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“For Christ’s sake,” Jonathon shouted. “Can you not manage one woman?”
The guard hissed something in French I didn’t understand, but it sounded a lot like a string of curses aimed at Jonathon, and then at me, and he tackled me to the ground, wrenching my hands behind my back. As he brought his body over me, I arched my back and slammed my head backward into his nose.
Crunch.
The man cursed in English, slurring out a “Shit, moszerfucker,” before rolling away from me. I scrambled to my feet, only to be met by a sudden blow to the other cheek. Jonathon had hit me that time, and the open slap from his hand connected with my face with a dizzying crack. I fell back to my hands and knees, my face on fire and my vision spinning.
“This is not how this was supposed to go,” Jonathon raged. He hauled me up by my arm and shook me. My already reeling head pulsed with agony. “This is not what you are. Stop acting like a deranged creature and behave.”
I coughed out a laugh. “I am, though.” I lifted my vision to Jonathon’s pinched features, and his face swam as I struggled to right my equilibrium. “I am perfectly deranged. And no matter how much of my brain you scoop out, I always will be. You can’t have me, and you can’t change me. Not that it matters.”
Pop, pop, pop.
My smile darkened. “He’s coming for you.”
It took Cohen’s team a full two minutes to tighten their perimeter. I’d have fired every one of their asses if they’d been my operatives—it was sloppy. Their outer perimeter hadn’t even noticed us cross the vineyard, and as Tabitha and I skulked around the darkening, sunset-drenched château grounds, I didn’t bother hiding too much. Their attention appeared to be diverted to something inside the house, so even two operatives in full tactical gear—complete with helmets, face guards, and pounds of ammunition and weaponry—didn’t trigger their alarms until it was far too late.
“Target nine neutralized,” Tab’s voice said over her speaker in my ear. She was ten feet behind me, covering my ass and securing and disarming any hostiles I hadn’t immediately killed. It was a difficult balance to strike in a situation like this. No, I didn’t want to put a bullet between every target’s eyes like I might in a military operation. They were hired security guards, and they were just doing their jobs. But I wasn’t going to give them the chance to shoot me, either.
We had worked our way up from the back entrance, clearing a room with two targets first, and that had finally tipped them off to our presence here. Silent takedowns were preferable, but not if they had guns pulled on me right out of the gate. Immediately after that, hostiles had stacked up outside a kitchen that led up a flight of stairs to the main floor, and that was where I wasn’t entirely sure I’d managed to neutralize rather than eliminate. That was what Tabitha was for. I shot, kicked away weapons, and then moved on. She neutralized and kept an eye on my rear.
We bounded from room to room, clearing them and finding cover before moving on to the next. Although I had memorized the schematics for the château during the plane ride over, I couldn’t be sure where they had taken Mattie. It wasn’t hard to figure it out, though. Tabitha and I hid in the shadows of a closet room just beyond the main foyer. And then we watched.
Security forces like this one—private companies that looked beefy but had little to no formal training—they were predictable. It was their job to protect the asset. So, when nine of their guys fell, they did the one thing they had been trained to do; they flanked the asset.
And honestly, it didn’t matter where this jackass had Mattie. I didn’t want her right now. I wanted him. I wanted his mouth around my gun and his fear staring right back at the retribution that had come for him.
“The dining room,” Tabitha’s voice scratched in my ear.
We both had masks around our faces that muffled our whisper comms, so I nodded and said, “Ten-four,” before leaving our cover. I knew from the map ingrained in my head that the dining room took up an enormous portion of the lower floor, spanning a whole wall of the château and stretching up three stories like a Catholic cathedral. It was close to our position, which meant we’d be coming up behind hostiles. There was a chance we could get flanked by them if there were more than the dozen that had assembled around Cohen’s location, but unless they had a full army tucked away in their back pocket—which they didn’t—then I wasn’t worried. We’d faced worse before.
