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That same dangerous focus from the night I’d fought in the pit came back. But this had even more purpose. That night had been a calculated move to ensure Kate was safe. This was to save her life, and I wouldn’t hold back.

Three more gunshots from the back of the house in quick succession, and then silence. There were different kinds of silence in battle. There was the silence when it was over—an empty sound that brought relief and release. And there was the silence in the center of chaos. An active sound like a withheld breath just before the storm broke.

This was that silence.

The front was clear, and everything was quiet. Too quiet. We cleared the other side of the house before approaching the front door, listening. There was nothing. Not a single sound to indicate anything out of place.

Liam motioned to me. Three fingers. Breach on three.

Three.

Two.

One.

I kicked the door open with all the force that I had and plunged inside.

Lights blinded me, and I fired low, aiming for the legs of the person in front of me. Shouts erupted, conflicting orders to shoot and the others to get us down.

I blinked my eyes clear just in time to duck a fist coming at my face, and in that time I realized that it was over. There were too many of them. Way more than we’d counted on. The hollowed-out house was overrun with them. Even at our best—as Liam and I were—we couldn’t take on twenty.

But we tried.

They seemed happy to let us.

My gun was knocked from my hand, and I threw myself at the body of a giant man in front of me, taking him down to the ground. Three punches to the face, and he was unconscious. The next one fell away from me with a punch straight to his nose.

Liam’s back was against mine, and we were surrounded. But they weren’t shooting. If they’d wanted us dead on sight, they would have done it already. The slight relaxation in Liam’s body meant he knew it too. The best chance we had now was letting them take us to the man on the phone and making sure Kate was alive.

We’d go from there.

I’d survived worse things than this, and could do it again.

They all moved at once.

A fist drove into my stomach with enough force to make me gag. Two of them had my arms, pushing me, marching me through the house, and I let them.

Everything in this building had been stripped back to the studs. It was just a shell—a staging area for whatever bullshit they had planned. Or maybe it had never made it past this stage when it’d been built.

They pulled me into a room darker than the rest, and memory overwhelmed me. The scent of blood was thick in the air.

No. I couldn’t go back there right now. I needed to be in this moment. Letting the horror wash over my mind, I accepted it and grounded myself. The dirt under my feet and the hands on my arms. The shapes in the dimness of the room.

An entirely different kind of horror hit me. There were cages on the walls, and the things in them weren’t moving. Those had been the gunshots. They either didn’t have room to transport the ones in here, or they’d decided that these animals weren’t worth the trip to wherever they were going.

At the end of the row, something moved. Kate. Her pale hair shone even in the darkness, and she was staring straight at me, identical horror on her face.

She was in a cage.

A fucking cage.

Rage rose from the center of my being, down in the place where I kept it locked. The sight of the woman I loved in a cage blew the lock off the hinges.

I moved.

They never saw it coming.

Twisting, I broke the grip of the man on my left and turned, slamming my knee into the right man’s balls before I drove it upward again, cracking my knee into his skull. The left man was so startled that he dropped like a stone.