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I waited a second for confirmation, but none came.
“Repeat. No guards outside the basement door. Anyone have eyes on an Ace?”
Still nothing.
Mari frowned, taking over. “Black Team Two? Black Team Three? Birds? Anyone copy?”
“No signal. He’s got a jammer,” Grey said, waving his phone. Which meant the comms units were useless.
Well, fuck. That made things complicated. We had no way to tell the others what we were seeing, so we were all going in blind.
Let’s hope it’s not like this everywhere.
Pocketing the earpiece, I stayed low and forced my focus here and now. The other teams weren’t my problem. Surviving was.
“We stay together,” I said again, making sure Mari heard me. There would be no running off to kill Cash alone. We did it together, or someone else could take the fucking shot.
“Together,” she promised.
We’d intended to use the fingerprint scanners to get inside since there was no way Cash could override them, but he’d apparently found a work-around.
Security systems needed power to run. We had a generator, but since the club was typically guarded, we didn’t have it set to kick on automatically. Which meant, when Cash had cut the power, he’d gotten access to the club without a fight, and now he’d manually locked the doors.
A feat Greyson was obviously pissed about. He grumbled under his breath about what he was going to do when this was over until Mari snapped, “Fix it later. We’ve got to get in there.”
Thankfully, the basement had its own separate backup, so it still needed a fingerprint to enter. Mari laid hers down until the light glowed green. As soon as we were all in, we let the door shut. First order of business, providing an entrance for the others.
We took the stairs up quietly, only stopping to make sure the basement was secure again. When we hit the top, we angled for the back hallway where the bathrooms bracketed an emergency exit, but we’d found our first snag.
The hall had a single guard who was dozing when we cleared the top stair. The creak of our boots against the wood woke him fully, and he opened his mouth to yell out. Nate surged toward him, clapping a gloved hand over it and slipping a knife into the guy’s throat. He was too focused on suffocating to care about us anymore.
Grey opened a nearby storage room and helped Nate lay the first Ace down before hustling over to ensure the emergency exit stayed open. It took some clever work, but he got a knife wedged in there so good, we’d have to replace the whole damn door to get it out. “Let’s go.”
Mari and I took point, rounding the corner quickly, which meant we got a face full of knuckles when we ran into a duo of guards who were far more alert than the last. I ducked out of the way, but Mari took a fist to the cheek. Her quiet oof pissed me off, and I grabbed my guard by the throat, plunging the blade into the same place Nate had. I wanted him dead so I could take my time with the other guy, but when I turned, Mari had his mouth pinned closed with her own knife.
“You shouldn’t have touched me.”
The Ace dropped to her feet, and she stepped over him, letting Nate and Grey drag the bodies to the closet again. We weren’t trying to hide our entrance; we just wanted to get closer before Cash found us. A person only had so much energy, and if we used all of ours before then, we’d be dead.
We took out six more Aces by the time my watch vibrated with a warning. I lifted one finger into the air.
One minute until the second wave.
We had to find Cash before we lost him in the mayhem.
The main room was littered with dozens of Aces. They sat around the tables smoking, drinking all the second-tier booze—probably because the top-shelf shit was gone—and playing cards. Most of them looked half smashed, and the others were openly snoring in their seats.
How the fuck was this the army that had nearly taken Seattle?
“Jesus,” Mari whispered, and I just knew she was thinking the same thing.
Nate winced. “They’re better when they’re sober.”
Didn’t we all know it.
The reminder of what had happened at the compound stole my breath, but I kept my focus. “Let’s check the office.”
We crept down the side hallway, clearing the storage rooms as we went, but we found no one else.
