"Which building," I say.
"The warehouse. Third floor — four heat signatures, one smaller, separate room."
Separate room.
"I'm going in."
"Your team needs eight more minutes?—"
"I'm going in now, Niko."
Silence. Then: "Perimeter in four. Don't die."
"Working on it."
I have four minutes.
Four minutes on Gansevoort Street in a doorway with a bandaged wound and a weapon I've already checked three times.
I don't want to feel.
Feeling means thinking about Serafina in that room — wrists bound, because of course they're bound, she's too dangerous to leave free. Thinking about whether she's been hurt beyond the drug. Whether they've touched her. Whether she's doing the thing she does when she's frightened — that discipline, that surgeon's lock-down, mapping the room and finding the exits and refusing to show them anything they can use.
She'll be doing that.
She's Serafina. She'll be doing that.
But she'll also be scared, and the thought of her scared — her eyes running calculations in a concrete room while she waits for me to come through the door — splits me open somewhere deep and structural. Makes my hands shake for the first time tonight, which the blood loss and the pain and the fight in the gallery didn't.
Her.
Just her.
My body is flooding with adrenaline and fury and something else I can't shut off, and I need to bleed it out or I'm going to breach that building shaking and get us both killed.
I press my back to the wall. Close my eyes.
Handle it.
Rough and fast, hand braced against the brick, her face behind my eyes whether I want it there or not. Not about want. Not about pleasure. About the need to function. About grinding her name between my teeth like a vow —I'm coming, I've got you, you're mine and I'm coming— until the shaking stops and the fury turns from fire to ice and I can think again.
It helps exactly enough.
I open my eyes. Breathe.
She's alive. Four signatures and one smaller — that's her, alive and whole and probably already working on a way out that doesn't require me.
"Team?" I say.
"In position," Caruso says.
"I'm not waiting."
I'm already moving.
The warehouse door takes four seconds.
The first man on the stairs takes two — he's armed, he's ready, it doesn't help him. I'm not operating with patience or precision tonight. I'm operating with the efficiency of a man who has exactly one objective and has removed everything else from the equation.
