SEVENTEEN #2
Rome was already moving toward Cannon, and they threw themselves behind the bumper of the van. They returned fire in short, controlled bursts. Rorke’s voice barked over comms, calling for contact, demanding responses.
He didn’t have time to process any of it. He grabbed Caryssa by the shoulder and shoved her down hard behind a low concrete barrier surrounding the gravel lot. He angled his body over hers, weapon up and tracking the movement of their attackers.
A round sparked off the concrete inches from his head. Caryssa’s scream was drowned by his returning fire. He hit his mark and the shape crumpled to the ground and didn’t get back up.
Caryssa lifted her head.
“Stay down!” he snarled.
The real firefight tore through the next thirty seconds. Younger shouted for position. Townie lay down cover from the side of the building. Rivers shifted and found a new angle, putting two rounds into a masked figure sneaking too close to Rome. The man went down hard.
For one breath, the gunfire stopped.
“Running,” O said, breathless.
“Or regrouping,” Rivers ground out.
He glanced over to check on Caryssa—
And found the space next to him empty.
His heart stopped cold.
“Ryss!” His bellow exploded over the comms and a new spattering of gunfire. “RYSS!”
He caught the motion at the corner of his vision. Too late.
Her small shape was silhouetted against the orange glow of the burning warehouse as she sprinted toward the side door, back into the smoke and the fire and the building that had nearly buried them both five minutes before.
“No!” The word ripped out of him, closer to the raw cry of an animal than language. He abandoned his cover, ignoring the gunfire bursting behind him as every instinct inside him screamed that this was exactly how men died and not caring one goddamn bit.
“Sierra Four, hold position! That’s an order!” Cannon’s sharp, furious tone vibrated in his ear.
He didn’t stop, sprinting after her into the burning building.
And he prayed that he’d reach her before the roof took the woman he loved for good this time.
* * * * *
The heat hit her like she’d charged into a brick wall. Still, she kept going.
She’d ripped through four crates before Reid hauled her out, and the things she’d grabbed—then dropped—were already gone, consumed by the fire.
A ledger. A folder. Something with handwriting that wasn’t Bill’s.
She’d lost them, and that knowledge blazed in her stomach while she’d crouched behind the concrete barrier, ears ringing from gunfire and smoke stinging her raw throat.
Terror for the fight going on around her had kept her pinned flat to the ground for a solid three minutes but getting that information weighed just as heavy.
If it was scorched, none of this meant anything.
Not the danger so many had faced—Jolie and Stina, kidnapped because of whatever they’d overheard.
Phillip, killed at Antonio’s by a man no one could name.
The person who answered that call from Bill, and possibly calling the shots, was still out there, still capable of harming someone else’s family, someone else’s team.
She needed a name, dammit. Concrete evidence to end this instead of just cauterizing one more wound and calling it closed until the next strike.
She needed something from this building.
The wall swam in front of her vision through the heatwaves, but flames had consumed the crates she’d been going through and left a pile of ash.
Her mind screamed against what she was seeing, but from the corner of her eye she saw a flicker. She threw up an arm and coughed into her shirt she’d drawn over her mouth, edging forward.
A flame danced over the glass walls of a cubicle in the back, still intact past the worst of a collapsed section of roof. While the crates had burned in the open, those glass walls shielded anything inside it.
She knew in her gut that the most important paperwork for this operation would be in there.
Hope lit up her whole chest before caution could stop her from moving.
She took off in a dead sprint to the back. In her ear came shouts of her name. Reid, going crazy.
It hurt, hearing him. But she couldn’t stop. Didn’t he know she was doing this for him too?
If she could hand the team something real, proof solid enough to finally close this case…maybe she wouldn’t just be the FBI liaison.
Maybe she’d be an asset to Blackout the way those ladies were for Alpha and Charlie teams.
Caryssa had felt a deep ache to belong building since movie night, mug cakes and self-defense lessons and stolen moments with the man she loved. With it rose a terrifying, reckless hope that there might be a version of this that didn’t end with her getting back on a plane alone.
What she needed to prove her worth might be sitting inside those glass walls.
The building groaned around her as she pushed through the thick smoke. She crouched lower, one arm over her face and adrenaline burning through the fear that threatened to stop her.
The glass walls were scorched black on one side and the ceiling sagged dangerously overhead. She ducked through the open doorway, eyes streaming.
She stopped. Was the smoke playing tricks on her eyes? Was she lacking oxygen?
A figure knelt at the filing cabinets. The person’s back was to her, but he was dressed in full firefighter gear.
Instead of hosing deflagration foam over everything…he was pulling folders out by the fistful and feeding them into a small, contained blaze he’d clearly started himself in a metal trash bin.
Where did he come from?
The fire department couldn’t be here so quickly. No firefighter would be burning evidence instead of putting out the fire.
Unless he was trying to hide something.
She drew her weapon without thought, and her hands were steady despite the roar of her pulse. “FBI! Turn around, hands where I can see them!”
He turned.
The mask obscured his face, making it impossible to ID him.
He didn’t raise his hands.
He raised a gun and fired before she ever processed the threat.
The impact hit her with the force of a truck, punching the air from her lungs, and she was airborne for one endless, silent second before the floor slammed up to meet her.
Pain bloomed white-hot through her shoulder, radiating out in waves that made the burning building around her tilt sideways.
He crossed to her in unhurried steps, gun up. He crouched and ripped the weapon from her weakened grip, then he tossed it aside and leveled his weapon at her forehead.
She should have closed her eyes, but she wasn’t about to make this easier on him. She refused.
If this was the end for her, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of getting her fear as well as her life. She waited, chest heaving. Smoke and heat and pain were the only three things left in this world for her.
She only wished she had more time with Reid.
“I love you,” she tried to say, needing to acknowledge it out loud, but her voice was stolen by the smoke, her throat desiccated.
A shot exploded through the roar of fire.
She flinched, but it was the man who jerked at the impact.
He stumbled back and then turned and bolted through the smoke.
“Ryss!”
Reid’s raw voice cut through everything else.
He was there in an instant, dropping to his knees beside her. “Stay with me. Stay with me. Look at me—”
Her vision started to swim, the edges of the room going soft, but she latched on to his face and held on tight.
She was going to die here. The thought slid into her mind with a distant calm. If she had to go, she was glad—achingly glad—that it was Reid’s face she got to see doing it.
She lifted one trembling hand and cupped his jaw, smearing soot and blood across his stubble.
“I had no choice,” she rasped.
No choice but risking it all to try to stay with the man she loved to the end of the world and back.
His throat worked, his jaw tightening under her palm. “There’s always a choice. And you made the wrong one.”
The same words she’d said to him when she found out he chose Blackout over her were directed back at her, only they lacked the fury she’d meant when she spoke them.
“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I’m so sorry, Reid.”
He pressed hard against her shoulder, applying pressure to the bullet wound. “Just stay with me, Ryss. We’re choosing each other now, goddammit! Do you hear me? Please.”
Smoke curled around them, and the building groaned overhead. Caryssa held on to the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes.
If this was the end, she thought, drifting, at least she’d gotten this.
“Reid. I love you,” she whispered, and then the world tipped sideways and went dark.