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An uncomfortable chill pooled in my gut. I took a few testing swipes at the blockade, and the men simply fended me off with their own blades. A couple of them had guns at their hips that they weren’t even trying to use. But there were too many of them together for me to make a full attack on one without leaving myself vulnerable to too many others.
I peered past them at the rest of the battle and spotted Julius ducking to the side as he fired his gun. He hurtled backward toward me, and then stopped, his head jerking to the side and his eyes widening as he stared at someone farther down the alley.
“Petrov?” he said. “What the hell—”
He cut himself off to fire another couple of shots and swing his knife with the other hand as two more men rushed at him. Behind them came a stern, bulky guy with a broad forehead that had a scar angled across it. He was looking at Julius with a strange expression too.
Did Julius know that guy? Petrov wasn’t the name of the contact we’d been expecting to talk to. What the hell was going on?
“Someone get to Dess!” Talon’s voice hollered from a spot I couldn’t see.
I squared my shoulders and prepared to take care of myself. These pricks might want to keep me out of the fighting, but we didn’t always get what we wanted. A lesson I was happy to teach them after how many times I’d learned it.
I eyed my opponents again and identified a flaw in their formation. My fingers tightened around my knife. Then I sprang into action.
As if I meant to try to stab a guy in the middle, I lunged forward. But just as he moved to deflect me, I swerved in the opposite direction. My slashing blade cut across another man’s arm—not enough to take him out of commission, but significantly weakening his stronger hand.
The men shifted to adjust their positions to compensate, and I flung myself at the nearest wall. Using momentum and speed, I rebounded off it and leapt right over the pricks’ heads.
They definitely hadn’t expected me to end up behind them. Before they could do more than grunt in surprise, I’d punctured two of their hearts from behind. The third guy whirled around, and I slit open his throat. He crumpled into a pool of blood.
That was what they got for thinking they could contain me.
The constraints of the alley had worked against our enemies as much as ourselves. They must have been hoping to take us more by surprise. Bodies littered the concrete around me, and thankfully none of them belonged to the Chaos Crew. I saw Blaze get in a shot that caught one guy in the head, and Talon wrenched his favorite knife through another opponent’s belly.
A man sprang at Garrison, the closest of the four to me. I yelped a warning and sprang to help as Garrison leapt out of the way with his gun hand jerking upward. The guy raked a knife across Garrison’s forearm, and then ducked and rolled just as Garrison fired at him. Before I could make the attacker pay for the injury, he backed away, panting.
He wasn’t the only one retreating. They must have realized they weren’t winning this fight. Only three of our attackers were still standing, one of them the bulky guy with the forehead scar. He waved his own knife, smeared crimson, and they took off down the one route open to them without obstacles.
I would have charged after them, but as I raced around the corner, my gaze caught on Blaze, who’d fallen back against the wall with his hand pressed against a cut on his chest. My heart lurched with concern. I dashed to him instead.
“It’s okay,” he said in a voice that was only slightly strained. “Just a minor flesh wound.”
When he lifted his hand, I saw he was right—it was a long cut, but shallow. Maybe not even bad enough to require stitches. When I spun around, our remaining attackers had vanished.
Julius cursed. All four of the men gathered around me, watching the shadows warily in case there’d be another attempt.
“You knew one of them, didn’t you?” I asked Julius. “You said his name.”
“There’s no time to talk about it,” he said brusquely. “People will have heard the shots and called the cops. We need to get out of here fast.”
With him in the lead, we hustled out of the alley and made it to the rental car we’d arrived in just as sirens pealed in the distance. We dove inside, Garrison behind the wheel, and peeled away from the curb.
Squashed in the back between Blaze and Talon, I kicked the back of Julius’s seat. “We’re out of there now. Who was that guy you called Petrov?”
To my surprise, it was Talon who answered. “Former special ops. We were on a base with him for a while during our military days.”
I stared at him. That was an even bigger coincidence than I’d have imagined. “And he just happened to show up with a bunch of jerks trying to kill you?”
“It obviously wasn’t by chance,” Julius said, anger thickening his already deep voice. “Whoever’s behind these attacks, they know more about us than they should. And they’re using every tactic they can against us.”
“He won’t know much about our current abilities,” Talon pointed out, but his tone was somber too.
“Who would know about your connection to him?” I asked. “How do the people who sent him even know that you were in the military?” It wasn’t like the Chaos Crew kept a business website with a list of its members and their biographies.
Blaze grimaced. “If these are people who’ve come at us before, they may have seen enough of us that they could have been able to use their own facial recognition software, or fingerprints, or something like that to make a connection.”
Garrison coughed from where he was sitting behind the wheel. “I’m more interested in the fact that they tried to shove Dess off to the side. They didn’t do a thing to hurt you once they had you out of the way, did they?”
