Chapter 11 Rowan #2
The words are barely out before another round of shots echoes from somewhere closer, followed by the sound of men yelling over each other. And beneath all of it, rising so hard and fast it almost hurts, comes one thought.
Kiren.
I don’t have time to say it out loud. The door flies open so hard it slams against the wall with a metallic crack that seems to split the room in two.
One of the enforcers fills the doorway almost immediately, broad-shouldered and breathing hard, his face damp with sweat despite the cold that has been creeping through the warehouse all night.
Smoke and dust follow him on a rush of air that smells like burned fuel, hot metal, and explosive residue.
Somewhere behind him, men are shouting, their voices colliding into one ugly wall of noise that makes the corridor feel suddenly smaller.
“Move,” he barks, already reaching for me.
I twist back before his hand closes around my arm, but he catches me anyway, his fingers digging hard into my elbow. The force of it jerks me off balance and sends the metal table scraping across the floor when my hip clips the corner.
Lila tries to push off the cot. “No!” she screams.
The word tears out of her with more force than I’ve heard from her in hours, but the enforcer barely glances at her. His attention stays fixed on me as he drags me toward the open doorway.
“She stays,” he snaps.
I dig my heels into the concrete. It buys me almost nothing.
My shoulder slams into the frame as he hauls me into the corridor, pain flashing down my arm before the adrenaline swallows it.
Behind me, I hear Lila trying to move faster than her body can manage, the uneven stumble of her steps followed by a sharp inhale when the wound in her side catches up with her.
“Rowan!” she cries.
I twist hard enough to look back once. She’s halfway off the cot, one hand gripping the mattress while the other presses against her bandage as blood begins to seep through it again. The enforcer yanks my arm again before I can say anything to her.
The corridor outside is chaos. The stillness from earlier is gone, replaced by smoke, echoing gunfire, and men running in both directions with weapons drawn.
The overhead lights stutter in uneven pulses, turning the hall into a sequence of harsh brightness and shadow.
Dust hangs in the air thick enough to catch in my throat.
Somewhere nearby, an alarm has started, not a shrill siren but a low mechanical pulse that blares through the warehouse in repetitive bursts.
The enforcer drags me forward so quickly that my boots skid on the concrete more than once. I can smell him now; sweat, gun oil, stale cigarettes, and the bitter tang of panic he can’t quite hide. His breathing is rough, and his grip is rougher.
“This way,” another man shouts from farther ahead.
“Move the vehicles!”
“Where’s Ivan?”
No one answers that.
The corridor opens into the warehouse, and the scale of the chaos hits all at once.
The place looks completely different from the loading bay where Maria died, even though it’s the same building, the same cold industrial skeleton that has already seen too much violence.
Men are moving between the rows of storage pallets, some crouched behind cover, some already down on the floor and not getting back up. Shell casings skitter across the floor. The smell of hot metal and burned powder is so thick it coats the back of my tongue.
My captor drags me farther into the open and then, without warning, shoves me down. My knees hit the concrete hard enough to send pain straight up my legs. Before I can recover, the muzzle of a gun presses against the side of my head.
The steel is cold against my temple, and for one suspended second, everything inside me goes still. Not calm, but alert with awareness that comes when the body understands before the mind does that one wrong movement could be the last one.
“Back off!” the enforcer shouts, his voice cracking hard enough to reveal how close fear is riding underneath it. “Everybody back the fuck off!”
The warehouse doesn’t go silent exactly, but the noise around me rearranges itself. Gunfire farther off. Men shouting new commands. Footsteps scattering around the edges of my vision. The pulse of the alarm. The rough drag of the enforcer’s breathing above me.
And then I see him.
Kiren.
He appears through the haze and broken light, coat open, weapon in his hand, every part of him focused and controlled.
Two of his men move near the crate row to his right while more spread out behind him with quiet coordination, nothing like the frantic scrambling of the enforcers still trying to hold the warehouse together.
He sees me and stops. The gun at my head forces him to hold still while the man behind me presses close enough that his knee nearly touches my shoulder.
Every instinct in Kiren’s body must be telling him to pull the trigger anyway.
