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He jerks his chin.
Everything happens at once.
A man lunges from the left. I elbow his throat and hear the satisfying crunch of cartilage. Another swings—a flash of steel hidden in his hand—and I drive my knee into his gut before slamming his face into the wall.
From the corner of my eye I see Evelyn take aim.
Fuck. Where’s Dahlia?
She fires. The sound is deafening in the small hallway.
Dahlia screams.
Pain sears down my shoulder, hot and wet. Not lethal. Not yet.
I grab my precious submissive. No time to count the bodies or take stock of wounds. We run. Heading outside in the empty alley will make us too easy a target.
Through the club. Through the parted crowd. Through a haze of sweat and perfume and blood.
We don’t stop until we’re outside, in the car, two streets away before I pull over. Her breath is choppy, her hands shaking, my coat soaked in crimson.
I press her against the wall, check her quickly for injuries. “Are you hit?”
“No,” she breathes, eyes wide, stunned. “You?—”
“Just a graze.” I lie. “We’ll get it cleaned.” I feel around the collar, slide out the hair-thin microchip with hands unsteady as fuck.
She sees it—the fear I never show, the guilt twisting in my gut.
Evelyn. Vesper. The game is no longer in the dark, hiding among proxies and firewalls.
It’s gone live and we’re running out of bandwidth and time.
Dahlia
“She shot you,”I say, voice raw.
“It’s not bad.” But his face says otherwise.
“Fuck, Dante?—”
“We knew going in that they were dangerous,” he growls, then softens. “This is what they do, Dahlia. Betray. Manipulate. Kill.”
The adrenaline crashes and all that’s left is the fear.
And the realization that this is real now.
No more games of dominance and surrender in silk-draped rooms.
We’ve stepped into a power war.
And one or both of us might perish long before our thirty days are over.
I’ve never heardsilence like this before.
Not even in the dark corners of cyberspace where I used to hide out for hours, headphones on, the world forgotten.
This silence isthick—the kind that sticks to your lungs and doesn’t let go.