Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 41664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 167(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 167(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
Edge flicked his favorite knife through his fingers. “Time for fireworks.”
Nitro’s mouth curved. “Good. Been too fucking long since I got to light a fuse.”
“Stay focused,” Kane cut in. “We’re not here to play.”
Nitro smirked but said nothing more.
Prez turned to me again. “You get eyes?”
“Thermals went blind with everything else, but the heat map I cached before I flipped the switch says at least eight bodies on the floor and two up in the office catwalk. Plus a couple in the back rooms. They were lazy. Or cocky.” I felt my mouth twist. “I like cocky.”
Kane’s beard shifted with the ghost of a smile. “You always did.”
My pulse was steady, though a part of me thrummed hot under the surface. We moved. Silent and stealthy, weapons tucked against our bodies as we slipped across the gravel lot. It was an acre of open exposure, but we hugged the long-dead trucks hoisted up onto blocks, slid behind disintegrating crates, and crossed in the pockets of darkness cast by broken lights. The humidity sat heavy and thick with the storm rolling in from the gulf.
Nitro padded to the man-door on the loading bay and crouched to set a matte brick against the latch, armed it with a twist, and looked up. Kane gave a nod. Nitro’s thumb pressed.
The lock went with a muffled thud under Nitro’s charge, and the door shrugged open a half inch.
Fury slipped through the breach first, rifle sweeping, then Kane. Edge and I split wide, with the prospects on our heels. Inside, the dark opened into rows of crates and machinery, the bones of an old, forgotten factory.
The silence seemed artificial, like every man in the vicinity was holding their breath.
Then everything blew.
Shouts ricocheted off walls, men scrambled, and weapons clattered. The first muzzle flash cracked the dark and lit up a man’s surprised face long enough for my crosshairs to find the center of it. One shot. My shot was quiet, a suppressed cough, and he fell forward into the shadows.
The room bloomed with noise. It didn’t get frantic, though. That was a lie people swallowed because it came from Hollywood. Instead, it got focused. The Kings didn’t fucking do panic. We did angles, breath, and the shortest line between a problem and its solution.
Edge moved like a knife and smiled like a lunatic. Nitro didn’t so much as blink when rounds pinged metal near his shoulder; he adjusted and answered with a pop pop pop that shut two men up forever. Fury flowed through the chaos, head down, a coil ready to strike, every shot a sentence that ended with a period.
I cut the room into zones in my head and slid across them between cover, sighting, breathing, and squeezing. One headshot. Another. No wasted motion, no noise. Just precision.
One man pivoted, gun raising, and I put two in his center mass. Another got bold and popped out from behind a crate, screaming something about “sons of—” that ended when I put him down mid-hyphen.
But even as my finger pulled and my gun kicked, my eyes scanned, hunting for one face. The man who tied it all together. The one still holding the knife over Lark’s throat.
He wasn’t there.
Two on the catwalk tried to flank. Edge lifted his gun, drew a line through the space between them, and both men dropped, their weapons clanging through the grating. He whooped soft and a little deranged as Nitro clipped a charge on a crate and sent a shock wave through a far stack for the pure tactical pleasure of making a barricade slide into a fatal angle, basically slicing through the man standing behind it.
Kane’s voice was sharp as he called. “Left! Two!”
Fury answered with a pair of bangs and something heavy met concrete. “One.” Then, almost bored, he added, “Two.”
A third man—one of the mid-tier bastards—sprinted for the loading bay’s roll-up gap, misjudged the lip, and stumbled. I caught him at the hinge, elbow to the temple. Chokehold, quick and tight. His arms flailed while he gasped like a fish tossed onto the dock. I pivoted him to the cinderblock wall and introduced his head to it twice, then his arms went slack. My zip-tie bit plastic into his wrists before I gagged him with a strip of his own shirt and hauled him by the collar across concrete.
Kane’s eyes found mine across the chaos. One nod. No words.
We dragged him out the door, gunfire still raging behind us, and shoved him into the back of the unmarked van waiting two blocks down. The driver—ours—didn’t look up when we slid the back open. We shoved the prisoner in, bent his knees, kicked them to make space, and I slapped the door shut with the kind of satisfaction that meant the next phase had begun.
“Wrap it,” Kane growled into his mic. “Sweep and burn.” He looked at me. “You’re done here. Go.”