AURORA
The sound pulls me out of sleep before I understand what it is.
A crack. Sharp and distant. Then another.
I'm upright before my eyes fully open, heart already going, some animal part of my brain reading danger in the air before my conscious mind catches up. The room is dark except for the dying fire. Axel is already gone from beside me, standing at the window in nothing but his trousers, completely still.
"Axel—"
"Get dressed now."
I get dressed without arguing.
I'm pulling my sweater over my head when the world explodes.
The window shatters inward. I hit the floor on instinct, glass raining across the stone around me, and the sound that follows isn't one shot or two — it's a wall of gunfire from multiple directions at once, sustained and rolling and getting closer, and my brain just keeps sayingno, no, this isn't, we were just, we were just lying there, we were just—
Axel is across the room, pulling me up by the arm, a gun in his free hand I didn't see him reach for.
"Stay behind me." His palm presses flat to my back, solid and warm. "Don't leave my side. Whatever happens."
I try to say okay.
Nothing comes out.
He opens the door two inches, stops, and listens with his whole body. Then pushes through, and I follow him into the hallway. The smell hits me first — acrid, chemical, and off — burning at the back of my throat — then the smoke, thin but spreading. Two of Axel's men move quickly toward the staircase with weapons drawn. One of them has blood running down his forearm in a dark ribbon, and he isn't slowing down. I stare at it, and my brain just skips — like it sees the information but refuses to process it.
Viktor materializes from the far end of the corridor and crosses to us in seconds.
"South perimeter is breached." Low and fast. "Twelve, maybe fifteen men. They came through the blind side of the tree line."
"How?" Axel says.
Viktor's jaw tightens. "They knew where it was."
The words take a second to arrive.
Then they do.
They knew where the blind spot was. They knew this location. They knew which room we were in.
My breathing goes wrong. Too fast, too shallow, my lungs working hard and somehow pulling in nothing, my hand going to the wall without me deciding to put it there. The plaster is cold under my palm. I focus on that. Cold. Real. Still here.
Axel's grip on my wrist tightens, as if he felt it happen.
"Breathe," he says, without looking at me.
I'm trying,I think,I'm trying I'm trying I'm—
I breathe.
We move to the stairwell. Viktor ahead, one man at our rear. Halfway down the steps, the front door comes off its hinges.
The sound is enormous in the enclosed space. I flinch so hard I bite my tongue and taste copper and then four men are inside — tactical gear, faces covered, moving with the horrible practiced efficiency of people who have rehearsed this — and the first one raises his weapon and I pull in air to scream and Axel shoves me sideways into the stone wall so hard my shoulder screams with it and opens fire.
The noise in that stairwell is catastrophic. I press flat against the stone with both arms over my head, and I am making a sound I've never made before, a continuous high pitch that I can't stop, and when I force myself to look through the smoke,
Axel moves with a proficiency I can't quite grasp. No hesitation, no wasted motions. Each move is like a complete sentence. He takes down two men before I even realize they’re there. Viktor takes out a third. The fourth fires a shot, and then Sergei emerges from the darkness at the bottom of the stairs and takes that one out.
