Chapter 45
Pav didn’t remember crossing the last three steps.
One moment Harper was above him on the landing, pale and bloody in the pulse of failing lights, one hand locked around the wrist of a terrified girl. The next his hand was along the line of her jaw, tipping her face toward the light.
Pupils even. Bruising and cuts to her lips. Zip-tie abrasions circling both wrists, raw and angry against her skin. Her injuries stripped every unnecessary thought out of him.
Later.
He buried his reaction before it became a liability. She was warm beneath his hand.
Breathing.
Alive.
She’d moved toward him with nine women behind her.
“Harper.” His fingers tightened once at the back of her neck, against the softness of her hair. Then he let go.
The question he wanted had no place here.
“Can you run?”
His gaze traveled along the line of women—barefoot, shaking, exhausted, held together by terror and will.
One barely standing and another younger than the rest with a stuffed rabbit crushed to her chest. The last one at the rear held a handgun with the expression of a woman who’d already decided she was willing to use it.
Harper’s eyes met his, too bright. “Yes.”
He believed her because he had to. And because she was Harper.
Harper pointed. “Olga helped me get the others out.”
Olga met his gaze without flinching, and she gave him the smallest nod. Pav flexed his aching fingers around the rifle grip. The extraction had evolved again.
Harper’s shoulders squared as if waiting for him to argue, to tell her no, that the odds had changed and they were leaving the others behind.
“Stay close.” Then he turned and moved.
His comms shrieked. Fox cursing as gunshots cracked twice in disciplined rhythm, followed by a dull concussive thump.
“A bit tied up on my end.” Zak’s voice rumbled over the comms, breathless but controlled. “Be there in a tick.”
Pav turned back, taking the route he'd used to reach the upper floor.
Gunfire exploded below. The stairwell became a funnel in his head. One way in. One way out. Too many civilians.
He changed course immediately and pointed down the opposite corridor with his rifle. “Other way.”
The women pivoted with him as he headed down the parallel corridor. Old classroom doors stood open on either side, their interiors stripped to broken desks and stacked mattresses.
Behind him, Harper kept the women together. She spoke in Russian, giving simple instructions. No shouting. Keep moving. Help her. Don’t look.
She wasn’t waiting to be saved. She never had been.
A guard burst from a classroom twenty feet ahead, his rifle still coming up.
Pav fired once.
The shot punched the man back into the doorframe, and before the body hit the floor, Pav was stepping past him, scanning left, right, above. The women cried out behind him, ragged, involuntary whimpers that died almost immediately beneath Harper’s voice.
“Keep moving,” she said. “Don’t stop.”
Even now, she was thinking about everyone else. His jaw locked, pain blazing along the hinge.
The stairs down were half-blocked by a collapsed shelving unit someone had dragged across the landing, maybe years ago, maybe ten minutes ago.
Pav hooked a hand through the metal frame and hauled it aside far enough to create a gap.
Pain took his shoulder joint apart for one hot second. He bulldozed through it.
“Eyes on me.” He beckoned for them to follow through the gap.
On the other side, he waited until all the women were through. They were on the ground floor now.
A breeze threaded through the smoke from somewhere ahead, carrying snow and diesel and the metallic promise of outside.
Hope moved through the group like a dangerous thing.
Shoulders rising. Breaths catching. One woman muttered something that might have been a prayer.
Another began to cry again, but softer now, as if her body had decided tears were possible because the world might contain more than concrete and locks.
Pav hated hope in active zones. It made people faster than their judgment. Made them lift their heads too early, break formation, and run toward light before the threat was over.
Hope got people killed.
“Slow.” He made a dampening motion with one hand.
The women obeyed, and for that he was grateful. The service corridor opened ahead.
Beyond it, through the broken pane in the rear exit door, the yard stretched white beneath the moon. Trodden snow. A line of vehicles near the loading bay. The outer wall beyond.
Almost there.
Fox came over Pav’s earpiece. “South route clear. Gate control in ninety.”
“Extraction profile changed. Multiple civilians,” Pav said.
“Always adopting strays, Morozov? Copy that. Fox out.”
Ninety seconds was doable. And yet the hair on his forearms lifted. Training, not instinct—his body reading what his brain hadn’t caught up to yet. The yard was wrong. Too quiet. Too empty where there should have been chaos.
Angry shouts came from behind in the corridor. Men were converging; the pursuit was closing. Forward carried risk. Back guaranteed contact.
He waved the women through. “Move.”
Harper’s hand brushed the back of his jacket as she helped Lena over scattered chairs. The brief touch did more damage than the firefight. He locked it away as he reached the exit and cracked the door.
Left. Right. Blind angle by the service wall. No movement on the south side. Fox had done his job. Zak’s route was open.
A generator thudded unevenly somewhere behind them, coughing through the compound’s failing power. The yard stretched, bathed in moonlight, the guard tower empty.
Empty tower. Open yard. No panic movement. This wasn’t bad luck. It was design. Pav slowed.
Harper bumped up against him. “What?”
This wasn’t escape. It was channeling.
He pressed on her shoulder. “Down.”
Floodlights ignited. Light crashed across the yard, erasing depth and shadow.
Snow became glare, and the women’s silhouettes were caught in the open doorway.
Nowhere to hide. Screams broke out behind him.
Hands flew up to cover eyes. Olga swore and raised the stolen gun, but there was nowhere to aim.
Pav drove Harper back against the wall with his body before she could step into the light.
A static crackle came from old speakers mounted high beneath the eaves. Then a voice. “Harper Fox. At last. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Harper stilled beneath his hand, but a hiccup of breath escaped her.
He glanced back. Her face had gone somewhere he hadn’t seen before. Something quiet and worse than fear.
Pav’s blood iced.
The killbox had snapped shut.