Page 165 of The Devil's Thorn

This was staged.

“Trap,” I said.

Nikolai’s voice was clipped. “Yeah.”

Yuri chuckled. “Finally, something fun.”

Then—Click.

The sound sliced through the quiet. Metallic. From behind us. The fucking door.

My head turned slowly. Locked. Of course. My jaw tightened. The grip on my gun was like steel now.

I exchanged a look with Nikolai. He was already stepping sideways, angling himself toward the wall. Classic flanking position. Old instincts kicking in.

Yuri spun the knife in his hand again, his grin a mask now. “So how many do we think are watching?”

“Enough,” I muttered, backing slightly toward the nearest column, eyes scanning the shadowed corners above.

And that’s when I saw it. The red dot.

A laser, small but steady. It flickered onto my chest—right over my heart. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t flinch. I just stared down at it and let the silence press in around me.

It was never about the shipment. This was a message. No… A fucking setup. And we’d walked straight into it.

The red dot held steady on my chest, right over my heart. The bastard didn’t even bother with movement. Just held it there. Waiting. Watching.

This wasn’t a warning. It was a promise.

I didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. My lungs were tight, like they already knew what was coming. If I so much as twitched, I’d be hit. And I wasn’t arrogant enough to think it would be clean.

A million calculations ran through my head—angles, distance, structure. I’d mapped out the building hours before I ever stepped inside it. But none of that mattered now. The instant I moved, I was getting shot.

I shifted just my eyes, barely tilting my head, enough to glimpse Nikolai and Yuri in my peripheral vision. They were frozen, eyes on me. I could read the tension in Nikolai’s shoulders, the warning in the way Yuri’s hand flexed tighter around his blade.

“Don’t move,” Nikolai said, voice low, sharp.

“You’ve got a dot,” Yuri added. “Chest. Heartline. Precision.”

I nodded once. “I know.”

There was a beat of silence. Then I muttered, keeping my body still, “Whatever I do, I’m getting hit.”

Yuri clenched his jaw. “You move, you bleed. That’s what they want.”

“Better me than all three of us standing here like fucking statues,” I said quietly. “They’ll come in. That’s the next play.”

“We can wait. Call the team,” Nikolai said.

“They locked us in. Jammed signals. You think they won’t flood this place in under sixty seconds?” I snapped, still calm, still cold. “I move, take the hit, you two use the distraction.”

“I can throw something,” Yuri offered, voice tight. “Knife, phone, anything.”

“They’ll shoot anyway,” I murmured. “They want chaos. They want blood.”

“And you want to give it to them?” Nikolai said harshly.

I let out a slow breath, then turned my head just enough to look at both of them. “We move. On three.”