ALEX POV
The first round punches a fist-sized hole through my kitchen wall and powders the air with gypsum. I drag Camila behind the island, push her head down, and angle my body between her and the balcony doors. The phone is still on speaker; Reece is shouting my name, but it's just noise. All that exists now is the geometry of the room, the angles of approach, the rhythm of men about to die.
Three boots. Balcony. One in the hallway outside my unit, light footed, suppressor already threaded. And someone posted further back as over watch covering the elevators.
"Stay down," I whisper.
She nods, eyes huge, knuckles white around the cabinet handle.
I slide, low and silent, to the edge of the island, counting heartbeats. The first guy crashes through the balcony glass with his muzzle up. He's expecting panic. He gets a 9mm to the orbital bone instead. I fire once, pivot, and he drops boneless, his weapon clattering across the tile.
Second man shouts. Third answers in Spanish, tight, professional. Good. That means they'll die clean.
Two more rounds snap past my ear and chew up the cabinets behind us. I roll and fire into the reflection on the stainless-steel fridge, catch the second man's shoulder, then throat. He collapses hard, hand clutching a spray that paints my floor.
The third fires on full auto through the drywall. I flatten over Camila, feel her flinch under me, feel everything male and primal snarl to the surface. "With me," I breathe. "Crawl."
We scuttle along the baseboards to the short hallway. I toss a smoke pop down the kitchen line; fog blooms thick and gray. The suppressor in the hall whispers, pss-pss-pss, tapping holes down my corridor. He's walking fire, blind. A rookie mistake.
I rip my bedroom door wide, take the corner tight, and let the hall shooter overshoot his lane. He realizes it too late, his shadow stutters, and I put him down with two controlled shots to center mass. He drops, gasping like a hooked fish; I finish it quick and clean.
"Alex," Camila whispers, hand on my back. She's shaking, but she's here. Behind me. Listening. Alive. "Is it… is it over?"
"No," I say. "More coming. Move."
Her breath hitches. I grab our go-bag from the closet, the one I packed the second she fell asleep last night because deep down I knew this day would come. Cash. Phones. IDs. Ammo. Keys.
From the kitchen, a groan. One of the balcony pair is still clinging to life. He turns, slick and coughing, and our eyes meet through the haze. He smears a bloody palm across the tile and starts to reach for his radio.
"Don't," I tell him, calmly.
He keeps reaching. I fire once and he stops moving.
I scoop up a spare carbine, sling it, and pull Camila close. "Shoes. Now."
She's barefoot, drenched in my T-shirt, legs bare from the knees down. I hate it. I love it. I hate that I love it.
The elevator bank pings. Not mine. Not floor access. Overwatch just moved. Good. Let him come.
I shove through the stairwell door and we start down. The concrete echoes with the metallic ring of my boots and the soft slap of her feet. She stumbles once. I catch her elbow. We go faster.
We hit the next landing and the door below us swings open. A pale hand slides around the frame with a pistol attached. I don't think. I shoot through the door. The hand jerks back, the pistol clangs away, and a body thumps into the hollow shaft with a grunt.
"Keep moving," I tell her, and she does. Brave. Shaking. But brave.
"Alex," she pants as we descend, "you're bleeding."
"Not mine." Mostly true. My forearm is slick from glass. Doesn't matter.
We spill into the parking level, and I scan automatically, the dark Mercedes with swapped plates, nose-out. My stash ride. I palm the fob, crack the trunk, and dump the go-bag in. Sirens Doppler in the distance, neighbors called it in. The cartel won't want uniforms, but they will want me pinned.
I open the passenger door for her. "Bungle. Low. Don't pop up until I say."
She drops into the seat and fumbles with the belt, fingers clumsy. I smooth the strap across her collarbone, lock it in. She looks up at me like I hung the moon.
"Breathe," I murmur. "In. Out. Like that."
She does. I close the door and move around,
, and a round smashes the concrete pillar beside my head.
I snap, fire twice into the muzzle flash. A man behind a sedan pitches sideways and disappears. I dive into the driver's seat, hit ignition, and we launch.
I'm aware of Camila's hand pressed over her heart, her whisper of a prayer. I'm aware of the scatter of heads peeking up from between cars. But mostly I'm aware of the fact that Solano's men found us less than twelve hours after the safe house incident.
Which means one thing: the mole is very real.
We tear out of the garage and into gray daylight. Rain needles the windshield. I take the ramp hard, merge with traffic, then slice off a side street before the tail car can clear the exit.
"Left," Camila says softly.
I glance at her.
"There's a camera there," she whispers. "They used to avoid that intersection. At the compound. Cameras made them nervous."
It's nothing. It's everything. She's observing. She's helping.
