Hunted By the Lost Heir (Moretti Dynasty #3)

Sean

The warehouse smells like diesel.

Twelve men in the room. Six on the cash side. Six on the deal side. Two exits behind me. One ahead.

That is the only reason I am still wearing my own face.

The man across from me is Federov. He runs three of Moretti Global's offshore accounts. Tonight, he thinks he is laundering seven million through a shell company that my partner Doyle spent the better part of a year building.

I have read his file twice.

"You're new," Federov says.

He has not looked at me directly yet. That is not nervousness. That is the process. He is deciding whether I am worth the time it takes to remember.

"Filling in. Yegorov's wife went into labor."

"Yegorov has a wife?"

"News to him, too."

A small dry sound from somewhere behind Federov. One of his guys, half a laugh he does not want to admit to. Federov does not turn. But the temperature of the room moves a quarter inch in my direction.

That is the whole game.

Federov gestures at the briefcase on the table. "Show me."

I open it. The cash is real. NYPD does not half-ass props. He runs three random bills through his counter. Watches the numbers come up clean. Finally looks at my face.

For half a second, I think he has made me.

Then he nods. "Welcome to your new job."

We are closing the deal. I am three sentences from the line that triggers the breach. Eight teams stacked at every exit. Captain Sullivan in the surveillance van two blocks south. A long investigation about to become a longer list of convictions.

Then the freight door rolls back up.

The wrong way.

It is the wrong way because nobody triggered it from the inside, which means it is coming from the outside.

Which means the timing is not ours.

A woman walks in.

I see her before I understand why she should not be here. That is the part I will come back to later. When I am trying to figure out the exact second everything burned down.

Dark hair pulled back. Charcoal suit. No jewelry. No logo. A leather portfolio in her left hand. A phone in her right.

She is surprised by exactly one thing in this warehouse. That thing is me.

Quarter-second flicker. Then gone.

She sees me. I see her. Neither of us shows it.

"Mr. Federov." Her voice is even. Pleasant. "I have the closing documents from Mr. Moretti's office. He'd like them executed before the wire goes through."

Federov does not look pleased. He does not look displeased either. He looks like a man recalculating a piece of math he thought he had finished.

She is not supposed to be here.

Federov closes these deals alone. Does not bring lawyers in until after the wire clears. The fact that she is standing in this warehouse right now means somebody at Moretti Global wanted eyes on this exchange specifically.

That somebody is going to be a problem.

She crosses to the table. Sets the portfolio down. Slides it toward Federov without looking at me.

I look at her anyway.

She keeps her hands very still on the edge of the table. Everything above her wrists pretends nothing is wrong.

She is afraid the way someone gets when they have been afraid in worse rooms than this one.

I open my mouth to say the line that ends my career and starts everyone else's worst week.

The back wall of the warehouse gives way.

Not explodes. Opens.

A wall section dropped from outside by people who already knew exactly where the structural points were.

Six men come through the gap.

Not NYPD. The NYPD would be coming through every door at once, screaming, with helicopters overhead. These men carry suppressed weapons. Move unhurriedly. Do this for a living.

They are not here for the cash.

They go straight for her.

I have one full second to make a decision that will ruin my life in three different directions.

I make it.

I move.

The first shooter clears the gap, and I am already inside his arc. I take his weapon hand at the wrist. Drive my elbow into his throat. Feel the cartilage give. His gun comes free. I have it before he hits the floor.

The second shooter is pivoting toward her. I put two rounds in his chest before he gets there.

Federov is screaming in Russian. His men are pulling weapons. The woman has dropped to one knee behind the table. Not panicked. Not frozen. Low and small, the way a person who has done a tactical drill at some point in her life gets low and small.

Something to come back to.

The third shooter is on me before I clear the second body. Bigger than I am. Better trained than the first two. He gets a hand on my throat, and I let him have it.

Letting him have it is the fastest way to break his elbow.

I break his elbow.

He makes a sound that is not quite human and goes down.

The fourth shooter clears the gap and shoots me.

It is a clean hit. Left side, below the ribs. Through and through, probably. The round does not ring my spine. I am still standing.

Pain is information.

The information is that I have ninety seconds before the adrenaline wears off.

I use the ninety seconds.

The fourth shooter goes down with a knee strike, followed by a follow-up that keeps him there. I drop the fifth with the first man's gun. The sixth turns to run. I let him.

I need the lead.

