Chapter 13
Dubai, present day
Katya
The servers were three floors up and two wings over, buried behind layers of reinforced walls and biometric locks that Revenant believed made them untouchable.
That belief was their first mistake. Their second was letting me see the building schematics before they built the place when I still worked for them.
I’d memorized them in less than a half hour.
In times like these, having a photographic memory came in handy.
I moved at point with Andrei, the two of us taking the lead down the long corridor as the others covered our flanks. Somewhere above us, the commander was barking orders and trying to put a neat little box around something he didn’t understand.
Which was us.
“Left up here,” I said, breath steady despite the adrenaline burning through me. “This main trunk feeds into the core of the building. The server room is behind two security doors down that way.”
My boots slipped slightly on a streak of something dark on the floor—blood, not mine, not ours—and Andrei’s hand shot out to steady me without even looking, fingers snaring my elbow, grip firm and brief.
“You good?” he asked, eyes sharp.
“I’m fine.” I pulled free. “Let’s keep moving.”
We reached the first security checkpoint, a tall steel door with a glowing panel beside it cycling red and blue. There was no keypad, no manual override, just a biometric reader and a curved glass screen waiting for a hand, an eye, and a prayer.
Roman walked right up to it and kicked it.
The door didn’t budge.
“Helpful,” Lev said dryly.
“Just getting acquainted,” Roman replied, rolling his shoulders. “Kara? Katya? One of you want to do something clever, or should I keep flirting with it?”
“Move,” I said, stepping up to the panel. “This system is idiot-proof. It’s not me-proof.”
I pried off the lower cover with the edge of a knife. Inside the panel, lines of fiber and cable pulsed with faint blue light. I found the link I wanted—a narrow connection line leading to a redundantly labeled sub-circuit—and jammed the blade into it, shorting the bridge.
The lights on the panel flickered, cycled once, and went dead.
The lock clunked open. Andrei stepped past both of us and simply shoved the door. It swung inward with a hiss of pressure release.
“It’s almost like I loosened it for you,” I muttered.
He gave me the barest hint of a smile. “You did.” I grinned back.
Behind us, Viktor chuckled. “Everybody gets to be a hero.”
I ignored the way my stomach flipped at the sound of his voice.
After the first door, the hallway narrowed into a short passage lined with thick glass panels.
Behind them, I could see banks of auxiliary equipment, battery backups, cooling systems, and a bunch of other mechanics that hummed and pulsed like the room had a heartbeat.
We paused where we were, assessing the situation.
At the end of the hall, there was another door: solid, gray, heavier than the last one, with two biometric plates and an embedded camera staring down at the entrance to the door.
“We won’t break this one quietly,” Dmitri observed, sliding closer with his gun lowered but ready. “And we’re almost out of time.”
“How many guards would you assign to this room?” Lev asked him.
“Minimum? Two inside,” Dmitri said. “On a night like this?” He listened for a heartbeat. “Double.”
Roman cracked his neck. “Then let’s go say hello.”
“Just wait a second. Stay right there,” Andrei said.
The others moved to the side, crouching and flattening into the recesses of the hall. He walked right into the center of the corridor, hands visible, weapon holstered.
“What are you doing?” I hissed. “Do you have a death wish?”
“Trust me,” he said.
I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it. My instincts screamed at me that this wasn’t right, but then a tiny, almost imperceptible smirk tugged at his mouth.
He looked straight up at the camera in the corner, angled his head, and said, “Hey, I’m lost. Could you buzz me in?”
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the door slid open.
Four guards stepped out, guns halfway raised, faces caught between confusion and suspicion.
Andrei’s smile did a wicked thing. He lifted his empty hands higher. “Thanks. I was worried I’d have to knock.”
The closest guard frowned. “Identify yourself.”
Andrei shrugged. “No.”
The man blinked. “No?”
“I prefer actions to words,” Andrei said.
He moved then, fast and fluid. His elbow caught the first guard across the jaw in one precise snap, sending him stumbling into the wall.
In the same motion, his hand dropped to the man’s sidearm, stripping it clean from the holster.
He pivoted, fired once, a clean shot right into the second guard’s shoulder before the muzzle even leveled fully.
The man hit the wall, gun tumbling from his fingers.
Viktor whistled low. “Little brother has been practicing.”