I take the left.
We thread through four blocks of wet city, then hit the main artery. A black Tahoe jumps two lanes behind us. They're good, no lights, no obvious tail pattern, but I see the weight in the suspension, the aggressive nose, the driver's patience. Predators can smell blood.
"Glove box," I say. "There's a phone. Hold the side button and say 'ghost call.' It'll ping two precincts and a Fed node."
She does it, voice shaking: "Ghost call."
A neutral voice replies, "Routing emergency. Stay on the line."
"Hang it up," I say. "They won't get here in time."
She swallows and sets the phone down. "Where are we going?"
"Somewhere no one expects. Then somewhere no one survives, unless they're us."
She blinks. "Is that… comforting?"
"It is if you're with me."
Her mouth parts. Heat licks down my spine. Not now.
The Tahoe creeps closer. I slide into a bus lane and then, without signaling, snap a hard right down an alley so narrow the Mercedes' sensors scream. The Tahoe overshoots, curses echo. Good. I cut left between two dumpsters, hop a shallow curb, and spit onto the next block.
Behind us, tires screech. They've adapted.
"Hold on," I warn, and drop the hammer.
We fly.
We're three minutes into the chase when my burner rings. Number blocked. Internal line. I punch it to speaker, jaw tight.
A voice breathes into the car like cigar smoke and rot. "Alexander."
Camila goes still, as if her blood froze.
"Solano," I say evenly.
He laughs, soft and delighted. "Ah. I wondered what sort of man would dare what you have dared. Taking my little songbird to your nest. Did she sing for you yet?"
The growl that moves through me is not human. "You're already dead."
"Twice apparently," he purrs. "Tell me, does she still tremble when the lights go out? I trained her to be very obedient in the dark."
Camila's hand finds my thigh and squeezes, a small desperate anchor. I cover it with my own, palm to palm, eyes on the road.
"You'll never touch her again," I say.
He clucks his tongue. "You Americans. Always so dramatic. No, I will touch her again, Agent Coulson. Because I know where you're going."
The call ends.
I swear, low and vicious.
"How would he know?" Camila whispers.
"He wouldn't, unless someone's feeding him our turn choices in real time."
"The mole."
"Yes." The word tastes like rust. "And if Solano's as good as I think he is, he's not triangulating by cameras or plate readers. He's pinging a device."
She glances at the dash. "Phone?"
"Burners are clean." I shoot a look at her. "Jewelry? Hair clips? Anything you didn't have at the safe house?"
"Just… your T-shirt," she says, small.
"Then it's on the car," I mutter. "Or in you."
"In me?" She pales.
"Not like that," I snap too fast, then soften. "Sometimes they sew trackers into seams at shelters. Or slip them into shoes. Or, "
"My card," she whispers.
"What card?"
"The one you gave me. I… I kept it. I was holding it in the bathroom when the lights went out. I had it in my hand when I fell. When I woke up… it was gone."
My chest tightens. "Then they had contact range."
I whip into an underground loading dock behind a shuttered department store. The gate is half down; I smash through it with the car's nose, kill the engine, and drag us into silence.
"Out," I say. "Quickly."
She scrambles, breath fogging in the cool dark. I pop the hood and plunge my fingers along seams and bins until I find what I'm looking for: a magnetized capsule the size of a thumbnail tucked up against the radiator support. Cute little bug.
I crush it under my boot.
"Is that the only one?" she whispers.
"Doubt it."
I slide under the rear bumper, feel along the exhaust hanger, the hitch socket, the inner lip of the bumper cover. Find another. Then another. Sophisticated. Redundant. He planned for me.
I destroy each one until the only sounds left are the ticking of the engine and Camila's shaky breathing.
"You okay?" I ask, crawling out.
She drops to a crouch and cups my face with both hands, sudden and fierce. "You're the only okay I have."
I go very, very still. Rain drums on concrete. Somewhere above us, a siren wails and then fades. Our breaths fan between us, warm in the cold.
She leans in and brushes her mouth to mine, soft, tentative, a whisper of a kiss that still manages to gut me. My hand tightens on her waist. I kiss her back once, barely, like a promise I'm not allowed to make.
"We have to move," I rasp.
She nods, eyes bright, mouth kiss-swollen, courage burning hot under the fear. "Where?"
"Off-grid. And we need new wheels."
I scan the dock. In the gloom sits a battered delivery van with an open side door and a clipboard on the seat. Maintenance company. Keys dangling. Sometimes God plays favorites.
I load her in and slide behind the wheel. The van coughs to life and shivers like a wet dog. We pull out the opposite side of the dock, past pallets and a yawning freight elevator, and into an alley that smells like rain and old oil.
