Page 113 of The Enforcer's Revenge

“I’m trying. Oh—” Brianna felt something stab her knee, which was jarring when she was wearing shorts and had no protection. “Fuck.”

“What?”

“Something stabbed me.” Brianna felt on the ground, trying to find what it was, and discovered the splintered wood along the edge of the floorboard. “Floor feels broken here.”

Carina crawled over to Brianna and felt the floor herself, except they were both near blind in the dimness. “Where is it? I don’t feel anything.”

Brianna grabbed Carina’s hand and physically put it over the split wood in the floor.

The loud chaos of the raid echoed from the upstairs hallway, getting closer and closer. “NYPD! Show yourself! Hands up!”

Carina kept feeling around the damaged floor like she hadn’t heard them.

“NYPD SWAT! Come out, or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

It sounded like they were tearing the house apart, room by room, quickly getting to Carlo’s toward the end of the hallway.

“We have to go out,” Brianna growled at her. “It’s NYPD. We go out. We play stupid. It’ll be fine.”

In response, Brianna saw the inky outline of Carina jerking open a small door that lifted up from the floor instead of sideways from the wall like they had been looking for. She grabbed Brianna’s arm like she expected her to crawl into that thing—blindly—with NYPD closing in at any second.

What were they going to look like, stuck in a laundry chute, when the cops found them?

Stupid as hell.

Guilty as fuck.

Brianna was sure of it as she found herself crawling into a hole in the floor, praying that she wasn’t going to end up a pile of broken bones on the bottom. She had to go feet first in the dark, which was no easy task.

“Go.” Carina pushed at Brianna’s shoulders.

It was like crawling into a deep, bottomless, unlined coffin. The wood was rough, splintery, and everything was so fucking dark. It was completely oppressive. The stuff nightmares were born from. She braced her legs once she got deep enough but was still leaning halfway out.

“NYPD!”

The room shook with the sound of Carlo’s door being kicked, only Brianna had locked it.

SHIT!

“Hey! They’re in here! Help me take it down.”

The response was immediate as more than one person started kicking at the door, but Carlo’s deadbolt was clearly not an ordinary deadbolt. It held them off a few extra seconds, but Brianna needed to quickly make room for Carina. She didn’t realize she had made the decision to let go until she was sliding down the laundry chute.

She knew she was agile enough to catch herself before she got very far. It was a long ride down to the basement, and the space was very narrow. Only she didn’t think about nails in the wood, and she really wished she would’ve.

Something ripped through her arm, and it was one of those white-hot terror moments. She used her legs to catch herself, and Brianna knew instantly she was very hurt.

Emergency room hurt.

She couldn’t warn Carina. She didn’t dare speak, and they couldn’t afford to have both of them injured if they had any chance of surviving this. Brianna braced herself with her knees and reached up to feel for the nail. When she didn’t find it, she started to slowly inch her way up with her back braced against the side wall and her legs doing all the work.

Luckily, Carina didn’t drop blindly like Brianna had. It sounded like she was slowly lowering herself down, using her legs to give her leverage.

Then the door from the outer room burst open. The wall vibrated with the sound of feet as the intruders came into the room. Carina obviously gave up on going slow and let go. There was the click of the chute door closing, which meant Carina pulled it shut on her way down, and Brianna braced her kneesharder a moment later when she ended up catching a large part of Carina’s weight.

In the next second, the sound of gunfire deafened them.

It exploded inside the closet so violently that Brianna lost her balance and slid farther down the chute. Carina slid with her, and there were a few heartbeats where death felt everywhere.