Syd drew out the gun, fingers flexing on the grip as she aimed at the doorknob, then reconsidered, shifted the barrel toward the hinges on the other side.
The shot echoed, deafening, against the tile and marble, hard surfaces reflecting it back at an earsplitting level.
Sydney fired twice more, then threw her weight into the door again, felt the hinges break, the wood swing free.
And she was out.
XV
THE LAST EVENING
EON
THE white halls stretched in a strange tableau.
Soldiers kneeling at corners, and frozen mid-stride in halls. A woman on fire, the flames licking at the soldiers trying to approach. A man on his knees on the ground, arms being wrenched behind him. Clouds of gas lit by the red strobe of the emergency lights.
And weaving through the scenes, Victor and Dom, making their way out of EON. It was slow, agonizingly slow, the air dragging like water at their arms and legs, and Victor holding Dom’s sleeve like a blind man—and in some ways, he was blind, blind to the path through the maze.
And then Dominic dropped.
There was no warning. Not even a stumble.
He simply sank to the floor.
Victor knelt too—it was that or let go—but as Dom’s back came to rest against the wall, Victor saw the front of his uniform, black on black, but shining wet.
The bullets had torn tidy, coin-sized holes.
The shootout in the hall. In that brief instant, when Dom had surged out of the shadows and before he’d pulled them back—
“You fool,” muttered Victor, soundlessly.
He pressed his hand against the wound, felt the shirt soaked through with blood. How Dominic had stayed on his feet so long, Victor didn’t know.
Dom shuddered, as if cold, so Victor severed his nerves, and said, “Get up.”
But Dominic couldn’t hear him.
“Get up,” he mouthed again.
This time Dominic tried, rose a couple of inches, only to slip back to the floor. His mouth moved, the words lost, but Victor understood.
Sorry.
“Sorry,” said the ex-soldier—and Victor realized that he could hear Dominic’s voice this time. The shadows were crumbling around them, color and life sweeping in through the cracks. Victor tensed, tightened his hold on Dominic’s arm. But it wasn’t his grip that was slipping.
It was Dom’s.
“Hold on,” ordered Victor, but Dom’s head lolled to the side, and the colorless, soundless space between time collapsed back into chaos and noise, gas and gunfire.
Blood slicked Victor’s palms, streaked the floor, stretched behind them in a vivid breadcrumb trail, shockingly red against the sterile white surfaces.
Victor started to draw Dominic to his feet, but the ex-soldier was dead weight now, his skin gray, waxy, his eyes open, but unseeing. Victor let go, easing the body back against the wall as soldiers barreled around the corner.
This time Victor moved first.
No hesitation, no calculation, just blunt and brutal force.
He dropped them like stones in deep water.
Victor stepped over their limp bodies.
The facility’s front doors came into sight, one long, empty hall standing between him and freedom.
And then a soldier stepped through the wall in front of him.
There was no sliding door, no hidden hall. She came straight out of the wall, as if it were an open door. She stood before him, unmasked, dark eyes sharp and a cattle prod hanging from one hand.
An EO, working for EON.
Victor didn’t have time to be surprised.
The soldier lunged for him, blue light crackling across the top of the baton. Victor leapt backward, reaching for her nerves, but before he could get a grip on them, she cut sideways, vanished again through the wall.
An instant later, she was behind him.
Victor spun, catching her wrist just before the electric baton found bare skin.
“You’re troublesome,” he said, the words swallowed up by the wailing alarms.
He wrenched her nerves, and the soldier gasped in pain, but didn’t crumple.
Instead, she slammed her boot into Victor’s wounded side.
He went down hard on the white floor, and she was on top of him—or would have been, if his hand hadn’t shot out at the last second, dragging her body to a stop.
The soldier fought his hold, even as he forced her hand to turn the cattle prod back on herself. Her eyes narrowed in concentration as her will warred with his, but Eli was loose, and Sydney was lost, and those two things made Victor immovable.
He flexed one hand, drove it toward his chest, and in a mirror motion, the soldier drove the cattle prod into her own.
Blue light, the crackle of energy, and the EO collapsed, unconscious.
