The Lost of New Bristol (Lila Randolph Book 2)

by Wren Weston

  “And birthing you and Oskar. I hear it’s a little uncomfortable.”

  Tristan joined the group at the window. “Are you sure your father is really—”

  “I know who my father is. He was so damn proud and happy that he hung the certificates on the wall in our room. Bullstow did the DNA test themselves, you know. Twice. They didn’t believe anyone would sleep with the dirty German slave. They redid the test when Oskar and I were five years old. Stupid assholes.”

  Tristan looked helplessly at Lila. “I got nothing.”

  Lila stole Fry’s binoculars, unwinding the strap from his neck. “I like the real you, Maria. Don’t ever change.”

  “That’s funny coming from someone who prances around in a hood.”

  “I don’t prance.” Lila focused her binoculars across the street, the mesh hood obscuring her view. Nothing moved in the warehouse, except for the occasional head in the dim, dusty windows. “How many mercs have you guys seen?”

  “Ten,” Fry answered. “We think.”

  “Could be more. Should be more.”

  “We’ll pretend there are.” Tristan withdrew his own pair of binoculars from his coat pocket. “Where do you think they’ll be?”

  “Roof, perimeter, back entrances.” Fry ticked off each suggestion on his fingers.

  “Next door,” Lila added. “They’ll have lookouts.”

  “We’ll account for them. I don’t know how much longer they’ll stay in the city, so we should move quickly. Fry will come with me. We’ll meet up with the others and make a plan. Dixon, Lila, stay here and watch the building. Call me if anything changes.”

  Lila nodded, completely uninterested in trailing along, just to be caught in a staring contest with people she hardly knew.

  After Tristan and Fry left, Dixon pressed his forehead into the glass, withdrawing again, becoming a mate to the shadows he’d hidden behind all week. Lila put down her binoculars and rubbed his back. “We’re going to save some children today.”

  He nodded.

  “In a couple of hours, they’ll all be safe again. We’ll get the girls back with their parents, and Oskar and Maria will be together once more.”

  Dixon didn’t take out his notepad. Whatever thoughts he had, he kept them to himself.

  Lila didn’t see any patrols, nor did she see anyone in the warehouses but the same few heads in the same few windows.

  When the doors in the back opened once more, Lila stiffened.

  “Anything new?” Tristan asked as he rejoined them, pulling out his binoculars for a last look. Fry, Frank, and Dice marched in after him, their jaws set.

  “No.”

  “Good. Four teams will surround the building. Another four will hold back, waiting to reinforce where they are needed.”

  “All those people, and we don’t even know what’s inside?” Lila grew uncertain as she peered at the quiet structure across from them.

  “We don’t know now. But the six of us will be playing snoops.”

  “Seven,” Maria said. “I’m going too.”

  Tristan shook his head. “I promised your father I’d keep you safe.”

  “Yes, I heard. Maybe I’d let you if you hadn’t screwed up the first job so badly. This time if you fuck it up, I’ll have a chance to get my brother back myself.”

  “Maria, those are German mercs who have him,” Lila said. “Their guns won’t be loaded with tranqs. They’ll have guns with bullets. They can and will kill you. They’ve killed more than a dozen people already.”

  “So? What’s my life been so far? Cleaning pots? Always brought back the second I break out of the compound? Pardon me if I don’t value another fifty years of that as highly as you do.”

  Dixon raised his tranq, aimed it at her neck, and looked at his brother for permission.

  “We’re not going to tranq her.”

  Another five minutes of arguing didn’t help the situation. In the end, Tristan decided it was better to take her along and keep an eye on her, rather than leave her behind in the abandoned warehouse.

  “Remember, don’t tranq anyone,” Tristan reminded them, giving the building one last pass with his binoculars. “We’re just getting a closer look. We get a visual on the kids, find the position of the mercs, and relay the information back to Toxic. She’ll pass it to the other teams. We’re not going to start a fight until the entire building has been surrounded, the neighboring properties searched, and the other teams have gotten into position. Does everyone understand?”

  Everyone nodded and reached for their tranq guns and knives, making sure they were in place along with their backup weapons.

  “Maria, stay with me and Dice,” Fry said. “You hear me?”

  The girl nodded, a little of the old Maria coming back as she gulped.

  The group moved out. They backtracked two blocks around the warehouse, slipping through a large abandoned field behind the structure. The grass and weeds came up to their thighs. They squinted toward the building, large windows half busted and open to roosting pigeons.

  No one patrolled the perimeter, and only a few figures paced in front of the windows, the same people they’d seen before.

  Lila peeked through her binoculars. “I don’t like this. I can’t see anything new, and we can’t get any closer. Even without cameras they’ll see us the minute we try to cross the field.”

  A gun cocked behind them, a tiny little snick carried on a frigid wind. “We saw you long before you got to the field.”

  The entire group spun, lifting their tranqs.

  Six well-armed men dressed in black trousers and blackcoats surrounded them, pointing guns at their chests. Guns loaded with bullets. Cold guns made of cold steel held by cold men who had used them to kill.

  Had Natalie even seen them before she died?