"New identities," I say, more to myself than her. "Change of clothes. Hard shelter off-network. Then we take the fight to him."
"To Solano?" she asks.
"And to the mole," I say. "Whoever he is, he just signed his death warrant."
We cut across the city with the wipers slapping time. The van rattles over potholes. Every few blocks, I run a serpent's path, left, right, left, to shake any tail that might have reacquired us. Nothing obvious appears. Good. But Solano's words keep circling like vultures: I know where you're going.
Which means he knows me. Or thinks he does.
"Alex?" Camila says after a long stretch of silence.
"Yeah."
"When you said 'hard shelter'… where is that?"
"A place I keep for when everything goes to hell."
"Has everything gone to hell?"
I glance over at her. "It's getting there."
She exhales, a sound that's somehow a laugh and a sob. "Okay."
I squeeze the wheel. "You're doing good."
"I'm trying." She pauses, then: "When you said 'take the fight to him'… what does that mean?"
"It means we stop running."
Her throat works. "Okay."
The van nosedives as I brake at a light. A street vendor glares. A couple under a shared umbrella runs across in front of us. The normalcy feels obscene. I drop us into gear again and turn into a neighborhood of old brick warehouses and graffiti. The kind of place where nobody calls the cops.
At the end of the block, an iron gate guards a narrow drive. I punch in a code on a rusted keypad. The gate buzzes reluctantly open, and we roll into a courtyard with a single bay door and a corrugated roof that looks one storm away from caving. The bay door grinds up on a slow chain. I pull us inside and hit the control. The door clangs down behind us. The world disappears.
Inside it smells like gun oil and laundry soap. Shelving lines the walls, tools, jacks, tubs of innocuous junk. In the back is a small room with a cot and a safe. I kill the engine and the silence lands solid and heavy.
"Home sweet home," I say dryly.
Camila hugs her arms. "It's… cozy."
"Liar."
"A little."
It wrings a smile out of me. I open the safe and pull out a zipped duffel. Inside: clothes, IDs, cash, compact medical kit, unregistered weapons. The pieces of a man with no name.
I toss her a hoodie and soft joggers. "Change. Shoes on the shelf. We leave again in five."
She nods and slips into the back room, door half-closed. I strip off my ruined shirt and clean the glass bite on my forearm with alcohol, hissing through my teeth. I can feel the shake in my muscles now that the adrenaline is leaving. I can also feel the places where her hands touched me, the phantom warmth. It's ridiculous. It's real.
The back door creaks. Camila steps out, hair damp from rain, swallowed in my hoodie. She's laced into a pair of black sneakers two sizes too big and smiles a little at the way the toes curl up. The bruises on her face look worse under the harsh overhead light, but something in her eyes is stronger.
"I'm ready," she says.
"Good girl," I murmur without thinking.
Her breath catches. My fingers close around the duffel like a vise.
"Alex," she says softly, stepping closer. "What if we can't run fast enough?"
"Then we make them chase us where I want them," I say. "And we make them regret it."
She swallows, nods, trusts.
I sling the bag over my shoulder and reach for the bay control,
, and every light in the warehouse dies.
Darkness slams down like a dropped curtain.
"Alex?" Her voice is very small in the black.
I grab her wrist and pull her into my chest. The night swallows even our breathing.
Then a single red dot appears on the far wall. Sweeps. Lands on my chest. Crawls to her face.
A laser.
Four more dots flick on around us, scattered high in the rafters, silent, patient, merciless.
A voice speaks from the dark, distorted by an intercom, calm as a church: "Agent Coulson. Step away from the girl. Hands where I can see them."
Camila trembles against me. I raise my empty palm slowly, keeping her tucked behind my side.
"Who are you?" I ask.
The voice chuckles. "Oh, come now. You already know."
I do. I hate that I do.
The red dots steady. Safety clicks whisper in the dark. The air tastes like dust and violence.
"Here's how this works," the voice continues. "You surrender the girl, you survive the night. You keep her, you both die. Your call."
I lean in, mouth at Camila's ear, my voice a ghost of sound: "On three, drop. Crawl left. Find the tool chest. Bottom drawer. Wait for me."
Her fingers clutch my shirt. "Three?" she breathes.
"Three," I promise.
I inhale, counting the rhythm of my pulse.
One,
Two,
I open my empty hand wider, like I'm giving up. The lasers steady in satisfaction.
Three,
I slam the bay door switch with my elbow. Sparks explode. The motor howls. The door jerks up six inches, jams, reverses, shrieks, and showers the rafters with hot metal shavings.
The lasers flinch.
"DOWN," I snarl, and throw myself into the dark with her.
Gunfire erupts. The night tears open.