by Kaylea Cross
His attention sharpened. “Is she one of them?”
“Might be. Apparently these women both put up one hell of a fight when they were taken. Killed three of their best guys before being captured. They’re saying the women are government spies. Assassins, even.”
Valkyries? It was possible. But was one of them Amber? It didn’t make sense. What was she even doing here?
Unless…
Of course. The captives.
He sucked in a quiet breath as everything clicked into place. They could be Valkyries. It would explain so much, and why Amber had risked everything to come back here.
“See if you can find out where they’re being held. If you give me good intel on this, I’ll double your fee.” Yury had already been paying him good money for the intel. That offer should get him immediate results. “If you hear anything else, you know where to reach me.”
He hung up and drove west toward the outskirts of the city to meet with another contact—a low-level government official who might know something about the captive women. If those captives were Valkyries, Yury’s gut said Amber was here to rescue them. And she was now on the run, with Cordova right on her tail.
Given Cordova’s relentless reputation, there was a chance he might already have captured her. Yury didn’t think so, because if Cordova had, Yury would have been notified by now. According to the terms of their contract, Cordova wasn’t required to contact him with updates. He wouldn’t report back unless he’d captured or killed her.
Cordova was good, but Yury was too, and this time he wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He was going after Amber Brown himself.
He had eyes and ears all over this city now. Money made things so much easier. If she reappeared in the city again, it was only a matter of time before he found out.
Didn’t matter how long it took. He would find her. Pay her back double for all his and Zoya’s pain.
A life for a life. Even though it didn’t seem enough.
****
“You’re a freaking Valkyrie. It’s ridiculous to worry about whether you killed that guy back there,” Amber muttered under her breath.
She shook her head in annoyance as she kitted up for the coming op. She’d killed plenty of times before and never lost any sleep. Now, ever since learning that she might have turned on the wrong person, in addition to finding her long-lost sister, something inside her had shifted.
She’d always had a conscience—almost everyone did except for true sociopaths—but it had never bothered her before. Now it was almost hyper-sensitized. She couldn’t control it, couldn’t shut it off. It kept needling her with worry about what had happened. Pricking her about what had happened to Megan when they were little.
Why hadn’t she fought harder to keep them together? Why had she believed her trainers when they’d told her Megan was dead? Or why had she never looked into it when she was older?
Then there was Hannah. And how Amber could have allowed herself to be manipulated yet again into believing potentially false information.
And now this situation with the man who’d been following her.
Leaving him had bothered her all the way back to Damascus. To the point that she’d even monitored emergency dispatch channels and checked local hospitals to see if he’d been admitted and find out his status. The only thing she’d found was that the man who’d shot at her earlier was now dead.
That one didn’t bother her. But for some reason the guy on the bike did. Because her gut said she might have made another mistake.
He’d protected her before. What if he hadn’t been trying to capture her, but trying to help her instead?
“Then why did he chase you like that for miles, Amber?” she said in exasperation.
She gave herself a mental shake. He’d been alive when she’d left him on the side of the road, and a trucker had been less than a minute behind them. He would have been helped out.
Besides, odds were he’d probably been trying to capture her. Maybe to hand her over to the very people she was going after tonight. And whatever, at least now she didn’t have to worry about him coming after her again. She had to get this done fast.
This was her best shot at rescuing Hannah.
The Escalade she’d put the transmitter on had stopped at what looked like an abandoned warehouse on the very outskirts of southeast Damascus. It bordered a working class neighborhood that was much less densely populated than other parts of the city.
About an hour before she’d arrived back in Damascus and switched vehicles, the system she’d set up on Lady Ada to monitor the radio frequencies had recorded a conversation confirming the location. For the past two hours she’d been looking at satellite images of the area. The images were a few hours old but she had to act on the intel because she couldn’t afford to wait any longer.
At just before midnight she left her rented room dressed in black cargo pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt, her hair secured in a tight braid, blades and weapons strapped on and her other gear in a backpack. The drive only took ten minutes. She parked behind an old bakery that was closed for the night and stealthily made her way to the two-story warehouse on a quiet street.
The black Escalade with the tracker was parked alongside it, and another was in the back. All the windows on the main floor were dark, the only visible light coming through a tiny gap beneath the edge of a drawn blind on the upper floor.
If the satellite images were accurate and she was right, there were three guards on duty. If she was wrong…
She’d improvise.
Quiet surrounded her as she crept to the back door off the alley. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. Looking up, she focused on her first order of business.
Slipping the crimp device between her teeth, she grabbed hold of the drainpipe on the exterior of the building and climbed it, being as silent as possible. The security camera was mounted beneath the top-floor window, and she stayed out of its line of sight.
Making sure she had a good grip on the pipe with her left hand, she took the crimp device in her right hand and reached out to snap it into position on the camera wire. She waited ten seconds, made sure the tiny LED light stayed green to indicate the signal was jammed, then climbed back down.
So far, so good. She still had the element of surprise going for her.