  “You come armed with cute toys,” the leader said with a heavy accent. “I will never understand how the empire hasn’t beaten you already. Arms up, please.”

  Lila lifted her arms, cocking her head to side as she tried to place his accent. It sounded like a mix of German and something else, caught up in a warring mix of tones.

  The mercs took the group’s tranqs from their holsters, and their leader jerked his gun to the warehouse across the field.

  Lila stared about her as she marched on. The others would come. Tristan’s people would interject themselves into the fray before they entered the warehouse.

  But no shots rang out.

  No group charged.

  No one intervened at all.

  Had the others been taken too?

  Lila squinted into the dusty warehouse as the group filed inside. The large space had been cleared of all machinery. A few tables had been pushed to a side wall, filled with notepads, computers, temp palms, maps, and food. Another table had been moved to the center, playing cards scattered on top. In the front lay five wire dog cages all in a row. One contained Oskar, and three young girls filled the others. The children’s eyes hardly focused on the influx of new people. One merely drooled on a pillow in her lap, her head pushed up against the side of the cage at an awkward angle.

  Another empty cage sat beside Oskar’s, its door hanging open.

  A man at one of the tables stood up to greet them, a silver band tied around his upper arm, a gun strapped to his hip. He thrust his hands behind his back and nodded at his men. “Good work, you’ve managed to find the last of the set.” He crooked his finger at Maria. “Come here, child. You’ve saved us an awful lot of time.”

  Maria’s bravado had greatly waned upon their capture. Whatever had been left of it melted as she shuffled toward him, her gaze falling demurely to the floor. While one of the mercs piled the tranqs and knives on the table, she raised her faltering, trembling voice. “Are you going to bring me back to my father?”

  “Eventually. You’ve prov
ed quite difficult to find. We almost left you, but now you’ve been delivered to our doorstep. You won’t be any trouble, will you?”

  Maria shook her head and strode closer. “They yelled at me and made me clean all the time, just like the others. Are you going to make me do that?”

  “Of course we won’t. The cages are here to keep you all safe until we can return you to your father.” The man smiled an oily smile. “You’re a princess, not a slave. We don’t practice such barbarity in the empire.”

  Maria stood beside him and looked down at the ground, the picture of innocence, the epitome of the wronged.

  The pacing mercs guarding the warehouse left their posts, joining the rest of the captors. Nearly twenty women and men glared at Lila and Tristan and the rest of the group as if they had been mistreating children, rather than saving them.

  Maria was going to get them all killed.

  Painfully.

  Lila cut a look to Dixon, saw his fingers shaking in the air as he pressed them into bunched fists. Here he was in another life-or-death situation, just a week after his last, and she didn’t know how she’d get him out of it. The look that crossed over his face worried her. It was a mixture of sadness, fear, and…

  Anger?

  “Why?” Lila asked, hoping to buy enough time for Tristan’s people to rescue them. “I understand taking Oskar and Maria. After all, you traditionalists harbor some notion of restoring them to the throne, but—” Lila broke off, considering the man’s accent and the accent within it. “Oracle’s wrath. You’re not Germans at all. You’re Italians.”

  The group of mercs eyed one another, shifting in their boots, hands upon their guns.

  Their leader laughed and clapped his hands. “Bravissimo,” he said, his vowels and consonants changing completely. “It’s hard to speak your language with a German accent. Harder still to speak it perfectly, though a few of my men can fool your people well enough. It’s a pity you figured it out. I would have let you and your friends scamper back to the little police force at the capitol so you could tell them all about the bad German people who stole the prince.”

  Lila’s shoulder ached, and she struggled to keep her hands up. “Why take Oskar?”

  “Why not? Everyone wants him. Your highborn want to sell him to the highest bidder, your government wants to send him to Head Councilman Abbot so America can get a shiny gold star on its collar, and the German traditionalists want to put him or his father on the throne. Even the German loyalists want him.”

  “The loyalists? I thought they wanted him dead?”

  “Only the idiots, but they pay like crap.” The man snatched up one of the tranq guns on the table, peering at the trigger and darts loaded inside.

  “King Lucas doesn’t pay like crap, does he?”

  “King Lucas is the slyest one of all, maybe more than King Felipe. You know the easiest way to sway the public? Turn your enemy into a villain or a clown. King Lucas has never wanted Peter dead. He’d rather not make Peter and his children into martyrs, into sad legends the populace can rally around whenever they don’t like something he does or says. He hasn’t even had to do much. Give Peter a few drinks, put him around in front of the cameras, and let him make an ass of himself. It’s been delightful watching King Lucas work. I may not like the man’s politics, but you can’t doubt his sense of humor.”

  “What about King Felipe? He wants to own the next king of Germany?”

  “The next best thing to being an emperor is to control one. If the children are good and do as they are told, he might even send us to Germany to collect their father. Everyone will think King Lucas has finally gotten rid of the foolish man. That will take some explaining on his part, don’t you think?”

  He dropped the tranq gun on the table and padded toward Maria. Squeezing her shoulder, he tossed a careless glance back at Oskar’s cage. “Does that sound good, boy? You can have your father back if you cooperate. You’ll be a prince and then a king and maybe even an emperor. You and your sister will wear nice clothes and eat delicious food, so long as you do what you’re told.”

