AllFreeNovel
Share Us
NINETEEN
Decima
“We were never particularly close,but I wouldn’t have thought he’d outright screw us over,” Julius said as we stalked through the streets with the rest of the crew.
“Are you sure it is a trap?” I asked, glancing around. “Maybe he really does have something important to talk to you about.”
Garrison let out a huff. “And he really needed to talk to us about it in some random alleyway? If it’s a dead end, I say we leave without even sticking around to find out what mess they’re trying to pull us into.”
Earlier today, Julius had gotten a call from a guy he’d worked with briefly a few years ago, asking for a meet-up with only a vague explanation. Julius had agreed, but he’d suspected from the start that it was some kind of set-up. I guessed it was hard not to be paranoid about that kind of thing when our enemies had already turned several of the mercenary teams he’d once seen as colleagues against the crew.
We were all well-armed with both guns and knives, braced for a confrontation. My senses prickled with alertness as I scanned the buildings around us. We wanted to find out exactly what this was about, but we weren’t throwing caution to the wind, that was for sure.
“He sounded nervous,” Blaze said. “It could be that he needs help. And either way, we have to get to the bottom of it.”
“As long as we don’t end up in the bottom of a grave,” Garrison muttered.
Talon cast a baleful look over all of us. “Maybe we should shut up and focus if we want to avoid that outcome. We’re almost there.”
Julius nodded with a self-deprecating smile, and we fell into silence.
At the mouth of the alley, we paused in a defensive formation and peered down it. The passage turned farther in, just as Blaze had expected from the satellite imaging he’d pulled up. No one had blocked it off in any way that was visible from here.
Julius made a brisk motion, and we all followed him, spreading out even more as we strode along the cracked concrete between the looming brick walls. We didn’t want to make it easy for anyone to surround all of us at once.
The shadows wrapped around us like a damp sheet, and my nose itched with the sour smell trickling from a nearby dumpster. Julius and Talon rested their hands on their hips over their holsters. Blaze outright withdrew his gun, less confident in his quick draw than the others.
We paused at the bend, looking both ways to where the streets showed at either end. We definitely weren’t cut off. But there was no one here yet, and we were right on time. That didn’t bode well.
I stayed in the alley we’d entered through next to Garrison. Julius and Talon ambled a few paces down each direction of the longer alleyway. Blaze stopped right in the middle of the T, knitting his brow.
And we waited.
For a long stretch, nobody came—not to speak to us or to descend on us with guns blazing. I stayed tensed, conscious of every sound that came from the quiet warehouse district. Other than the distant grumble of passing traffic and the hiss of a plastic bag caught in the breeze, it was silent.
When it was twenty minutes after the meetup time, Blaze shifted on his feet. “Maybe he got ambushed on his way to meet us.”
“I don’t think we should stick around any longer,” Julius said grimly. “If he’s got something to say, he can reach out again.”
At the same moment, a faint scraping sound reached my ears from behind a door in the side of the building next to me. I stepped closer, my fingers curling around the hilt of one of my knives—
And the door burst right off its hinges into me, slamming into my body and knocking me onto my ass.
Sudden footsteps and gunshots thundered all around me. I shoved at the heavy metal slab that was pinning me down and then squirmed to maneuver myself out from under it.
“Keep her down!” someone shouted, and a figure that I realized was braced on top of the detached door stomped on my hand, making my fingers release my knife before he kicked it away.
Clenching my jaw against the jab of pain, I aimed a punch and managed to clock the guy in the groin—hard. With a strained noise, he swayed on his perch, and I wrenched myself out from under his and the door’s weight.
The scene I escaped into was total mayhem. Bullets ricocheted off the walls, bodies heaved this way and that, and voices hollered back and forth. I couldn’t tell which were from my men and which from the enemy. Grabbing my gun, I moved to charge into the fray—when yet another opponent charged into me.
I lashed out at him, smacking him in the head with the butt of the gun, kneeing him in the gut. He shoved me backward, barely touching me other than that. Like he was just trying to get me out of the way rather than attack me.
A few more men converged on me. I raised my hand to shoot, and the nearest one knocked my aim off course. Several fists flew at me, but none of them hit me that hard—except the one I couldn’t quite manage to dodge amid the barrage, which lost me my pistol too.
For fuck’s sake. I whipped out my other knife and fell into a fighting stance, glaring at my four attackers. But they just stood there, equally poised but not closing in. Again, I had the sense that they were trying to keep me out of the fighting rather than drag me into it.
Just like the men during the attack at the hotel had hesitated to fight me.
