Page 78 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

“But now, you’re a prisoner too.” Her bound hands catch my arm, gripping with the ferocity of a woman clinging to a lifeline.

I breathe. One count. Two. The dancer's recovery. The technique that rebuilds composure from the wreckage of raw emotion.

"Andrea. Listen to me." I lower my voice. The man behind the desk is back on the satellite phone, his attention on the evacuation logistics. The guards are watching us, but from a distance. "There are people who, right now, are fighting to reach us.”

Andrea's grip tightens. "I've been hearing the gunfire. Ten minutes now. It's getting closer."

"How well do you know this layout?"

The question shifts something behind her eyes. The traumatized captive recedes. The dancer surfaces—the woman who maps spatial relationships instinctively, who calculates distances and angles and traffic patterns the way she calculates a corps formation.

"They've moved me four times since I arrived. Always the same route." Her voice drops to a murmur. "Down this corridor, left at the junction, up a ramp to where they park the trucks. Two trucks and a van up there. The loading dock faces north—that's the road into Myanmar."

"Guards?"

“Up top there are four, sometimes five. Two on the loading dock. Two on the vehicles. One floater who patrols the ramp." She pauses. "There's a side passage off the main corridor, about thirty meters from this room. It connects to a utility level—pipes, ventilation, old rusted machinery. They don't guard it. It's partially collapsed."

The intel is gold, mapped by a dancer's spatial memory. Andrea has spent her captivity doing what I would have done—observing, counting, and cataloging the choreography of her captors.

The satellite phone buzzes again. The man answers. His expression shifts—the first crack in his composure. He speaks rapidly, the European language carrying a sharp edge that wasn't there before. He sets the phone down and stands.

"We're accelerating the timeline." He addresses the guards. "Get them loaded. All of them. Now."

The guards move. The one nearest the women reaches for the first girl in the line—a teenager with hollow cheeks and zip-tied wrists.

I stand.

The movement is fluid, automatic—a dancer rising from the floor in one unbroken line. My bare feet plant on the cold concrete. My shoulders roll back. My spine straightens. The zip tie holds my hands behind me, but the restriction doesn't diminish the presence. A ballerina commands a stage with her center of gravity, not her arms.

I step into the space between the guard and the women.

"You're not taking anyone else."

The guard hesitates. The reflex of a man confronting something that doesn't fit the pattern—a barefoot, zip-tied woman with mud on her feet and blood on her shoulder, standing between him and his cargo with the stillness of a person who is not going to move.

The man behind the desk looks at me, his assessment of me fading into something cold and impatient. He sees the lie. Not all of it, but enough. "You are lying, Ms. Masters. Or you are stalling. Either way, my patience is gone." He nods to the guard. "Break her legs. We'll carry her."

My heart stops. The bluff is over. I bought seconds, not minutes, and the time ran out. The guard steps forward, raising the heavy stock of his rifle.

Andrea screams and surges from the wall, her zip-tied hands reaching for the guard.

The guard pivots, swatting her backward with the rifle stock, sending her crashing onto the concrete. He turns back to me, his weapon raised, the fluorescent light gleaming on cold steel.

Gunfire cracks in the corridor. Closer. The distinctive staccato of an M4. Three rounds. Then silence. Then three more.

The man behind the desk picks up the satellite phone, dials, and gets nothing. The line is dead. His composure cracks wider, revealing something desperate underneath.

"You're out of time." Andrea's voice rises from behind me, quiet and fierce.

The other women shift in the shadows. The thousand-yard stares are lifting. The presence of someone standing up—literally, physically standing barefoot and bleeding between them and their armed handlers—has broken something deep inside the paralysis of the room.

Slumped spines straighten. Lowered chins lift. The smallest, most profound act of human resistance: they choose to bear witness.

The guard at the entry door turns toward the corridor. The gunfire is close now. The thick concrete walls carry the sound in distorted waves—the concussive bass of high-caliber rounds, the sharp crack of suppressed rifle fire, and beneath it all, the calculated silence between the shots. A silence that tells me someone is moving through these corridors with the patience of a man clearing a kill zone.

I know that silence. I know the dangerous man who moves inside it.

Then the reinforced steel door shudders.