Her electronic scrambler made short work of the digitized lock on the back door. She slipped it into her back pocket then drew her pistol and screwed on the silencer. Next came her NVGs, allowing her to see in the low light.
She pressed her shoulder to the door as she twisted the knob, cracked it open an inch, and waited. Her heart rate was elevated, because she was finally about to see Hannah.
She paused to take three deep, slow breaths, calming her pulse. The second she went through this door, there was no going back. She would have to be sharp and eliminate any threats that lay inside.
Go.
With the flip of a mental switch, she went into op mode and surged inside, her goggles allowing her to see in the dimness.
A radio or TV was on somewhere inside, possibly upstairs. She crossed the concrete floor silently, heading toward the front of the open-plan building where the bluish light from a TV flickered in another room, probably an office.
In the hallway to the left a guard stood beside a closed door, his back to her. According to the floor plan she’d found, the door led to an underground storage facility. Hannah had to be down there. But to get inside, Amber had to take out this guard without alerting the others. She couldn’t risk merely disarming and tying him up. He was one of Rahman’s men—lethal and connected throughout this city. One alert from him to anyone else and she was screwed.
She had to kill him.
Soundlessly she drew her knife from the sheath strapped to her thigh and crept up behind him. Striking fast, she clamped a hand around his mouth as she drove the blade directly into his right kidney and twisted it. He jerked taut and flailed a hand back for the knife, but he w
as already sagging, the pain so intense he couldn’t even cry out.
She yanked the blade free and grabbed him around the waist, one hand still over his mouth as she stepped back to ease his heavy weight to the floor. The scent of blood filled the air as she holstered the knife and drew her pistol, reaching behind her for the doorknob. She didn’t know how long she had until someone found the guard’s body, but it could be any moment.
Inside it was cold and dark, a faint glow coming from the bottom of the stairs. Closing the door soundlessly behind her she crept down the steps, weapon in hand. A single light bulb was on in the ceiling at the base of the stairs. Amber pulled out her penlight.
There were no guards. But there were cells.
Two appeared to be occupied, one near the stairs and the other at the back of the room. A body lay crumpled in the nearest one, with short, dark blond hair that looked like it had been hacked off with a knife.
Hannah.
Amber rushed over to her. Hannah was lying curled up on her side, facing away. Her face was a mess, her eyes swollen shut, dried blood covering her skin. Her hands and feet were bound.
“Hannah,” she whispered.
No reaction. She was either unconscious or…
A padlock on the cell door barred her entry. Amber wasn’t as good at picking locks as her sister, and she didn’t have time to waste doing it. She pulled a small can from her pocket and sprayed liquid nitrogen on the lock. After a few seconds she stepped back and drove the sole of her boot into the frozen metal. The lock shattered.
She ripped the door open and rushed inside, kneeling down beside Hannah. But as soon as she did, she knew she was too late. Hannah Miller was dead. And from the looks of it, her death had been slow and painful.
For a long moment Amber couldn’t move. She stared down at the dead Valkyrie’s face, her heart constricting.
This was her fault. She’d done this. And Hannah had suffered terribly before drawing her final breath. Amber wouldn’t even be able to take her body out, because that would slow her down too much. Hannah wouldn’t even receive the dignity of a burial.
Nausea roiled in her belly. She sucked in a breath and swallowed, fought to clear her head. Breathe. You need to breathe and stay focused—
“Is she…dead?” a raspy whisper asked from the back of the room.
Amber jerked upright, swinging around to aim her pistol toward the source of the voice. In the shadows she just barely made out the shape of the silhouette in the cell at the back of the room. A dark-haired woman, also lying curled on her side on the floor.
Amber stepped toward her, lowering her weapon. “Who are you?”
“One of us.” Her voice was weak.
Another Valkyrie? Heart thudding, Amber aimed the beam of her penlight at the cell. Her insides iced over when she saw the woman lying tangled in what was left of a bloodstained, shredded gown. She had Asian features, straight black hair and dark, badly bruised eyes.
The fine hairs on Amber’s nape stood on end as recognition hit her like a punch to the gut. “Kiyomi?” she said in disbelief. They hadn’t seen each other since their training as teenagers.
The woman squinted at her through one barely-open eye, her features twisted in obvious pain. The bastards had cuffed her wrists and ankles and chained her to the floor like an animal and left her here to suffer. “Who… Who are you?”
Shit, what was Kiyomi doing here? “Amber.” She sprayed the lock, busted it with her foot and threw the door open. She’d been lucky the other guards hadn’t come for her yet. Every second from here on out was a luxury.
Recognition flared in those dark, bruised eyes. “Amber…”
“Come on, we don’t have much time,” Amber said as she sprayed the liquid nitro on the steel loop holding the chains in place.
It took her three kicks to break it. As soon as it snapped she bent to help Kiyomi up. “Can you walk? We’ve gotta hurry.”
Kiyomi’s quiet intake of air and the sudden rigidity of her body told Amber she was in agony. “No. It’s too late. Leave me here. I’ll handle the other guards while you get out,” she gasped.
