Chapter 31 #2
I need to get closer. There’s a laptop on the table in front of the nervous man, and I can see him pulling up files, showing Kozlov something on the screen. Shipping manifests, maybe. Records. If I can get access to that data—
“Bayo,” I whisper. “I need to get into that room. There’s a laptop with files I need.”
A pause. “That’s not recon, Mia. That’s a snatch job. Different risk profile.”
“Yeah, I know what it is,” I say testily.
“You’re outnumbered and outgunned. If they spot you—”
“Then I’ll handle it.” I’m already moving, crawling toward the vent cover that will drop me closest to the meeting room. “I didn’t come all this way to leave empty-handed.”
“Mia, abeg.”
“Four minutes, you said. If I call, you come. That’s the deal.”
He grumbles a bunch of barely legible swears in a mix of Yoruba and English. Then he sighs. “Copy that. Be careful.”
“I’ll do my best.”
The vent cover comes free with a soft scrape of metal. I ease it aside and lower myself through the gap, hanging by my fingertips before dropping silently onto a stack of crates.
From here, I can see the meeting more clearly. The laptop is maybe twenty meters away, partially obscured by Kozlov’s bulk. Four guards in the immediate area, plus Marsh and the nervous man. Marsh isn’t armed, at least not visibly, but his men almost certainly are.
I need a distraction.
My eyes scan the space, cataloging options. There’s an electrical panel on the far wall, there’s the fire suppression system. The—
One of Kozlov’s men looks up.
Directly at me.
For one frozen heartbeat, we stare at each other. His eyes widen. His mouth opens.
I shoot him in the throat.
Go time.
The suppressed Glock coughs twice, and he drops without a sound, but the damage is done—the other guards are already turning, already reaching for their weapons, and my cover is blown to absolute shit.
“Contact!” I yell, dropping off the crates as gunfire erupts around me. “I’m made! Multiple hostiles!”
“Extraction en route,” Bayo’s voice crackles. “Four minutes, Mia. Stay alive.”
Four minutes. I can do this.
I roll behind a forklift as bullets splice up the concrete where I was standing. Two guards are advancing on my position, moving with professional coordination. Behind them, I can see Kozlov being bundled toward a back exit while Marsh grabs the laptop.
No. I need that!
I break cover, firing as I move. The first guard takes two rounds to the chest—center mass, body armor, he staggers but doesn’t drop—and I adjust, putting the third round through his left eye. He crumples to the ground.
The second guard is faster than I expected. He’s on me before I can redirect, his hand closing around my gun arm, and suddenly we’re grappling, my back slamming into a support beam hard enough to rattle my teeth.
He’s big, strong, and trained.
But I’m better.
I drop my weight, letting my knees buckle, and as he lurches forward to compensate, I drive my elbow into his throat.
He chokes, grip loosening, and I twist free, pulling one of my knives from its sheath and burying it between his ribs in a single smooth motion.
The blade scrapes against bone as I angle it upward, into the heart.
His eyes go wide, confused, like he can’t quite believe this small woman just killed him.
They never believe it. Not until they’re bleeding out on the floor.
I wrench the knife free and keep moving. Marsh has disappeared through a side door, the laptop with him, but I don’t have time to pursue—two more guards are coming from the east side, and I can hear shouting in Russian from somewhere deeper in the warehouse.
“Bayo, I need an exit and I need it now!” I yell.
“Yes. Okay. Uh, uh…loading dock, fifty meters northeast. Kat’s repositioning.”
I run. I run like hell.
Behind me, bullets spark off metal and punch through cardboard boxes. I return fire over my shoulder—not aiming really, just suppressing—and duck through a gap between shipping containers.
My knife is still in my hand, slick with blood, the Glock has maybe eight rounds left, and somewhere in this labyrinth of crates and shadows, at least six more men want me dead.
I’ve had worse odds.
I think.
“Come out, little mouse.” Kozlov’s voice echoes through the warehouse, distorted by the acoustics. “You think you can escape? This is my house. My territory. You will die here.”
I press my back against a container, controlling my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. My heart is pounding, but my hands are steady. They’re always steady when it matters.
