"Down!" Silas shouted, and the yard erupted before the word finished leaving his mouth, gunfire raining from the elevated walkway as his men scattered for cover behind shipping containers that suddenly felt paper thin.Reyes hit the ground beside him hard, dragging one of the younger crew members down by the collar a half second before a round would have taken the man's head off. "They knew," Reyes gritted out, blood already darkening his sleeve from a graze. "Silas, they knew we were coming, this wasn't luck, this was—""I know." Silas pressed his back against the container, manifest folder still crushed in one fist, mind racing through every person who'd known about tonight. Voss. Reyes. The six men he'd hired. Naomi, wherever she was now. He didn't have time to work through the list, not with bullets chewing through steel three feet from his head. "Count. How many down.""Two, maybe three, I can't see Delgado—"Above them, Augustine's voice carried again through the loudspeaker, un

The car skidded onto the gravel drive before Silas had it fully in park, and he was out the door and running before the engine finished dying behind him, gun already in hand, rain plastering his hair flat against his skull.The safehouse door stood open. Not broken. Open, like someone had walked through it without needing to force anything at all."Naomi!" Silas's voice cut through the rain and got nothing back but silence.He cleared the front room fast, weapon up, Reyes a half step behind him covering the hallway, and found the kitchen empty, a chair knocked sideways on the floor, a mug shattered against the tile, coffee still pooling dark and warm enough to steam faintly in the cold air."She was here recently." Reyes crouched by the mess, careful not to touch it. "This just happened. Maybe twenty minutes ago, not more.""Upstairs." Silas took the steps two at a time, and found the bedroom door hanging half off one hinge, the window beside the bed shattered outward, glass scattered

The cold hit him like a wall, black water closing over his head and swallowing every sound from the pier above into a muffled, distant roar, and for one disorienting second Silas had no sense of up or down at all, only the burn of salt in his throat and the current pulling hard at his soaked clothes.He forced himself still. Just for a heartbeat. Long enough to let his body find the surface on its own, lungs screaming, and when his head broke into the rain-lashed air again he sucked in a breath and scanned the black water frantically for any sign of her."Left!" Reyes's voice carried down from the pier, hoarse, desperate. "Silas, thirty feet, she surfaced thirty feet to your left!"Silas swam hard, the current fighting him with every stroke, rain hammering the water's surface into a chaos of ripples that made it almost impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. He caught a glimpse of dark hair breaking the surface once, gone again a second later, and pushed himself harder, lungs bu

"Say something," Reyes said, low, urgent. "Silas. Say something, because right now you're just staring at that phone like it's going to change what it says if you look at it long enough.""It's not going to change." Silas set the phone down on the table with a control that didn't match the tightness in his jaw. "Someone knew where we'd be tonight. Not guessed. Knew."Naomi had stopped halfway to the stairs, one hand braced against the wall, staring back at the two of them with the blanket still draped over her shoulders. "How is that even possible? You said no one knows this place exists. Six years, you said. Nobody.""I said nobody knew," Silas said. "That's different from nobody finding out."Odette had gone very still by the doorway, the armful of dry clothes forgotten against her chest, and something in her expression made Reyes look at her sharply."You have a thought," Reyes said. "I can see it. Whatever it is, say it.""I don't, I don't want to accuse anyone of anything without

"Get down from the window," Silas said, already pulling Naomi back by the shoulder, his voice dropped to something low and hard. "Now. Both of you.""There's only one set of headlights," Reyes said, not moving from his position, weapon still trained steady on the glass. "One car. If this were a hit, they wouldn't come in with one car and no cover.""Or they want us to think that." Silas's eyes never left the tree line, watching the twin points of light crawl slowly closer along the gravel, no urgency to the pace at all, no aggression. "Odette. Is there a way out of this house that doesn't go through the front.""Cellar door, round the back, comes out near the tree line," Odette said, appearing in the hallway already dressed, calm in the particular way of someone who'd clearly run through this exact scenario in her head more than once over six years. "I can take Naomi that way if it comes to it.""I'm not hiding in a cellar while the rest of you stand here deciding whether to shoot som