The lead has been hanging back near the gap, weapon trained on her, waiting for his men to finish the job. Older. Steadier. The one who knows why they are here.

I close the distance before he registers that his team is already gone.

He gets one shot off. Wide.

I take his weapon hand. I take his weapon. I put him on the wall.

Up close, I see the tattoo. Inside his wrist, just below the cuff. Black ink. A ship's anchor wrapped in something serpentine. Two letters underneath I do not recognize. Greek alphabet. Σ and what looks like Π.

It means nothing to me yet.

But it will.

"Who sent you."

The lead spits blood onto the floor between us.

He says one word.

"Stavros."

He reaches for the knife at his belt. I take it away from him and use it on him before he uses it on me. He goes down, the way every other man has tonight.

The warehouse goes very quiet.

I stand there for two full seconds.

The pain in my left side announces itself the way pain does when adrenaline starts pulling out of the bloodstream. Hot and wet and real. I am bleeding through my shirt.

Federov is gone. So are most of his men. The two who stayed are dead on the cash side, caught in a crossfire that was not theirs.

The woman is still behind the table.

She is standing now. She is holding something.

It takes me half a second to recognize what.

My service weapon. The actual one. The one I keep in the small-of-the-back holster, I never advertise. She must have pulled it off me when I was working the third shooter. I did not feel it.

That tells me something about her.

She is pointing it at my chest.

Steady. Two-handed grip. Stance like someone showed her once, and she remembered. Not a natural shooter. There is a quarter inch of tension in her shoulders that a natural would not have. But she won't miss me at this range.

We both know it.

I look at her.

She looks at me.

Her face is the calmest thing in this warehouse. That is the part that gets me. I have just put six bodies on the floor. She is looking at me like I am a problem she has to solve before someone makes her solve it the wrong way.

I do not raise my hands. I do not lower the gun I took off the lead.

I stand there bleeding and watch her decide.

"Who sent you?" she says.

"You stole my gun."

"You were busy killing six men."

"That feels judgmental."

For half a second, I think her mouth might move. Not a smile. Something smaller. More dangerous.

Then it’s gone.

Her voice is level when she speaks again. The same quality her hands had on the table. The stillness has teeth.

"Who sent you?"

I think about the answer.

My badge inside the pocket of the jacket I am bleeding through. The months of work I just lost.

They came for her.

She knows it. She is holding my own gun on me while she decides whether I’m part of the problem.

"Tell me before I decide," she says.

She means it.

I start to answer.

I do not know what I would have said. I will think about that later. In a different room. When she is close enough to touch and nowhere to run.

Sirens. Distant. Closing fast.

Her eyes flicker once toward the freight door. Just once. Then back to my face.

I understand, with a clarity that will cost me everything I have built, that she is not going to wait for the police.

She is going to make a decision in the next four seconds. Whatever she decides next, I already know I am not letting her disappear.

I take a step toward her.

She does not warn me.

I take another.

The gun stays where it is. Her finger stays on the trigger.

I close the distance.

I do not stop until the muzzle is against my sternum.

I lift my hand. Slowly. Bleeding through. Empty.

I put it on her throat.

Not to push. Not to grip. To rest.

To tell her I could have ended this and chose not to.

She does not shoot.

Her pulse moves under my fingers, faster than her expression is letting on.

But her face gives me nothing.

I do not press.

I let her have the choice.

Her finger eases on the trigger.

She holsters the gun at the base of her spine without taking her eyes off me.

"Hold still," she says.

She does not wait for me. She is already moving. Charcoal jacket coming off her shoulders in one motion. Folded once down the long way. Then again. Fast hands working without looking.

She crosses to me.

She does not ask. She does not warn me. She wraps the jacket around my waist, tight against the wound. Ties the sleeves once. Twice. Hard enough to make the pain announce itself in a new register.

Her hands are on me. Not to pin. Not to fight. Just holding me together.

She presses the jacket harder against the wound.

Her eyes flick once to the blood on her hands.

She has already calculated how bad this is.

The fact that she is still moving fast tells me the number is ugly.

She does not look at my face.

I look at hers.

She is not breathing right. Shallow at the top of the chest. Her shoulders not moving.

The jacket smells like her.

Warm vanilla. The kind that lives on skin instead of out of a bottle.

I make a note of it. The way a cop does.

I should not be making notes of her.

She finishes the knot.

She pulls back.

"Move," she says.

I move.