CHAPTER 17
MARGARITA
I lean my forehead against the freezing, damp concrete.
Just seconds ago, this pitch-black maintenance closet was a pressure cooker of friction, sweat, and the crushing weight of Damon’s body pinning me over a rusted utility sink.
Now the afterglow is wearing off, and the cold is creeping right back into my bones.
I can still feel the phantom pressure of his leather-gloved hand clamped over my mouth.
He didn't just take me in the dark to get off. He hollowed out my panic, replacing my erratic terror with a cold, feral clarity. My biology is completely fucked up for adapting to this psycho’s baseline, but right now, I need his baseline to stay alive.
I grab the hem of my torn scrub top, using the ruined fabric to aggressively wipe the layer of industrial grease and sweat off my neck. My fingers are vibrating. It’s a minor tremor, nothing that would ruin a suture, but enough to piss me off.
"You’re still shaking," Damon says. His voice is a low, gravelly rumble in the dark. I don't need to see him to know exactly what he’s doing. The metallic click and slide of his weapon is unmistakable. He’s checking his magazine by feel alone, methodical and completely unbothered.
"It's the adrenaline, not the fear," I snap back, my voice barely a whisper but laced with enough venom to make the point.
"Good. Fear will get you killed out there."
He moves toward the heavy iron door, a massive shadow detaching from the darkness.
He presses his ear to the steel and goes perfectly still.
He stays like that for nearly a minute. The man is a predator calculating the gaps in a patrol route, operating on a frequency I’m just starting to tune into.
The silence in the room is clinical, broken only by the smell of iron-heavy water dripping from a corroded pipe overhead.
Every time that drop hits the floor, my brain calculates how close the hunting party outside might be.
Damon reaches back without looking. His large hand finds my shoulder, his fingers digging in and squeezing once. It’s a territorial, grounding gesture. I don't flinch. I just match my breathing to his, my lungs falling into the rhythm of his chest expanding and contracting.
"Two of them. Ten yards to the left," he says quietly.
"I can’t see them," I reply, stating the obvious because my vision is utterly useless in this abyss.
"You don’t need to see. You need to move when I move."
He slides the deadbolt back. The slow scrape of metal on metal makes my skin crawl.
We slip out of the closet and into the main subway maintenance tunnel.
The air out here is immediately thicker.
It smells like roasted ozone, ancient concrete dust, and the deep, wet rot of the city above us.
We hug the wall, moving as shadows among shadows.
I keep my hand flat against the back of his tactical vest, using the rigid plates as a physical anchor.
He radiates heat like an engine block. I trust his back more than my own instincts right now, which is a terrifying psychological shift I’ll have to unpack later.
My medical brain is already compartmentalizing, triaging our escape route, scanning the darkness for trip hazards or ambush points.
"Watch the third rail. It’s live," he murmurs over his shoulder.
I roll my eyes in the dark. "I know how to identify a lethal current, Damon."
"Then stay off the tracks until I tell you."
We creep forward until a beam of blinding yellow light suddenly sweeps across the tunnel walls ahead.
Damon immediately grabs my collar and yanks me backward into a recessed alcove carved out for maintenance tools.
We are pressed chest-to-chest, crushed into a space meant for a single worker.
The memory of what we just did in the closet simmers violently between us.
Two mercenaries walk past the alcove. I can smell the cheap tobacco clinging to their clothes and hear the heavy clang of their boots on the steel grates.
I hold my breath until my lungs ache, locking my eyes on the thick column of Damon’s throat.
His pulse is thrumming steadily against his skin.
The audacity of this man’s cardiovascular system.
He isn't breathing fast at all. He is entirely at home in the kill-zone.
"Don't move," he breathes down my neck.
"I'm not."
"Wait for the sweep to pass."
The flashlight beam wavers, catches the far wall, and then disappears down the curve of the tunnel.
The vibration of a distant train hums through the soles of my boots.
Damon steps out of the alcove, leading us forward until the narrow passage abruptly drops off into a massive, cathedral-like cavern where the maintenance lines intersect with the main subway routes.
Four sets of tracks gleam like polished silver ribbons under the flickering blue-ish sparks of a distant transformer.
The cavern is vast, echoing with the drip of water and the whistle of wind being pushed through the tunnels by unseen trains.
I smell burnt hair and grease. Across the fifty-yard expanse of open rail, I see it.
A rusted iron service ladder climbing sixty feet straight up the stone wall toward a ceiling grate.
I adjust the strap of my medical bag. My knuckles are bone-white wrapped around the leather. It’s a wide-open expanse. A perfect kill-zone with absolutely zero cover.
"The ladder is the only way," Damon states flatly.
"It’s too far. We’re targets out there."
"We aren't going to be targets. We're going to be ghosts."
We don't even get five steps out of the shadow before shouts erupt from a concrete platform a hundred yards down the line.
A massive halogen spotlight cuts through the dark, instantly pinning us against the tracks.
I don't even have time to curse before the deafening, staccato roar of automatic rifles tears the cavern apart.
Damon shoves me hard. I hit the oily gravel just as he drags me behind a thick concrete support pillar.
A hail of bullets chips the stone above my head, raining pulverized concrete dust into my hair.
The noise is a physical assault. A stray round ricochets off a steel rail mere inches from my boot.
The sharp ping vibrates straight up my tibia and rattles my teeth.
"Get your head down!" Damon barks, returning fire around the edge of the pillar with his suppressed pistol.
"They have us pinned!" I yell over the gunfire. My mind is already calculating the trajectory of the bullets. The angle is deliberate. The mercenaries are funneling us toward the center tracks.
"They have a line of sight, not the kill," Damon replies, dumping his empty magazine and slamming a fresh one home.