Dmitri didn’t waste the opening. He raised his gun and fired, dispatching the third guard with a swift, brutal combination of a shot to the knee and another to the head.
Kara, slinking along the wall and apparently unnoticed in the mayhem, swiftly got behind the fourth guard, grabbed his baton off his belt, and cracked it across his head with a satisfying thud. He went down hard.
“Okay,” she said, breathing deeply. “That felt good.”
Roman moved through the half-open door like a storm. “My turn.”
The server room was massive, the ceiling soaring high above long, silver rows of electronics, their bodies blinking with tiny LED lights like a field of mechanical stars.
The noise inside was constant, that faint, low vibration that comes from concentrated, humming power.
It felt like walking into the nerve center of a giant, very angry beast.
There were six more guards inside.
They turned when the door swung open, weapons already halfway raised. Revenant trained their people well. If we’d hesitated, we would’ve been minced.
We didn’t hesitate.
Lev moved and took the left flank. A single shot to the first guard’s chest. A second shot to the next one’s shoulder, crippling him. Clean, efficient violence. Nothing wasted.
Roman barreled straight through the center, gunfire answering the guards’ bullets.
He moved with that reckless, infuriating grace that said he trusted everyone else to clean up whatever he broke.
His shoulder clipped a rack, he ducked under a shot that should have taken his head off, and he threw his weight into a full-body tackle that sent one of Revenant’s men crashing into a server cluster hard enough to knock systems loose.
Dmitri stayed a step back, every shot he took deliberately calculated and remarkably accurate.
Kara slid in behind the nearest server bank, using it as cover, popping up just far enough to fire and drop a guard who’d aimed at Dmitri’s exposed side. Her face was pale, streaked with sweat, but her hands were steady.
Viktor passed me at a run, grabbed hold of a guard trying to flank us, and slammed his face into the edge of a console with enough force to shatter plastic and bone. He leaned close as the man slumped. “Tell your commander that’s for the grenade, sweetheart.”
I took the last guard. He saw me coming and fired wildly, the bullet grazing my arm. I swallowed the pain—I’d had worse—and put a knife in his groin, wrenching it sideways as he dropped. Then I slammed his head sideways into the floor and took his keycard.
I took a breath as it all went quiet.
The room was ours.
For the moment.
Breathing hard, I scanned the rows. These towers were Revenant’s real treasures, more valuable than any cell or gun. Their operations. Their secrets. Their deals. The proof they existed where they swore that they didn’t.
And tonight, we were going to ruin them.
“Can you handle this?” Dmitri asked, eyes on me.
“Yes,” I said, already moving toward the central control console. I’d always been good at coding and computers, much more than enough to be considered dangerous.
The main interface was a curved bank of screens and keyboards situated at the far end of the room, slightly elevated.
It pulsed with lines of code and layered security prompts.
I slid into the chair, fingers moving on instinct.
It was almost muscle memory, after all those late nights being indoctrinated into Revenant’s systems.
They thought they’d taught me enough to serve them.
They’d taught me enough to destroy them.
I got to work.
My fingers flew, bypassing the first shells of security one after another. Some of the old exploits I knew no longer worked; someone had already patched them. I worked around them, digging into deeper, more delicate places.
“Andrei?” I called.
“Yeah?” he answered, moving between windows, watching the entrances.
“Get ready to move us the second this goes sideways.”
“Already planning it.”
Lev paced the far wall, checking for alternative exits we could use. Roman watched the main door, gun ready. Dmitri’s gaze alternated between us and the hallway, mind undoubtedly calculating angles of attack should it prove necessary.
Viktor planted himself near the door with Roman, rifle relaxed in his hands but his posture anything but. When he caught me looking, he flashed a tiny, crooked smile that made my core twist tight.
Eyes on the screen, Katya. No time to indulge in fantasy right now…
“Katya?” Dmitri called out. “Can you handle it?”
“Yes,” I said, fingers flying across the keys. “Just buy me a couple minutes.”
Andrei stepped beside me, shoulder brushing mine.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
“I need everyone to shut up for thirty seconds,” I muttered. “I’m doing brain surgery.”
The interface flickered, fighting me. Their security systems locked file after file as I pried them open.
I typed command after command—simple ones, nothing fancy—navigating directly to the encrypted stores I knew existed but were never meant to touch again.
“Explain this in terms I can actually follow,” Kara called.