel her breath, hot and ragged, soaking through the tactical fabric.
She doesn't cry. Doesn't speak. holds on like I'm the only solid thing in a world that keeps trying to pull the ground out from under her.
My arms close around her. The rifle digs into her back and I shift it aside, pulling the sling over my head and letting the weapon hang from one hand while the other wraps around her shoulders.
My hand finds the back of her neck. That spot.
The one that fits my palm like it was designed for it.
I grip her there, firm, possessive, my thumb pressing into the muscle, and I press my mouth against the top of her head.
"I found you," I say again. Quieter. Into her hair.
"I know." Her voice is muffled against my vest. Small and steady and certain. "I knew you would."
Ten seconds. I give us ten seconds. Then I pull back.
"We need to move. Can you run?"
"Yes."
"Stay behind me. Don't stop for anything. If someone comes at us, get behind the nearest wall and stay down."
She nods. No argument. No questions. She trusts me with her life, and that is a boulder of responsibility on my shoulders, beside the rifle and the vest and the bodies I'm leaving behind.
I take her hand. Lace my fingers through hers and grip hard. She grips back harder.
We move.
Down the corridor, past the bodies, past the shell casings scattered across the grating like brass seeds.
She doesn't look down. Her eyes stay forward, locked on the stairwell, her bare feet silent on the metal floor.
She's cold. I can feel it in her fingers, in the tremors running through her hand.
I want to stop and wrap my jacket around her, but stopping means dying, so we keep moving.
The stairwell. Second floor. Claudio is waiting at the bottom, covering the hallway. He sees Alexandra and nods once. That's it. No words, no reassurance. acknowledgment that the mission objective is secure and we're getting out.
Ground floor. The common area where we started. The bodies are where we left them. The coffee cup is still shattered on the floor. Alexandra's hand tightens in mine as we pass through, but she doesn't slow down.
The storage area. The service door. The night air hits us like cold water, sharp and clean after the gun smoke and blood inside. Alexandra gasps, pulling it into her lungs, and I feel her squeeze my hand.
Emilio is at the corner of the building, rifle up, scanning the street. He sees us and lowers the weapon.
"She good?" he asks.
"She's good," I say.
"Then let's get the fuck out of here."
The SUV is where we left it. Three blocks away, behind the shipping container.
We cover the distance fast, moving through pools of streetlight and stretches of darkness.
Claudio takes point. Emilio covers our rear.
I keep Alexandra beside me, her hand in mine, my body between her and the open street.
At the SUV, I open the back door and help her inside. She slides across the seat, pulling her legs up, and I climb in after her. Claudio takes the wheel. Emilio takes shotgun.
The engine starts. The headlights stay off. We pull away from the curb, smooth and quiet, rolling through the industrial district like we belong here. Like four people driving home from a late dinner.
Not like three killers and the woman they extracted from a building full of dead men.
Alexandra leans against me.
She doesn't ask how many. Doesn't ask about the blood on my hands, the crack in my vest, the bruise that's spreading across my chest beneath the ceramic plate. She presses her face into my shoulder and closes her eyes, and her fingers find mine and hold on.
I wrap my arm around her. Pull her tight against my side. Press my mouth to her hair.
The city slides past the windows. Streetlights and stoplights and the occasional car, normal people living normal lives, oblivious to the violence that happened half a mile from their apartments.
The world keeps turning. It always does.
The blood dries, the shell casings get swept up, and the sun comes up the next morning like nothing happened.
But then it happened.
I defied the man who made me. I walked away from the only life I've ever known. I breached a building with two men and a bag of guns, and I killed everyone who stood between me and the woman sitting beside me. Fourteen men at least. I've lost count and I don't care to find it.
Aurelio will want answers. Marco Castillo will want blood. Whoever sits behind Apex Meridian Holdings will want to regroup, reassess, find another way to neutralize the woman who's dismantling their operation one spreadsheet at a time.
Let them.
I look down at Alexandra. Her eyes are closed.
Her breathing has slowed. She's not asleep, but she's letting herself rest against me with a trust so complete it makes my chest ache.
Her bruised cheek is pressed against my shoulder.
Her raw wrists rest in her lap. Her bare feet are tucked beneath her on the seat.
She fought. I can see it in the torn collar of her shirt, the scratches on her forearms, the set of her jaw even in half-sleep. They came for her and she fought back and bit through a man's glove and made them earn every second of her captivity.
This woman.
This impossible, infuriating, brilliant woman who called me a coward on the first night and has been proving herself right ever since.
I press my lips to her forehead. She stirs, murmurs, I can't hear what she says, and burrows closer.
In my pocket, beside the spare magazine and the folded knife, her hair tie sits like a talisman. I carried it into the building. Carried it through the blood and the gunfire and the hallway of bodies. A black elastic. Worthless. Ordinary.
The most important thing I own.
Claudio catches my eye in the rearview mirror. His expression is unreadable, but there's something in it I haven't seen before. Not approval. Jealousy. Like he's finally seeing wanting he's always longed for but never confirmed.
He looks back at the road without comment.
We drive in silence.
The city gives way to quieter streets. We're not going back to the compound. Not yet. Claudio is driving to the safehouse on the east side, the one only four people know about, the one that exists for exactly this type of situation. Somewhere we can breathe. Somewhere we can stop.
Somewhere I can hold her without the world watching.
Alexandra shifts against me. Her hand finds my chest, palm flat over my heart, and rests there. I feel my pulse beating against her fingers. Fast. Hard. Still running on the fumes of what I did tonight.
But alive.
We're both alive.