Victor rose, swept around her body to the wide glass doors. But they didn’t open.
There was no escape.
* * *
MITCH didn’t know what to do.
His car idled a hundred feet beyond the high metal gates of the EON complex as the rain turned from a drizzle to a downpour.
He sat behind the wheel, now jury-rigging the butler’s small black box to hack the gate’s frequency instead of tracking signals. That would get him closer to the building, but it still didn’t answer the problem of how he was going to get in, or rather, how he was going to get Victor out. Or even where to start looking for him.
There was a guard in a security booth inside the gate, and who knew how many officers inside the building, and it would take a hell of a lot more than a smartphone and a hacking fob to crack the security around a place like EON. Which meant, if Mitch was getting in, he’d have to use force.
He was still wracking his brain for the best of several bad plans when the rain eased a little, enough for Mitch to make out the building’s front doors—and the distinctive figure standing just beyond them.
Victor.
Mitch hit the button on the black box, and the gates to EON began to slide open. He gunned the engine and shifted into drive, tires skidding in the rain before lurching forward through the gate, and straight toward EON.
Victor leapt out of the way just before Mitch crashed his car through the front doors. The glass, reinforced as it was, didn’t shatter, but it did buckle, bow, and as Mitch reversed the car, Victor was able to pry the doors open and slip through.
He threw himself into the front seat.
Mitch’s foot was already on the gas.
The guard from the security tower was running toward them, but Victor flicked his hand, as if the soldier were only a bug, a nuisance, and the other man collapsed.
Mitch’s car, its front end a mess of crumpled metal, barreled through the open gate and drove away.
He checked the rearview mirror—nobody was behind them, not yet. He glanced sideways at Victor.
“That’s a lot of blood.”
“Most of it is Dominic’s,” replied Victor grimly.
Confusion washed over Mitch. He didn’t want to ask. Didn’t really need to. The only answer that mattered was in Victor’s eyes as they avoided his.
“Where’s Sydney?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You drop me off,” said Victor, “and you find her, and then you get the hell out of this city.”
“Drop you off where?”
Victor pulled the invitation from his back pocket. It was crumpled, and bloodstained, but the gold lettering on the front was clear.
“The Old Courthouse.”
XVI
THE LAST EVENING
DOWNTOWN MERIT
THE rain was finally easing by the time Marcella stepped outside.
Three cars sat idling on the curb ahead, one elegant black town car flanked by two SUVs. The security detail swept around them, four men in crisp black suits, raised umbrellas masking them from sight.
Marcella wasn’t taking any chances.
Stell would be getting desperate, and desperate men did reckless things.
They reached the sedan, and Jonathan held open her door. When he wasn’t wallowing, he could be quite a gentleman.
Marcella slid into the backseat, and noticed she wasn’t alone. A man sat across from her, tan and elegant in a pale gray suit. He was staring out the window, and sulking profoundly.
“Well?” asked Marcella. “Did you get to her in time?”
The man nodded, and spoke in that familiar lilt. “It was a near thing,” said June, “but I did.”
“Good,” said Marcella briskly. “You’ll bring her to me, of course, when this is done.”
June’s borrowed eyes flicked sideways, but when she spoke, her voice was steady. “Of course.”
Jonathan climbed in on the other side. Marcella had no trouble seeing June behind her many faces—but Jonathan jumped a little at the sight of a stranger.
“Johnny boy,” cooed June. “Rest easy, now, the prodigal EO has returned to the fold.”
Marcella considered June. “Is that what you’re wearing?”
The man’s mouth tugged into a wry smile. “Am I too pretty?” And just like that, he vanished, smooth, high cheekbones replaced by a bag lady with a hooked nose. “Is this better?”
Marcella rolled her eyes, glad to see June restored to her usual humor.
“Surely,” she said, “there’s a happy medium.”
June gave a dramatic sigh and dissolved into a middle-aged man with a groomed mustache and an attractive, if mildly forgettable face. “Better?”
“Much,” said Marcella.
June gave her a sweeping look. “You look like Snow White killed the queen and stole the mirror.”