  Oskar didn’t say a word, his glazed eyes staring at the floor.

  “Why take the oracles?”

  “King Felipe wants proof that the witches are false before he agrees to war.”

  “The militia will figure it out. You shouldn’t have used tracers to find Rebecca.”

  “Ah, that’s how you found us,” he said with a shrug. “It was an acceptable risk. A few bugs in the FPS office, and we learned all about Rebecca’s new parents and their tea habit. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was enough, and it was much easier than hacking into the FPS files.”

  “But—”

  “Oh god, take off the woman’s ridiculous hood. I want to see her eyes while I shoot her in the mouth.”

  Lila’s hands immediately went to her hood, but one of the black-clad guards held her arms in place. The mesh brushed against her skin and hair as it was pulled off.

  Fry and Dice couldn’t help themselves. They turned their heads, their eyes bulging at the sight of Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph, chief of the Randolph militia. To their credit, they cut their eyes away before their captors noticed they’d caught such a big fish.

  But the black-clad Italians knew her face, too.

  “Well, well, well.” Their leader grinned. “It appears we have—”

  A shot rang out.

  Blood sprayed from the Italian’s forehead.

  Chapter 29

  The recoil nearly knocked the gun from Maria’s grasp, but she held on, firing at the next merc before she’d even aimed properly. Her shots were as wild as her eyes, but she managed to put two bullets into a fleeing merc’s chest before spinning to find a new target.

  The mercs nearest Maria cursed in Italian and scattered. They did not draw their guns. The girl was worth too much money to harm.

  They weren’t the only ones moving.

  Lila had crouched as soon as the Italian’s head exploded, and not because she was frightened. She grasped at an empty sheath before she remembered they’d taken her boot knife. The drop had been lucky, though, for she’d dodged a merc’s arms.

  They closed around air.

  She escaped purely by accident.

  Lila pretended a weapon and swung, slashing toward his throat. It was a feint, just enough of a threat to make him wary, just enough for her to get close and snatch his gun.

  A gun he had not drawn so that he would not destroy another prize.

  Predictably, the merc dodged.

  His burly arms closed around her.

  Lila elbowed him in the neck, wiggled in his grasp, and grabbed his revolver. She fired at the man’s kneecap through his holster.

  He shifted at the last instant, right before the crack of the pistol erupted at his waist.

  The recoil shot up her arm, shaking her bones.

  The man’s screams tore through the air as he fell, clutching at the space between his legs.

  Now armed, Lila turned to the next merc, who rushed at her with outstretched arms. She knew she couldn’t aim in time. She knew she didn’t have the skills for hand-to-hand.

  She knew she had to move.

  Before she could do so, his body jerked, and half his skull erupted. He fell to the side, collapsing into a bloody mess on the gritty cement.

  Maria didn’t bother watching him fall. She merely aimed at another scrambling merc, too greedy to go for a gun.

  But these men were professionals. They quickly abandoned the idea of rushing Maria and Lila. All swarmed the table, having the same thought. Too much money breathed in the room, and they couldn’t risk destroying any of it.

  They needed tranqs.

  The others had also moved. Tristan, Dixon, Frank, Fry, and Dice had all lunged at the nearest mercs, fists punching, boots kicking, all scr
ambling to get to a weapon.

  Lila left them to it, unwilling to risk a shot so close to her friends. Instead, she aimed her gun at the neck of the closest merc, just as she’d done in practice so many times before.

  The blast kicked her arm, and she nearly lost hold of the gun.

  Her target collapsed, gasping for air, clasping his hands around his neck to stem the tide. He paled and twisted, from both pain and the realization of his approaching death.

  Did his regrets march before his eyes?

  Lila watched the pool of crimson underneath him grow, wondering what a merc regretted about his life.

  She knew what she regretted.

  She’d killed him. She’d actually killed someone this time.

  A hand gripped her leg. Her first target yanked at her ankle, attempting to topple her.

  No second thoughts passed through her head. Turning her aim, she shot his neck, just as she’d been trained to do.

  He fell, back-pedaling futilely in a second pool of crimson.

  Then he stopped moving altogether. His regrets floated away.

  Swallowing hard, she stole his gun, then aimed again toward the crowd of mercs. The press of bodies made them easy to hit, but this time her target fell before she’d even managed to fire. A little dart had struck his head, rendering him far luckier than he might have been.

  Tristan had rushed the table and snatched the last tranq.

  A wetness creep down her cheek.

  Perhaps she’d been hit.

  Squeezing her eyes, she breathed out sharply. Most of the mercs had pointed tranqs at her and her friends, scattering now that they had weapons. The ones who hadn’t scored a tranq fumbled for their guns. Bullets would come from both sides, and the sides were still uneven. There was nothing to hide behind, nothing that a bullet couldn’t burn through.

  She was moving too slowly.

  Time was moving slowly.

  Dixon fell nearby.

  Raising her gun, she called upon every lesson she’d ever taken from Commander Sutton, every hour spent at the range with Sergeant Jenkins. She gritted her teeth and began to fire as she’d been taught.