Natalie and Sophie climbed the stairwell with supplies pressed flat against their ribs, coats zipped to their chins, moving fast and quiet through the pitch black passage. Marco's voice still echoed in Natalie's head as she reached the tenth floor landing."Lock the door behind you. Don't open for anyone you don't recognize. Check the hallway through the peephole before you step out. And if someone knocks after midnight, pretend you're not home."Sophie glanced at her as they paused in front of the apartment door. "He almost sounded like he cared."Natalie pulled out her key without looking back. "He doesn't care about me, Sophie. He cares about keeping something useful in working condition. There's a difference."She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and locked it behind both of them without turning on a single light. Derek's empty chair sat in the corner of the dark living room like a shadow that would never move again.Neither woman looked at it.Marco sat in his safe house runnin

The six of them moved through the underground garage in single file, their breath coming out in thick white clouds that dissolved into the frozen dark. Marcus led the way with a pipe wrench gripped in his right hand, shoulders squared, footsteps measured. Behind him, Vic carried a crowbar, two younger men held kitchen knives, a fourth gripped a heavy flashlight like a club, and Bernie shuffled at the rear with his leather tool pouch pressed against his chest.They reached the reinforced steel door at twelve fourteen. Bernie crouched down in front of the electronic lock panel and unrolled his toolkit on the concrete beside his knee. His fingers fumbled with the first pick, the cold turning his usually precise hands into stiff, clumsy instruments that could barely grip the thin metal tools."Come on, old man. Move faster." Marcus leaned over his shoulder, breath fogging."My fingers are numb." Bernie's voice was tight, his jaw clenched against the cold. "This lock isn't some department

Old Bernie crouched in front of the lock on apartment 704 and had it open in forty seven seconds. The door swung inward and the six men poured through it like water through a broken dam, their blistered faces twisted with a fury that had nothing to do with the Benedetti family and everything to do with the pain still burning across their skin.Marco watched their heat signatures converge on the apartment from the comfort of his couch, six orange silhouettes flooding into a space that held four pale blue ones. The screaming started eleven seconds later, muffled by concrete and distance but unmistakable in its pitch and desperation.He turned off the thermal display, gave Tank a piece of dried beef, and went to bed.By morning, every building in the neighborhood knew what had happened.A woman from the floor directly above apartment 704 had pressed her ear to the floor the moment the commotion started, and by sunrise she had spread the details to every person she could reach, both in th

Amber stood in the middle of the safe house, stripped down to her hoodie after peeling off three layers of winter clothing, her eyes sweeping across the room in open disbelief. The electric lights hummed overhead. The fireplace crackled in the corner. The indoor temperature sat at a comfortable seventy two degrees while the world outside froze and rotted under sheets of toxic green rain."You have electricity." Her voice came out like a prayer. "You have actual electricity. And heat. And running water. How is that even possible?""I prepared." Marco set a fresh glass of purified water on the table and gestured for her to sit.Amber grabbed the glass before her body even hit the chair. She drank the entire thing in four long gulps, her throat bobbing, her eyes closing as the clean water washed through a system that had been running on melted frost scraped off windowsills for the past two days. When the glass was empty she pressed it against her forehead and breathed out hard, her whole

Marco had the system primed before Marcus finished reaching for the basket.[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Hostile movement detected. Six targets initiating coordinated charge. Energy barrier: READY. Activation on mental command. Countdown: ENGAGED.]Marcus's fingers closed around the basket handle and his right foot shifted forward. Behind him, five men launched from their positions at the same instant, a wall of desperate muscle and blistered skin surging toward the open doorway.Marco blinked once.The energy barrier erupted from the system like an invisible tidal wave, a wall of compressed force that expanded outward from the doorframe in every direction.It hit all six of them at the same time, catching them mid stride, and hurled them backward across the garage floor with the casual violence of a giant swatting insects off a table.Marcus flew the farthest, his thick body slamming into the side of a parked sedan hard enough to dent the door panel. Vic crashed into a concrete pillar and c