CoraI sat bolt upright in my crappy cot as soon as I heard the first shot. They taught me a lot of bullshit in the Academy, shit I never ended up using in the real world, but the one thing they gave me was a damn near perfect sense of when a fight had broken out. I jumped out of bed, my body aching from my last night with Zahur, and padded to the door to listen.More gunfire. Mostly automatic. A lot of yelling. Nearly all Arabic. Another fucking thing they didn’t teach me before putting me undercover that would’ve come in fucking handy.One of the other women, a college kid named Allie, crept up to me. “Do you think they’re here to save us?”I looked down at her and tried not to grimace. Her face was all black and blue from a run-in with one of the guards the other day, but she hadn’t even spent time with the fucker holding us all here yet. She’d only got taken a week or two ago. I didn’t want to crush her fucking dreams. But I’d been here for a month and a half, taken for almost a y
TommasoFuck. Fuck. Fuck. I stared down at Zahur’s cackling guard as goosebumps raced across my body. Fucking Mostafa. That two-faced piece of shit had to have ratted on me. He fed Stan, fed all of us, bullshit. And I had fallen right into his goddamn trap. Zahur wasn’t here; Zahur was never going to be here. I had to pretend for everybody else’s sake that I wasn’t the cocky jackass I’d been accusing Zahur of being all along.I shot the guard on the ground just to watch his brains splatter. “Spread out. See if he’s right.”I turned and raced down a hallway I was mostly sure I hadn’t seen before. The fighting, the gunfire melted to the back of my brain. If he wasn’t here, where the fuck was he? We’d told Mostafa about the house we rented for staging, but the piece of shit didn’t know about the hotel. I’d been very clear not to tell him that. Right?Bullets thudded into the wall next to me. I swerved into the nearest room. The pain in my shoulder seemed to be growing, blurring my vision
PaigeI perched on the edge of the couch in the common area, trying to convince myself not to check my phone.“…And then Amalia says, honey, I grew up in Philadelphia. If you think I won’t break your wrist to get the last dahlia on Mother’s Day, you’ve got another thing coming.” Sam grinned at me.I chuckled. He’d been regaling me and the rest of the security team with tales of his wife ever since I returned to the common room, slowly coaxing me away from the window and involving me in the conversation. Amalia seemed like an incredible woman, and I couldn’t wait to meet her when we got home. Maybe she’d want to help out at the shelter.But, like always, the thought of returning home turned my stomach.“I’m gonna go make some more tea.” I stood.Sam held up his mug. “Coffee, if you wouldn’t mind.”I shook my head. “I understand why your wife breaks wrists.”He laughed. “Then, I’ll have tea.”I took his mug with a weak smile and headed for the small kitchenette, slightly walled off from
KillianI slammed into the driver’s seat of one of the rented cars and took off down the street. Carp had proven himself a good guy a handful of times, but Tommaso looked like he was on death’s door. I didn’t know if a good guy would be enough. So I raced through Cairo at night like a bullet, dodging and weaving through the endless traffic. The hotel Paige was staying in was ten minutes away as the crow flew, and I tried to turn the bulky van into that crow.Someone leaned on their horn, and I flipped them off as I jutted through another tiny break in traffic. Diesel poured in through the air conditioner vents, thick enough to cut with a knife. Months ago, I’d been rushing across my city to save Sera, and Tommaso had been there. Now, he needed me. And I always repaid my debts.I screeched around a corner. Especially when I’d been the one to stack the cards against us. I shouldn’t have said a goddamn word about Paige coming with us. Tommaso would still be bleeding out on some Egyptian
PaigeI stared into Sam’s blank, lifeless eyes, just visible past Zahur’s legs through the crack in the cabinet door, and tried not to breathe loudly. Maybe him walking over here was a fluke. Maybe he didn’t know where I was. I huddled smaller in the darkness.“Come out,” he crooned. “I will find you, azizati, but I promise you will find me better mannered if you turn yourself over.”His legs disappeared again, and I exhaled shakily. I had a moment, a second to get myself together. What would Lauren tell me to do? Breathe, obviously. In for three, hold for three—The air gasped out of my lungs as Zahur barked an order in sharp Arabic. Even the sound of the language cast me back to his house. There, guards had yelled to each other constantly, maybe checking positions, maybe just keeping us aware they were there. But somehow, they still managed to sneak up on me sometimes. The muscles in my arm tensed as I remembered the furious grip of one who caught me accidentally wandering too close
TommasoI blinked. The world was black around me.“—twelve ccs of—”“—son of a—”Voices swam in and out of focus. I blinked again. The blackness receded just a little. Night sky above me. No stars, like I was in the city. The fronds of a palm tree leaned into the edge of my vision. Details filtered back in. Cairo. Zahur. I drew in a gasping breathing and choked on the thick scent of diesel in the air.“Doc, he’s—”The world dimmed again. I swam through a nothing space, almost a dream, but it didn’t have any shape. The blackness threatened to swallow me. I fought, not like the man I thought I was when I last opened my eyes, but like the boy I used to be. Kicking, scratching, fighting dirty. No holds barred.When the world grew bright once more, Carp leaned over me. Oh, shit, I was in the middle of a raid. I needed to get up.My legs didn’t react when I moved them. Tied down, then.“Hey, Tommaso, there you are,” Carp said.More pieces clicked into place. The woman with the knife. Killia
PaigeI scrambled for purchase on the plush carpet as Zahur dragged me through the suite by my hair. Pain and fear raced through my body. Oh, God. Rico. Harry. Eddie. Dead. Dead. Dead. My feet slid in their blood.His goons followed us through the suite to the door of the bedroom Tom and I shared. The bastard only paused long enough to kick the door down before grabbing me under my arms and tossing me onto the bed.I tumbled through the air in slow motion. The knife under the back of my bra pressed cold and sharp against my spine. If I landed wrong, it was all over. I was such an idiot. All this fighting, and I was going to die by my own knife.A small, bitter voice in my head suggested that might be better than letting him touch me again.I landed on the mattress on my side. The razor-sharp knife scratched the bare skin of my back, but I barely had time to notice that before Zahur flipped me onto my back and loomed over me.“My little redhead,” he said. “I’ve been dreaming of you.”H
KillianI shot one of Zahur’s men and ducked behind an overturned couch. Either Zahur was even more paranoid than we’d thought, or he was scared of Paige. Four men had been patrolling the hall outside the door to the fucking suite, and there were at least half a dozen behind the door when I’d stormed in. I’d dropped several but lost a few in the suite. Fuck being a crow; I needed something far more dangerous to get to Paige in time. I reloaded my gun and lunged up from behind the couch to sprint for the one open door I’d spotted earlier.Bullets rattled through the hotel room. One of them caught me in the vest like a punch to the fucking chest, and I dropped. My breath wheezed in and out of me. Sera would be furious when she saw the bruise. I grabbed a bloodstained throw pillow off the floor and tossed it up over the couch. More gunfire. But this time, I listened. The windows reverberated. One of them shattered. The quick click of the trigger releasing came from the far corner of the