Massacre

Ace's Pov The four guards at the main entrance moved first. They were trained and they were fast and they had a direct line to me from the back of the room. I did not wait for them to close the distance. I fired twice at the ceiling. The sound in an enclosed space at that volume did exactly what I needed it to do. Everyone in the chair rows dropped or scrambled. The guards broke their direct line to avoid the panicking civilians. Don Caruso had not moved. He was standing at the right side of the ceremony space and looking at me with an expression that had shifted from satisfaction to calculation. "This accomplishes nothing," he said. "It accomplishes quite a lot actually. It buys me time. It buys me leverage, it shows every person in this room that your control is not absolute. Where are the twins."

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Chaos Exit

Ivan's Pov The chaos started at the front of the property and gave us exactly the window we needed. Nikolai heard the shots first. He was working the binding on his right wrist when the first volley hit the front of the building above us and the guard outside the fourth room door moved toward the corridor to respond. One guard instead of two. The door was the only problem left. Nikolai looked at me across the room. I had my left arm partially free from the binding they had put on after the recapture. My ribs were worse than the previous session had made them. I did not say anything about either. I worked my left arm free in forty seconds. The door lock was a standard key mechanism. The guards had been sloppy about it because they had already taken us once and assumed the same approach would hold. Nikolai had been assessing the door since we arri

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Warehouse

Nikolai's Pov The warehouse was a disused commercial facility on the north end of the city. Rem had sourced it eight weeks ago as a contingency location. No digital footprint. No Caruso connection. No federal surveillance history. We got inside and Rem sealed the entrance and killed the exterior lights and we moved to the inner room. Ace sat on a crate and I sat across from him and Ivan went to work on the shoulder with the medical kit from the vehicle. The bullet was in the outer deltoid and had not gone deep and Ivan had it out in six minutes with Ace making no sound at all through the process. "You could react," Ivan said, pressing the dressing. "It would be normal after everything." "I am reacting internally," Ace said. "That is enough for me right now." "That is not helpful to either of us. We need to know where the pain stands."&nb

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Father

Ace's Pov Calloway stopped the broadcast within three minutes of my call. He sent a location through the relay at four in the morning. A neutral building on the west side. A private office space registered to a shell company that Rem verified had no Caruso or Bratva connections. I told Ivan and Nikolai I was going alone. That conversation lasted eleven minutes and ended with both of them standing at the warehouse entrance watching me get into Rem's vehicle with expressions that said everything they had decided not to argue further. I changed out of the dress in the vehicle. Rem had a change of clothes in the bag he always carried. I put them on carefully around the bandaged shoulder and left the dress on the floor of the vehicle. Calloway was already inside when I arrived. He was sitting at the only table in the room and he stood when I came through the door and he

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The Syndicate

Ivan's Pov We tracked Ace through the relay signal on Rem's secondary monitor. Nikolai was at the table with the monitor between us and neither of us spoke much for the first forty minutes. The signal put Ace at the west side building and it stayed there and as long as it stayed there nothing was wrong. "He is still inside," I noted. Nikolai looked at the monitor. "Yes. The signal is steady." "Fifty-three minutes," I said. "I can see the timestamp clearly." "I am not reading it for you," I said. "I am talking through what this wait means." Nikolai looked at me. "He is not choosing Calloway," he said. "You do not know that for certain." "Yes I do," Nikolai said. He leaned back in the chair. "If he were choosing Calloway he would not have told us where he was going

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جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 135

Massacre

Chaos Exit

Warehouse

Father

The Syndicate