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She’d come here to win.

Nick felt his body tense as he held her steely gaze.

He should have expected this. Hedidexpect it, to a degree at least, but he’d honestly thought it would happen when they got deeper into the Archangel complex, and that it would involve a direct threat to Damon’s life, if not to theirs. He’d expected a disembodied voice over a loudspeaker, threatening to kill Damon with force-fields or with acid gas if Nick didn’t hand over the kid and Malek, and likely Wynter and himself, too.

He certainly didn’t expect Lara to come in person like this.

All of those things told him, instinctively, not to move.

They told him she wouldn’t have done this, notlike this,unless she felt confident she could bring Nick to the table, and quickly. His knowledge of St. Maarten fed that instinct to wait, to hear her out, to let her begin the negotiation.

Brick had no such instinct.

In fact, Brick’s instincts took him in exactly the opposite direction.

Brick leapt at the richly-dressed Archangel C.E.O. without any warning whatsoever.

No snarl. No quippy word. No angry scream.

He moved so fast, Nick doubted St. Maarten had expected it either, whatever perfect plan she’d thought she’d concocted in coming here like this.

The humans with guns had no prayer of their reflexes catching up to Brick’s frontal assault. Not a single projectile or plasma bolt hit him; he moved too rapidly for any of them to find their mark before Brick was already on top of her.

Truthfully, Nick doubted any of the humans could evenseeBrick’s leap with their eyes, much less shoot at it. The older vampire had always been fast.

There was a reason he was still alive.

Even so, Nick felt a little awe-struck at the blur Brick’s lanky form made, too.

The older vampire didn’t leap so much as dive like a predatory bird. He threw himself at the woman in the fifty-thousand-credit suit, and Nick found himself thinking Brick might have broken her spine, simply from the force of that impact.

Then a lot of other things happened really, really quickly.

* * *

Malek dropped to one knee,gun in hand. He fired from low down on the floor, his mismatched eyes concentrated, and harder than Nick had ever seen them.

Nick recovered more slowly than either of them.

It took the human in front of him turning his gun off Nick and onto Mal to get him to act. Nick lunged the instant the barrel moved a centimeter off his head. He back-fisted the man’s face, feeling as much as hearing the satisfying crunch as he broke his jaw and one cheek with a glove-clad hand. He followed up the first hit with an elbow to the throat, which dropped the man so fast, Nick might have kicked out his legs.

He didn’t wait, but yanked the rifle out of the human’s hands, and shot him with it.

Luckily, all of St. Maarten’s soldiers appeared to be human.

Zoe had also ducked and zagged, and now she had her own gun out.

Brick, of course, who started all of it, had knocked Lara St. Maarten over completely with his intense vampire weight.

Impossibly, St. Maarten still put up some kind of struggle, even as Brick forced her backwards so quickly Nick could barely track it with his eyes. Nick heard a gunshot then, saw a red spot appear sharply in the left part of Brick’s back, and realized Lara had been armed after all. She’d just shot Brick in the chest.

It wasn’t enough, of course.

Brick’s weight and momentum continued to propel the two of them backwards until they slammed into an organic metal railing between the wall and stairwell. The force of the impact vibrated the thick bar. Lara let out a pained gasp, the first time one of them broke the silence. They balanced there another half-second, until Brick and St. Maarten flipped over the metal railing altogether.

They disappeared.

Nick heard Lara scream on the way down.