Tabitha and I bounded, sprinting forward in short spurts before taking cover and securing an area. As I’d predicted, they didn’t station their formation until a good twenty feet before the dining room entrances, anyway. And they had them in a linear defense configuration that was dumb as shit. Why? Because it was easy to train knuckleheads to look like they were being effective, but it was a lot harder to train them to be useful.
Shaking my head, I pressed my back to the wall near a stairwell. Beyond us, the historical house opened up to a hallway maybe ten feet wide and two stories tall. To the right, three entrances led to the expansive dining room beyond. The whole mansion had a classical, baroque feel, with wood-paneled walls, outdated wallpaper, and ostentatious sconces lining the hallway to illuminate the ornate architecture. The problem with older blueprints was how easy it was to get funneled into one small space. This one, for example, put twelve men right in the line of our fire like fish in a barrel. They’d stationed their guards along the hallway and by the dining room entrances. “Twenty feet, twelve hostiles. Five at nine o’clock, two at twelve, five at your three. Linear perimeter.”
“Ten-four,” Tabitha’s voice whispered. “I’ve got the five at nine o’clock.”
That left only seven in my sector of fire. Snore. “I can get my seven before you get your five,” I challenged with a crooked grin.
Her breathy laugh crackled over the speaker. “I’m not taking that bet.”
“I need a more gullible op,” I muttered, hitching my rifle against my shoulder and into position.
A crash from inside the dining room rang through the cavernous mansion. It was followed closely by a male shout, and my grin died on my lips. So, he did have her in there. Rage fired to life like a V8 engine in my chest, and I pied the corner the same instant Tabitha peeked out from her cover.
Two shots to the thighs, one to the chest, got a knee—one more to the side to get his shoulder, one to the face—oops—two to each shoulder, one to the stomach and another in his pelvis, two to the hips. Seven guards went down in ten seconds, and Tabitha laid out her five just after.
I didn’t have time to fully neutralize all twelve of them, and so, taking a risk, I crossed the X, putting myself in the range of fire if any of the black-clad hostiles still had their crosshairs on me. Two shots rang out from my left, and I located the source. One hostile on the ground with a handgun. With shaking hands, he held it between his palms and had it trained on me from across the room. Tabitha shot his hand from ten feet away. His scream joined the cacophony, but I didn’t pause to clear the room. Tabitha could handle it.
I had a more pressing target.
Not waiting to see whether the door was locked or not, I lifted my boot and smashed the plate of the antique brass doorknob that led to the dining area. It crashed open, swishing against a thick, opaque plastic tarp. Gunshots pierced through the tarp, but I’d already flattened myself against the wall beside the doorway. With the plastic in the way, I couldn’t get a visual on hostiles. Even for me, that was reckless. I wasn’t going to pepper shots into a room where Mattie might get hurt.
I couldn’t stand there unprotected with twelve potentially unneutralized threats at my front, either. I waited for their gunfire to cease, counting nine rounds. From the sound of it, they had handguns. Knowing they most likely had some rounds left, I pulled in a bracing breath, prayed for luck, and stormed through the plastic sheet.
My brain registered a lot of things at once, but foremost was that one of the guards had his black handgun aimed right at me. I took him down with one, well-aimed shot to his chest and another to his neck right after. A shot from the second guard made contact with my vest, and I trained my sights on him a split second before two more rounds took him down. Pain radiated along my ribs and chest from the impact of the bullet, and I knew it would leave a nasty bruise, but it was nothing life-threatening.
My brain caught up with the rest of the room after that. It looked like a makeshift medical room had been set up, and a doctor and a nurse had scrambled for cover behind an operating table and standing equipment to the left of the room. Over where the guards had been, Mattie lay on her stomach in the middle of the floor in a medical gown. Jonathon stood over her, dressed all in brown like a fucking newsie, and he held a handgun out to the side with the barrel pointed at Mattie’s prone form.