I can see it in the way his grip tightens on the weapon, in the tension building through his shoulders beneath the coat, and in the hard concentration that takes hold of his face.
“Drop it!” the enforcer screams.
Kiren doesn’t move.
Men are still fighting around us. I hear another burst of gunfire from somewhere to the left, followed by someone collapsing hard enough to echo through the warehouse. One of Kiren’s men returns fire from behind a stack of crates. Another shouts something in Russian that I don’t understand.
But Kiren’s attention never leaves me.
The enforcer presses the gun harder against my temple, enough that the pressure begins to ache.
“Blyat! I’ll do it!” he yells.
His voice breaks on the last word. And that tells me what I need to know.
He’s frightened. He’s not in control of this room.
He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at Kiren, the men closing in around him, and the certainty that whatever happens next ends badly for him unless he forces something desperate into existence.
Kiren sees it, too. He senses the same fear I do, which means he knows this man might fire by accident before he fires on purpose.
My pulse pounds against the barrel at my head.
Think.
The command comes hard and clear through the panic trying to rise inside me.
Think Rowan.
The floor beneath my knees is littered with warehouse debris, little things I only half notice at first because most of my attention is fixed on the gun, the hand holding it, the angle of Kiren’s weapon, and the distance between us.
There’s dust. Splintered wood. A broken plastic strap.
A metal bracket snapped off something larger.
And just beyond my right hand, almost completely hidden beneath a smear of grime and tracked-in slush, a length of rusted pipe no longer than my forearm.
The enforcer is still shouting, and Kiren still hasn’t fired. He won’t, not while I’m like this. The realization comes with sudden clarity. If anything changes here, it will have to be because I change it.
My right hand inches across the floor. The enforcer doesn’t notice. His entire focus is forward, fixed on Kiren and the men positioned behind him.
“Tell them to back up!” he demands.
Kiren’s eyes are on me now in a way that tells me he sees the movement, or maybe only the intent behind it. He gives me nothing outwardly. No warning or instruction. But something in his face changes by a degree so small I could miss it if I didn’t know him.
He understands.
The pipe is cold when my fingers close around it. It leaves rust on my palm.
I don’t let myself think past the next second. If I think too far, I won’t do it at all. I draw in one breath, adjust my weight just enough to give my arm room, and then drive the jagged end of the pipe down and back with everything I have.
The sharp metal punches through the leather of the enforcer’s boot and into his foot. A blood-curdling scream rips from him as his body folds in on instinct, the gun jerking away from my head.
Kiren fires.
The shot cracks through the warehouse so close to me that my ears ring instantly. Warmth splashes across the side of my face. The enforcer falls backward, his grip vanishing from my arm at the same time his body hits the floor.
For one strange second, the whole world narrows to sound and motion as the gun skitters across the concrete, my breath tears in and out of my lungs, and the pipe falls from my hand.
Then Kiren is in front of me. He drops to one knee so fast I almost don’t see it happen before his hands are on me, one at my shoulder and the other against the side of my face, checking, searching, making sure I’m still alive.
His eyes move over me in a quick, ruthless sweep, taking in every mark, every place the blood might belong to me instead of someone else.
“Rowan.”
He doesn’t raise his voice, but hearing my name in his mouth like that, low and raw and stripped of everything except urgency, does something to me I can’t think about right now.
“I’m here,” I breathe.
The answer barely makes it out before he pulls me up from the floor and into him with a force that almost undoes me.
His hand presses against the back of my head, fingers sliding into the loose strands that have fallen free, and for one dangerous second, the warehouse, the smoke, the bodies, the gunfire, all of it falls away beneath the simple fact of him being real and solid and here.
He draws back just enough to look at me again, one hand still at the side of my neck as if he doesn’t trust the world not to rip me away if he lets go.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” The answer comes too fast.
His eyes narrow slightly, and he sweeps one more look over me.
“Rowan.”
“I’m not,” I insist, holding his wrist for a second because I need him to hear what matters first. “Lila is still in the room.”
That reaches him. His expression changes immediately, not softer or calmer, but redirecting. His head turns toward the corridor while he keeps one arm around me.
“She’s alive?”