Page 57 of Assassin's Prey
“Remi?”
The word was barely a whisper, but there was fear there. Fear when I shouldn’t be afraid. And then Remi nodded, his own eyes seeming to tear up as I stared into them and silently begged for reassurance. “Yeah,” he said.
“Yeah,” Eli said as well, coming up beside him. “Motherfucking yeah.” He gripped my shoulder hard. “Did you hear that, Levi? Abby is alive!”
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Chapter Twenty-Five
I felt like I’d been kicked in the head. Or maybe the heart. Abby was alive. Not dead, not blown into a million pieces by an inferno I had no possibility of stopping.
Alive.
My mind hit turbo speed in sixty seconds flat.
“She’ll be with Redding.” And apparently doing her own kind of damage, if what we’d overheard was true. I narrowed my eyes at Remi. “Plan B is in place, isn’t it?”
He glared at me like that was the stupidest question he’d ever heard, but I ignored him. Right now I needed to think aloud, and he’d just have to deal. “Of course it is.”
We needed to get as many of those men out of the third floor and out of our way as possible. Without Abby, we could take our time, comb the floor, take the men out one at a time. Not now. We were bypassing half our plan in favor of getting Abby to safety with all possible speed. “Come with me.”
We retreated into the second-floor office space and holed up in the first room with a door we could close. “Ready?” I asked Remi.
He raised a detonator for the rest of us to see. “Am I ever not ready?”
The bomb he’d planted wasn’t all that big. There would likely be minimal structural damage, but we’d placed it at the back of the first floor in the mail room, looking to get the most flammable material in one place as possible. A fire meant Rathlin’s men couldn’t ignore it; they had to deal, and that gave us time with them out of the way.
When Remi pressed the button, a muffled roar and hard shimmy reached us. Shouts in the stairwell barely traveled through the wall, and as I thought about all those men running for safety, concerned for their lives, my calm blew to bits just like the mail room had. The cool assassin was nowhere to be found right now, no matter how much I needed him. Rage was in control, all the anger that had boiled inside me at Abby’s “death,” the fury burning at the knowledge that Abby had been through a kidnapping, had suffered pain, fear, worry.
Fuck cool and emotionless—I had a flesh-and-blood target in my reach, and he’d pay for the hell he’d put me through. But he’d die for the hell he’d put Abby through.
By the time we sneaked back into the hallway, I’d channeled that rage into the hunt. Sticking to the outer edge of the staircase, we made our way silently up to the fourth floor. I caught sight of the guard stationed at the fourth-floor door mere seconds before he saw me, but that was all I needed to get a dart off. We could just as easily use regular weapons, but I’d rather not deal with the aftermath of thirty dead men and a clear motive attached to my now-public name. No, we’d stick to non-lethal—and reserve thespecialstuff for Redding and his cohort.
The guard dropped. Remi and I dragged him to one side while Eli set his position at the top of the stairs. “No one comes up,” I told him, though he already knew. “No one. If you need to, drop more than just a flash bang.” Eli had shut down the elevators before we came up, and in the enclosed stairwell, a flash bang might as well be an actual grenade going off. Any men attempting to reach the fourth floor via the stairs were about to have a very bad day.
He looped ear protection around his neck. “No worries. Go.”
With Remi at my back, I approached the door. On the count of three, we rushed it.
We were at the back entry of the apartment, facing a long hallway. At the opposite end, a guard stood. I darted him before he could get his gun up. His cry brought another guard and Rathlin around the corner.
Remi took the second guard. Rathlin managed to retreat, leaving my second dart to hit the wall behind him instead of his arm, damn it. As I advanced, I could hear the guards from beyond the living area at the end of the hall rushing into the room. No female that I could detect. I didn’t want Abby subjected to what I was about to do, but if it got her out of here… I prayed she was being kept in the bedroom.
With steady fingers I pulled the pin on a flash bang and tossed it around the corner into the crowd that was forming.
Even with my eyes closed, hands over my ears, and the protection of the wall, everything sheeted white. Sound died. I knew men must be stumbling around, disoriented, surprised, eardrums tortured, but I couldn’t hear them. That didn’t stop me or Remi from moving into the room. Amid the chaos, we darted three more guards.
Without conscious thought I took in the rest of the room. Abby and Redding were nowhere to be found. Rathlin had obviously used the couch for protection and now crouched behind it, at the farthest side of the room away from us, letting his men become cannon fodder. Chadwick, hands over his ears, ran for the executive office to the right of the living area. Remi followed, but I kept my attention on Rathlin.
He smirked at the dart gun in my right hand as he finally advanced. “Surely the big bad Levi didn’t bring a dart gun to a gunfight.” He had already pulled a GLOCK from the holster strapped to his thigh.
The man’s voice sounded tinny in my ears. “Of course not.” I waved my dart gun to get his attention, using the split second to pull a gun from behind my back. I might not be left-handed, but I could damn well shoot with either hand; I’d made sure of it. “I brought both.”
“You won’t need them.”
Redding’s voice came from my left, from the doorway to the bedroom contained in the apartment. Before I even looked, I knew what I was going to see, and I had to steel myself against it. I needed my eyes on Abby like I needed my next breath, needed to see that she was okay, that she was in one piece, but I couldn’t let it overwhelm me, not now. No, the animal needed to hunt; the man would have to wait till later to care for his mate.
“Put the guns down,” Redding said.