A shadow moves at the edge of my vision.
I spin, knife leading, and catch the guard across the face before he can raise his weapon. He screams, clutching at the ruin of his left eye, and I silence him with a brutal strike to the temple. His skull makes a sound like a cracked egg. He drops.
Sorry, I think, but I’m not. Not really. He was going to kill me. He was working for a man who traffics human beings for experiments. He made his choices, and so have I.
Movement behind me. I whirl—
—too slow—
The blow catches me across the shoulders and sends me sprawling. My knife skitters away across the concrete. I roll, trying to get my feet under me, but a boot comes down on my wrist, pinning my gun hand to the floor.
Kozlov looms over me, his shaved head gleaming in the industrial light. He’s holding a pipe.
This is going to fucking hurt.
“There you are, little mouse,” he says, almost gently. “So much trouble from such a small thing.”
Can I spit on him? Hock a loogey from down here like a fucking Dilophosaurus and hope there’s enough upward trajectory that it gets in his eye?
“Bayo,” I gasp. “I need—”
The pipe comes down.
I twist at the last second, taking the blow on my shoulder instead of my skull.
Pain explodes through my arm, white-hot and nauseating, but I use the impact to roll, wrenching my gun hand free.
I fire twice from the floor—one shot goes wide, the other catches Kozlov in the meat of his thigh—and scramble backward as he roars in fury.
“Suka!” He swings the pipe again, wild this time, and I barely duck under it. “I will break every bone in your—”
I shoot him in the kneecap.
He goes down hard, the pipe clattering away, and for one precious moment I think it’s over. But then his men are flooding in from every direction, at least five of them, and I’m all out of options.
“Kat!” I’m backing toward the loading dock, firing at anything that moves. “Kat, I need you NOW!”
“Thirty seconds!”
I don’t have thirty seconds!
The first guard reaches me and I meet him with a front kick that sends him staggering, following up with a palm strike to the nose that sprays blood.
The second comes from my left and I duck his swing, driving my knee into his groin, then slamming his head into the nearest crate when he doubles over.
But there are too many. There are too fucking many and there’s only one me.
I’m not going to make it. I’m going to die here.
Keep going, keep fighting.
But a fist connects with my jaw and the world tilts sideways in an explosion of razor blade stars. I stagger, tasting copper, and someone grabs my arm—wrenching it behind my back, spinning me, and suddenly I’m on my knees with a gun pressed to the back of my skull.
“Enough!” Kozlov limps toward me, one hand pressing down and alternating between his bleeding knee and his thigh, his face twisted with rage. “You kill my men. You come into my house. Now you die like a dog.”
“Mia!” Bayo’s voice is frantic in my ear. “Kat’s still three minutes out! Can you hold?”
What happened to thirty seconds? I want to ask but I can’t find the words.
My shoulder is on fire. My jaw feels like it’s been hit with a hammer.
There’s blood in my mouth and blood on my hands and the cold barrel of a gun digging into the base of my skull.
I count the bodies around me—three down, maybe four—but there are still too many standing.
Too many guns. Too many ways this ends with me dead on a warehouse floor in Brooklyn, another NOC who got too close to something too big.
I failed.
“Any last words?” Kozlov asks. He’s enjoying this now, the sick bastard. His men are closing in, forming a loose circle, wolves around wounded prey. “Any message for your people?”
I could tell him to go fuck himself, spit in his face, try one last desperate move, knowing it would only buy me seconds at best.
Instead, I force myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way I was taught. The way I’ve done a hundred times before when death was close enough to taste. At least if he kills me now, I’ll be spared from the worst that they can do.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice steadier than it has any right to be. “Tell them I was still fighting.”
Kozlov laughs. That gravel-in-cement-mixer sound. “Fighting. You are on your knees, little mouse. No more fighting. You are finished.”
He’s right. I know he’s right.
But I also know something he doesn’t.
That I’m not the only predator in this warehouse.
I’ve spent my whole life learning to sense things that don’t want to be sensed and right now, in this warehouse full of killers, someone else is here.
Someone watching.
Someone waiting.
Kat? That better be you.