“Bullshit. We’re getting out of here right now, together.” Once they were safe Kiyomi could tell her what she was doing there and what had happened to Hannah.
Muttering a quiet apology she grabbed Kiyomi around the waist and half-dragged her out of the cell, ignoring Kiyomi’s strangled cry. They both froze at the sound of voices coming from above.
“How many are there?” Amber whispered.
“Five.”
“Four. I took one down already.”
Footsteps sounded over their heads. Then raised voices came from outside the stairwell door.
“Get behind me,” Amber said, pushing Kiyomi back. She raised her weapon just as the door burst open and fired at the first man through it, catching him low in the chest. He cried out and toppled down the stairs.
Amber was already moving sideways toward the far wall, herding Kiyomi backward as bullets ripped down the staircase. Legs appeared in her line of sight. She fired at the thighs, was rewarded with another guttural cry as the next man tumbled down, but more rushed onto the steps before she could kill him.
She got off four more shots at the approaching men, hitting two more in the chest, then a large shadow detached from the steps and came hurtling at her.
A huge, heavy weight slammed into her side, taking her to the floor. She braced and grunted as her back hit the cold concrete, driving the air from her lungs.
Chest burning, she shoved the man off and rolled away from him. As soon as she was free she aimed her weapon at him, but Kiyomi leaped into action. Though it must have been agony for her the other Valkyrie lunged up and wound the chain binding her handcuffs together around the man’s neck, then twisted.
His eyes bulged and he clawed at the chains strangling him as Amber got to her knees and changed the angle of her aim. But Kiyomi didn’t let go, her teeth bared in a feral snarl as she choked the life out of him. They fell forward and hit the ground with a thud, Kiyomi still pulling on the chains.
Struggling for air and almost out of ammo, Amber reached for a fresh mag and shifted to one knee, turning to face the stairs as more shouts and running footsteps reached her from above. Three more men appeared in the open doorway at the top of the stairs.
She whipped her weapon up to fire but before she could pull the trigger, shots rang out from behind the men and they started falling. She watched in astonishment as they all slid down the stairs one by one, dead or dying, smearing blood all over the stairs.
Staggering to her feet, she blinked to clear her hazy vision just as another figure appeared at the top of the steps. She jerked her pistol up to aim at his center mass, then froze when his face came into view.
Amber stared up at him in astonishment, her pulse roaring like the ocean in her ears.
No. Fucking. Way.
Chapter Six
“We’ve got under two minutes to get out of here,” Jesse told her, holstering his weapon as he came down the rest of the stairs. He hurt all over and his back and legs were stiffening up. But he’d wind up hurting a hell of a lot more if the rest of the security squad showed up and put some bullet holes in him.
“Who are you?” Amber demanded. She hadn’t moved or lowered her weapon. Her expression was full of mistrust, borderline hostile, and he didn’t blame her.
He also didn’t have time to explain everything here. “Megan said to tell you Carly sent me.” He wasn’t sure what it signified, but the message worked, because her expression changed instantly, her face going blank with shock.
“What?”
No time to explain further. A glance past her told him Hannah Miller was dead in her cell.
He went straight over to crouch in front of the other woman, who’d choked one of the guards to death with the chains they’d bound her with. One look at her and he decided she was too beat up to get out of here on her own. “Come with me,” he said to her.
>
“No, I—”
“I’ll get you outta here.” Gritting his teeth, he put her over his shoulder, straightened while every throbbing muscle in his body screamed in protest, and started for the stairs.
“Wait,” Amber protested, trailing after him.
“No time,” he answered, his muscles and bones screaming as he took the stairs. “There are more guards coming.”
She followed right on his heels. “How do you know that?”
He stepped over the bodies and climbed the stairs, one arm locked around the injured female’s waist, his pistol in his right hand. “We’ll talk once we’re back at the safehouse,” he said, his voice low.
“What safehou—”
He stopped abruptly, two steps from the top, pausing to listen. The woman over his shoulder tensed and Amber fell silent.
From outside, the sound of a speeding vehicle approached.
“They’re here. We’ll go out the west side.”
“I’ll take point.” Amber rushed past him and stopped inside the doorway to check. “Let’s go.”
Jesse stayed right behind her as she hurried down the hall to the other side of the warehouse. The back door crashed open behind them.
Men shouted. Running feet approached.
Jesse waited while Amber opened the west door.
“Clear, but we have to hurry,” she said, then burst outside into the darkness.
Three shots ripped through the quiet as Jesse ran outside, Amber’s muzzle flash exposing them momentarily. He could just make out her shadowy silhouette as she took cover behind a low stone wall across from him.
“Go,” she urged him.
Trusting that she wouldn’t risk getting her friend killed, he ran toward her.
Bullets whizzed past, slamming into the concrete building beside him. Two men ducked around the far corner, weapons up. Jesse aimed at the first one and fired just as Amber did. Both men crumpled to the ground.