The ground beneath us begins to hum. It’s a low vibration at first, but it escalates rapidly into a bone-deep rumble.
I press my bare hand flat against the steel rail nearest to the pillar.
Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum. The vibration shoots through my palm.
A single, blindingly white eye rounds the curve in the tunnel.
It’s the midnight express, tearing down the track directly in front of our cover at sixty miles per hour.
"Damon, the train!" I scream, the wind in the cavern suddenly whipping into a frenzy as the pressurized air gets pushed ahead of the massive machine.
"I hear it. Wait."
"Wait for what? To be crushed?"
The mercenaries realize exactly what is about to happen. If that train passes between us, they lose their shot. The gunfire doubles in intensity, chewing the edges off our concrete pillar. They’re trying to force us to choose between getting shredded by lead or flattened by steel.
Damon leans his heavy frame into mine, his face inches from my ear so I can hear him over the escalating, deafening shriek of the train’s brakes and the roar of its engine. "We run right in front of it. The second it passes, the shooters lose their line of sight. We move then."
He isn't pitching an idea. He’s stating a law of physics. The timing has to be flawless down to the millisecond. If my boot catches on a rail, I die. If I hesitate, I get shot in the spine.
His fingers dig brutally into my bicep. The grip is so tight I know for a fact it’s going to leave a dark purple bruise in the exact shape of his hand.
"You have to trust me, Margarita."
I look at his dead, cold eyes. There is no panic in him. "I do. Just... don't let go."
"Never."
The blinding white light of the train washes over us, turning the cavern into a glaring, high-exposure photograph. The heat off the engine is suffocating.
"NOW!" Damon bellows.
We burst from behind the pillar. I sprint across the steel rails.
My combat boots slip violently on the oily gravel wedged between the wooden ties.
The train is a towering wall of screaming metal thirty feet away and closing fast. Through the glare of the glass, I catch a split-second glimpse of the driver's face—a pale, distorted mask of absolute terror as he slams the horn.
We leap over the final rail. The massive steel nose of the locomotive blasts past our heels. The sudden vacuum created by the train’s speed catches the heavy fabric of my oversized jacket, violently yanking me backward.
"Keep moving!" Damon roars, his arm wrapping around my waist, physically hauling my momentum forward.
"My legs—I've got it!" I shout back, finding my footing on the far side of the tracks.
"Don't look back!"
We slam hard into the far wall of the cavern. The train is a blur of rusted metal and graffiti hurtling past us mere feet away. The sheer noise of its passage is an impenetrable barrier, effectively shielding us from the shooters on the platform. The screeching wheels drown out the gunfire.
Damon doesn't give my respiratory system a single second to recover. He grabs my shoulder and shoves me toward the rusted service ladder bolted to the wall. He wipes his hand across my face, smearing a streak of wet blood off my cheek. It’s not my blood.
It’s from the throat of the first guard he gutted back in the tunnels.
"The ladder. Move," he orders.
I stare up at the vertical drop. "My hands are shaking too much to climb."
"Use your legs. I'm right behind you."
I grab the bottom iron rung. It is slick with decades of condensation and brittle, biting rust. I pull myself up.
I force my focus into a microscopic tunnel: the next rung, the next heave of my shoulders, the next burning breath in my lungs.
Below me, Damon stands at the base of the ladder, his broad back to the wall, his pistol raised toward the flashing lights of the passing train cars, guarding our blind spot.
"Go! Faster!" he yells over the screeching steel.
"I'm going!"
A jagged flake of rust breaks off the rung above me and falls directly into my left eye. A sharp, stinging pain flares, but I refuse to let go to wipe it. I just aggressively blink the tears away, grinding the grit into the corner of my eye.
"Don't look down."
I hit the small, caged maintenance platform at the top of the sixty-foot climb.
Above me is a heavy, grated iron manhole cover.
I plant my boots on the platform and shove both hands against the underside of the grate.
It doesn't move a millimeter. It’s either locked from the street level or rusted permanently into its housing.
Panic spikes hard in my chest. If this is a dead end, we are sitting ducks in a steel cage.
Damon hauls himself onto the platform beside me. He takes one look at the situation, his face a grim mask of violent determination. He wedges his thick shoulder directly underneath the iron grate. I can see the heavy muscles of his back straining against the fabric of his ruined dress shirt.
"It won't budge," I say, my voice cracking.
"Together. On three," he grunts, planting his feet on the grating. "One. Two. Three!"
I shove upward with everything left in my triceps while Damon drives his entire body weight into the iron. With an agonizing screech of twisting metal and snapping rust, the grate pops off its housing.
I scramble up through the opening, spilling out onto wet asphalt.
The sudden shock of freezing rain hits my face like a slap.
We are out. We are in a narrow, trash-littered alleyway squeezed between two massive, rusted shipping containers.
The air out here is freezing, crisp, and heavy with the smell of industrial salt and dead fish. It’s the shipyard.
Damon hauls himself out of the hole, kicking the heavy iron grate back over the opening and wedging a discarded steel rebar pipe through the crosshatch to lock it.
I fall to my knees on the soaked pavement. My chest is heaving so violently my ribs ache. I open my mouth, just letting the freezing rain hit my tongue to prove to my brain that I’m actually above ground.
"We're out. We're out," I gasp.
"Keep moving. We aren't safe yet," Damon says. His voice is tight. Too tight.
I look up at him. The ambient, flickering orange light from a nearby shipyard crane catches his torso.
The rain is washing the grime off him, revealing a massive, spreading dark stain soaking through the left side of his black shirt.
The violent climb tore the emergency field stitches I put in him an hour ago.
"Damon?" I stand up, immediately dropping back into surgeon mode. "You're bleeding through your shirt."