28. Demin
DEMIN
Mishka and I are halfway up the armory stairs, the kill bag over my shoulder when the first explosion goes off somewhere on the east side of the compound. The whole stairwell shudders and rumbles, and Mishka looks at me with wide eyes.
"What the fuck?" he mumbles, leaning against the wall.
We both freeze for a second before another blast rattles the walls and then we rush up the steps. My heart surges into my throat, racing wildly as we enter the main floor, bursting out the door.
The flat, hard crack of rifle fire is rolling in from the east wing, and I can hear my own men shouting positions to each other over the top of voices screaming at them in Spanish. The war I've been fighting at a distance for a month has finally come through my front door.
"They're inside," Mishka says, swinging his rifle up.
"My God, Isabela," I mutter, whipping around as two of Solano's men come around the corner from the east doorway at a run.
Both of us lift our weapons, firing down the narrow hall, and two men drop like flies, smearing blood along my wall as they go.
"Listen to where they're pushing. They're not spreading out to take the house.
They're driving in one direction." These fuckers didn't come for me this time.
They came for Octavio, which means they're with Solano.
Mishka starts that way, hearing what I hear too. "The chemist," he says.
"Fuck." It makes sense in an ugly, clean way, because Solano has wanted his chemist back since the night I took him.
A loud frontal push on my compound is exactly the move to make.
It's what I did, and it's effective. But someone told them tonight was the night and they told them exactly where to go.
We move toward the east wing together, hugging the wall as the gunfire swells, and I'm already thinking of how many men I have standing between the basement and a hallway full of Cartel rifles.
Bart comes barreling around the far corner, sliding behind a column for cover while two of my soldiers lay down fire to keep the Spaniards pinned in the stairwell, and he catches my eye across the smoke-thick hall.
"Boss," he shouts, ducking lower as a round chews a chunk out of the plaster near his head. "They breached the kitchen door and the south service entrance at the same time. It's like they fucking knew right when and where to hit."
"How many?" I snarl, pointing the barrel of my weapon up the hallway to unleash a few suppressing rounds.
"Counted maybe fifteen, could be more pushing in behind." He thumbs a fresh clip into his weapon, slamming it home and racking the slide. "They're not touching anything but the route to the basement."
Hearing him confirm it settles the ugly suspicion in my gut—no man finds the patrol gaps on a property like mine without a map drawn from the inside.
I press my back to the wall beside Mishka, breathing hard between volleys, then lean out long enough to put two rounds into a man crossing the open doorway down the hall.
He folds at the knees and pitches forward, rifle clattering across my floor, before I duck back to cover.
"Mishka," I call, gesturing toward the east stairwell with the barrel of my gun. "Take four men and reinforce the basement landing. Do not let a single one of them reach Octavio. If Solano gets his chemist back, we lose every ounce of leverage we've spent a month fighting for."
Mishka shifts his weight to move, already turning to gather the men I named, when Mikhail comes pounding up the corridor from the security wing with a tablet clutched against his chest and his face gone grey.
He runs hunched against the gunfire, ignoring the rounds skipping off the marble around his feet, and throws himself in behind the column beside me with his chest heaving and his eyes wide. Something is very wrong.
"You need to see this," he gasps, fumbling the tablet around in his hands and shoving the screen toward my face. "I was pulling the breach feeds to find their entry points, and I caught it on the side gate camera, Boss. Twenty minutes ago."
Looking down at the screen, I watch a stuttering loop of black-and-white footage playing on repeat, and my heart drops to my feet.
The camera over the service door catches a man steering a woman across the gravel with his hand clamped on the back of her neck, walking her toward a car staged against the far wall with no driver and no plates.
Even in the grainy shadows I know the set of those shoulders and the curve of her body better than I know my own hands.
Sergei is loading Isabela into the back of that car. That bastard! He took her right out from under my nose. The realization freezes every other thought out of my skull.
The assault is the noise. It's the screaming distraction meant to pull my eyes and my guns to the loudest part of the house while the real threat slid out the side door.
"Fuck," I growl. I walked straight into it like a green recruit, leaning into the obvious threat while the true one carried the woman I love out into the dark.
"He drove out the side gate, Boss," Mikhail says, swallowing hard as he kills the loop. "I've been trying to raise Sergei on comms for ten minutes. He's not answering any channel."
"Of course he isn't," I mutter, every ounce of anger in me compressing into the only thing that's ever kept me alive on a night like this. Reaching into my pocket, I drag out my phone and thumb it awake, pulling up the tracking program.
Weeks ago, some animal instinct I couldn't name itched at the back of my neck, and I worked a tracker into the heel of Sergei's boot while he drank himself stupid in one of my guest rooms. Sebastian always had his doubts, and I never did, but right now, I'm glad I followed that gut instinct.
Watching the blue dot bloom to life on the map now, I want to thank whatever paranoid saint put that instinct in me.
"There," I say, turning the screen so Bart and Mishka can both see it, my finger landing on the lone structure squatting in all that emptiness.
"An old warehouse on the outskirts… There's no reason to take her there except to bait me.
" My chest feels like it'll explode any second.
