Page 183 of Homecoming

Into the chest of a man wearing all black, and a mask, and carrying a rifle. With three more just like him at his back. Red light glinted off tac gear shiny and hard as beetle casings.

The bomb may or may not have been real. That was irrelevant:thiswas why the alarm had been pulled. To make way for an invasion.

Cold terror seized her insides. She swallowed a wave of sudden sickness, and then instinct took over. She whirled around and shoved Eric hard in the chest. “Go back,” she hissed. “Go through that door, there.”

“What, what are they–”

“Now. Get out of the hallway.”

Rochelle was bringing up the rear. She tugged open a door, and Leah herded the others into it. The gunmen had to have seen which one, had to know where they went. As the door fell shut behind Leah, she heard screaming.

~*~

The trip from Dartmoor to Ian’s building was a blur of color and sound, the wind like sandpaper against Carter’s face. He wasn’t sure how he could still be upright, given the jerky, erratic beating of his pulse; thought he was running on pure adrenaline as he followed the swooping line of bikes past Bell Bar, and Maggie’s Place, and Cook’s Coffee, through a light and down a sidewalk where pedestrians in professional dress were gathering on the sidewalk in frightened knots. The cops and fire department weren’t on the scene yet.

Ghost turned in at the entrance for the parking garage, and the roar of their tailpipes was deafening off all the concrete. The guard station was empty, the mechanical gate arm up. The parked in front of the doors to the building, and when the engines died, and his helmet came off, Carter could hear the alarm going inside, polite but insistent.

He was trying to control the trembling in his hands as he set his helmet on the handlebars, willing his legs to straighten so he could swing off the bike –Leah, oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m here, but I can’t– when he heard a crack, and a whine, and the unmistakable ping of a ricochet.

He dove to the ground, and saw some of the others do the same.

Michael, though, whirled, gun already out, and returned fire. Three neat shots cracked off in a row. Carter heard the bodies hit the ground as he crawled around the front of his bike to look.

Three down, in black tac gear, and masks, bearing rifles. A handgun lay beside a still-twitching body; it had sounded like a nine mil round that had zipped past them.

“Anybody hit?” Ghost called.

“No,” went up the chorus.

They got carefully back to their feet.

Michael had gone to inspect the bodies, and behind them, stacked up like sinister black dominos, sat a row of black SUVs with tinted windows.

“Mob goons,” Mercy said. He cupped his hands around his eyes to peer in a back window. “Already inside. These three were left to guard the wheels.”

“We need to get inside,” Ghost said. “Who knows if there even is a bomb, but there’s still people inside, and we know these assholes have no problems hurting civilians.”

“Wait,” Fox said. He stood over one of the bodies, toeing at its helmet, so its head shifted back and forth on the concrete.

Carter gritted his teeth. Leah was inside. They needed tomove.

But Fox was infuriatingly unhurried. “If we walk in there, we’re immediate targets.” He plucked at his cut.

“Better us than fucking interns,” Aidan huffed. “Let’sgo.”

“Oh, we should go,” Fox agreed. His gaze lifted – and went to Tenny and Reese, standing a bit apart from everyone else, as always, lean and deadly, and–

Carter got it, then, just before Fox said, “But let’s send them a little Southern hospitality gift, first.”

~*~

The location of Ian’s personal office had been chosen for a reason: from it, he had hidden access to a private elevator and a private staircase, one carpeted, and softly lit, with real wood handrails. He felt like a heel for choosing that, the fastest, safest, easiest way out, while his employees clattered en masse down concrete stairwells in a panic. But. Well.

Bruce led the way to the hidden door that offered access, head swiveling, one hand reaching back now and again to grip Ian’s coat sleeve and hurry him along. Alec crowded at Ian’s back, and while Ian would have liked to think that he was the one shielding his husband, he knew it was the other way around, that Alec was feeling just as protective as Bruce.

The brave, beloved idiot.

“Do you know the code?” Bruce asked Alec when they reached the panel. He would have never spoken to him with that gruff, short tone under normal circumstances, was as deferential to Alec as to Ian. But emergencies had a way of bringing out the best in people.

---