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She heard her name through the roaring in her ears.
“Marissa!”
Viktor?
The sound of footfalls and then, “Jesus Christ! Iz!”
Viktor’s face, as she had never seen it before, appeared inher line of vision, broken and scared. “Let’s get him off her, Stark.”
The pressing weight of the dead mercenary lifted and her chest expanded as she welcomed a deep breath.
“Where are you hurt, kitten? Tell me, sweetheart.”
“It’s not my blood,” Marissa croaked. “Well, maybe some of it.”
“Anything broken?”
How would I know?Marissa wanted to scream. She felt six ways broken to Sunday.
“Damn it, Marissa, talk to me.”
“My butt.”
Viktor’s brows furrowed. “You broke your butt?”
“No, you ass. Someone shot me in the butt.”
Now that she could breathe better, Marissa felt more like herself. “Help me up.”
Viktor gave her a hand up, and when she had straightened fully, she caught the quirk of his mouth and scowled. “It’s not funny.”
“This is becoming a habit, Ms. Cole.”
“What? You picking me up from the floor?”
“And you getting blood all over my property.”
“Well, sue me,” Marissa retorted. “Did we lose anyone else?”
“No. Maia and the others are fine,” Viktor said softly. “You did well, Ms. Cole.”
“Team effort.” Her tone turned somber. “I’m sorry about Holly.”
The planes of his face hardened. “So am I.”
Keepingthings under the radar when two SUVs had plowed into a building was a tricky situation to handle. Especially with a body sandwiched between the wall and the bumper ofan Escalade and another planted under the tire of the Explorer. However, the “cleaners” that AGS used were the same ones the CIA employed to tidy up some of their messier affairs.
A tarp was immediately erected to cover the missing walls and gates. These would be sealed off later by expandable metal barriers until repairs could be made.
Viktor tried to erase the image of finding Marissa pinned under a behemoth, not knowing whose blood and guts were spilling out between them. For a second, he couldn’t breathe, his ears roared with denial at the gruesome tableau before him. He thought for sure she was dead, eviscerated and crushed, and he’d been too late to save her.
But Marissa had proven once more that she had the ability to hack it as well as the best of them. The attacker was more than twice her weight. It certainly could have been luck that pulled her through, but he didn’t give a fuck. Luck only got you so far. Skills were what kept you alive again and again and again.
The coroners were busy processing the bodies. Yeager was holed up in one of the briefing rooms with agents from the FBI and DHS to discuss jurisdiction. The case spanned international and local boundaries and Viktor had a hunch that it would fall under the FBI with the CIA working the background as always.
Tim was tapped out. Viktor could see it in the way his analyst would stare blankly at his screen, suddenly snap out of it, and then zone out again. Tim wasn’t a warrior, and though he had watched several missions go down, he had never seen someone’s head shot in front of him. And the idea that a place as fortified as AGS was penetrable to their enemies took away any sense of security.
Derek had offered to help, having worked in the datacenter before, and was assisting Tim in offloading remaining information into a cloud-based database that was used fordisaster recovery to continue providing seamless support for their field agents.