"That's where he's gone, and he knows I'll come… I can't go alone."
Bart studies the map with his jaw working. "Boss, we have a literal war going on here," he says quietly, his voice low under the gunfire. "If we split the men to go get her, we lose both of them."
Sergei knows precisely how this is supposed to run. I'd bet my life that I either put the Bratva ahead of the woman the way my kind always does when the blade is at the throat, or I lose my mind chasing her and leave my house undefended. Either road, he wins.
So I'm going to give him a third road he never planned for.
"The bulk of our men hold here and grind the Cartel down to nothing," I order, shouldering the kill bag and checking my weapon. Mihail's gaze flicks up the hallway nervously. "Mishka, Bart, you're with me. I'm not letting him touch her… And the rest of them can hold Octavio…"
"Boss," Bart protests.
"You heard me," I growl, turning to Mikhail. "What are you standing there for? Go on!" My shout spurs him to action and he races off down the hallway toward the firefight.
Mishka racks his rifle and falls in at my shoulder with a glare settling over his face, and Bart keys his radio to push the rest of the men into a tighter line on the basement before he peels off behind us.
We move out through the smoke and the screaming with the firefight still raging at our backs while the three of us push toward the driveway.
Bart drives as fast as the car will allow, and we coast into the deserted lot, slipping out through a graveyard of rusted skids. Two men are posted at the sagging doors, both smoking cigarettes carelessly, and Bart and I drop them with suppressed rounds before either can lift a weapon.
Inside, the warehouse yawns open into a black cavern broken only by a work light burning somewhere in the back.
I can hear boots on concrete and voices bouncing off the walls.
We stalk through the inner doorway breathing as one animal, then go through it hard.
The darkness detonates into muzzle flashes and screaming.
Sergei brought more men than I counted on, six or seven of them scattered through the dead machinery. The next ninety seconds dissolve into brutality and bloodshed.
A man rushes me out of the shadows to my left and I put three rounds into his chest, watching him stumble backward into a rack of rotted pallets that come down on top of him.
And another comes off a catwalk, firing wildly until Mishka stitches him hip to shoulder and drops him over the railing.
The man drops to the concrete below as Bart takes a man hand to hand near the doorway, driving his knife up under the ribs and twisting it while the man claws uselessly at his arms. He struggles, lowering the body down quietly even as the blood pools across the floor.
I find Sergei standing between two rusted columns with a pistol already coming up, and I close on him before he can use it, driving my shoulder into his ribs so hard, we both slam into the concrete.
The gun skitters away into the darkness, leaving nothing but the two of us grappling in the filth.
His elbow hammers into my already-bruised ribs, lighting my whole side on fire, and my forearm crushes his throat as I bear down with everything I have.
"You're too late," he chokes out, grinning at me through the blood on his teeth. "You're never going to stop this. I'm not the only one inside your walls, Demin. There are more of us, already past your defenses…" My brain can't fathom what I'm hearing.
"But I hired you…"
"And they hired me… Go ahead and kill me. It won't stop what's coming."
Hearing him confirm the rot runs deeper than I thought only hardens the cold thing already living in my chest. He bucks and fights, getting a thumb up under my eye, clawing for the socket, but I drive my knee into his sternum and feel something splinter, riding out his struggle while the fight bleeds slowly out of his limbs.
This is far more merciful than he deserves.
If I had the time, I would cut him apart piece by piece.
"You're dying for no reason, Sergei," I tell him. "We will find and stop the men who are doing this. You should've run when you had the chance."
My hands wrap around his throat, bearing down until his eyes go wide and his grip on me goes weak, then his heels stop drumming the concrete, holding him there long past the point of needing to.
Then I push to my feet, dragging air into lungs that scream with every pull and turn toward the work light where a single chair sits in the center of the floor with a small shape bound to it.
Isabela is straining against the cords with wide eyes and a tear-streaked face, her wrists rubbed raw and bleeding where she's been fighting the restraints.
The sight of her alive cuts straight through my chest. "My God," I grumble as I rush to her side, taking the knife from my boot to cut her free.
The tethers Sergei used have cut into her flesh on all four limbs.
She seems frantic to get away. "Demin," she whimpers, sobbing so hard I barely understand her.
She's waiting for me, desperate to be in my arms, and while I don't ever want to see her this scared again, I love that this is her response.
"I've got you," I tell her, freeing the last loop and catching her as she leans forward off the chair into my chest. "I've got you, Milaya. He's gone. He's never putting his hands on you again."
She sobs into my neck saying my name over and over as I lift her into my arms and turn to find Bart and Mishka walking toward me. They have stern faces but they're unhurried, which means the place is clear and we need to get out of here.
"Call Mikhail… Ask about the chemist," I grunt, holding Isabela tightly to my chest. She clings to me, whimpering things in Spanish I can't quite make out, and Bart nods, taking his phone out.
"Papa," she whines, and I pray to God in heaven that he is out there being merciful somewhere. That whoever the fuck Sergei was working with hasn't managed to take Octavio the way they took her.
I can handle an emotional woman. I can't handle it if she's grieving. I may just purge the whole house if that happens.