Page 78 of Only Fools Rush

Lights flickered. Blood splattered the walls. It looked like a bloodbath had happened in here. The South Americans must have come in guns blazing, a total ambush.

How many Russians had been here? Surely Makarov had enough people on-site to protect his investment?

“There,” Cas jerked his head to a door behind the register and to the right. It had been kicked open.

“Five minutes on the cops,” Ciel said.

“Let’s go.” Side by side, we approached the door. “I’ll go first and fan right. You follow and go left.”

“Got it.”

Caspian was competent. For a moment, I took a breath in relief that he knew what he was doing. We worked well together.

I stepped through the door, finger on the trigger. It was eerily quiet. Movement to my right had my head snapping in that direction. Instead of firing my gun, which would draw attention, I yanked my knife from its sheath and threw it. It sunk into a man’s chest. He looked down at it, confused, before dropping to his knees. Before he could scream, I punched him in the throat, collapsing his windpipe. He fell to the ground, gasping.

“Wynn!” Caspian shouted.

I looked up, and a man had a gun pointed directly at my face. Without thinking, I dove to the side as the bulletthunkedinto the ground right where I had been standing. Cas fired his gun, and the man dropped.

I stood, taking two heavy breaths. Yes, we worked well together. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said as he stepped forward, gun raised. We pushed further into the back room. My boot almost slipped on a pool of blood. I looked down to see drag marks. Shit.

The lights still flickered, casting the room in alternating light and darkness, but tables lined the length of the room. A half-split kilo was cut open on one of the tables, its powder spilling to the floor. This was where the drugs were processed into smaller, sellable quantities. Overturned crates littered the floor, along with cling wrap and tape rolls.

The blood marks on the floor led to three dead Russians piled on top of one another in the corner, gunshot wounds to their chest and head.

“Damn,” Cas breathed.

A body jumped out from behind a piled of crates, tackling me to the ground. My body responded on instinct, using my training to grapple and jostle for position. I hooked a leg around theman’s body but hissed when the blade of a knife sliced across my side.

I shifted my hips, got control over the attacker’s body with my own, and used my leverage to flip us over. My knife was still in the other guy’s chest, where I had thrown it earlier, and I had dropped my gun when he tackled me. The attacker tried to swipe the blade at me again, but I closed my hand around his and squeezed. He dropped the knife. I caught it, drove it through his ribs, and up into his heart. He stopped fighting.

Caspian was locked in a fight with another one of them, the two men circling each other. Blood dripped from a cut on Cas’s lip, but he looked otherwise fine.

I yanked the knife free, stalked over to them, grabbed hold of the man’s shoulder, and slammed the knife between his shoulder blades. He dropped.

Quiet fell over the room. I sucked in a deep breath, trying to get my heart rate under control.

“You all right?” I asked, looking down at the two South Americans who had jumped us.

In the struggle, his shirt tore to reveal a giant expanse of tattoos across his chest. There was some lettering in Spanish.Muerte. A skull with a scorpion crawling through it, its tail raised high, and poking through the eye cavity. A few other filler pieces surrounded it.

A cartel tattoo.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Cas grunted. He rolled his shoulder and grimaced. His injuries were still healing, but he still held his own.

Police sirens sounded in the distance.

I stared down at the dead man’s tattoo. If Ciel knew the Alacrán Cartel, maybe he’d be able to use this. I quickly snapped a picture on my phone and texted it to him.

“You’re bleeding,” Cas said.

I looked down at my chest. Blood seeped through my shirt, but after inspection, the wound didn’t look that deep. I’d be fine.

“I’m all right,” I told him. Cas scoped out the rest of the room. Meanwhile, I retrieved my knife, and reloaded my guns. The back door wasn’t open, and it didn’t look like any others were hiding or had run. The place was trashed. “Ciel, ETA on the police?”

There couldn’t be many left.