Page 80 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

Her eyes meet mine.

The moment lasts less than a second, but contains everything.

The SIG barks.

The entry door guard drops—two rounds, center mass. The weapon transitions before the body hits the concrete. The far-wall hostile takes one round in the chest that staggers him and a second that drops him. The center hostile—the one closest to Lily—raises his weapon toward me.

The third pair of rounds punches through his throat. He folds backward, the weapon clattering to the floor.

Three hostiles. Six rounds. One and a half seconds.

The man behind the desk—fifties, wire-rimmed glasses—lunges for the desk drawer. His hand closes on a compact pistol.

I close the distance in two strides. The SIG's muzzle presses against his forehead before the pistol clears the drawer.

"Don't."

One word. The weight of a thousand yards of distance compressed into four feet of concrete floor.

His hand opens. The pistol drops back into the drawer. The wire-rimmed glasses sit askew on his thin face, and behind them, the eyes of a man who has run his odds and found them insufficient.

Bronco sweeps through the doorway behind me, his sidearm tracking the corners. Rook follows, clearing the far-wall door and posting security on the corridor beyond. Hammer comes through last and goes straight to the women in the corner, dropping to a knee, holding both hands open and empty where they can see them before he touches anyone.

"Room’s clear." Bronco's voice is controlled, professional. "Three hostiles down. One detained."

“Copy that.” Cipher’s voice on the other end of our comms.

I holster the SIG. Nine rounds remaining. The magazine didn't run dry.

Not this time.

The roar of gunfire fades, replaced by the ringing in my ears and the harsh breathing of the captives against the wall. The room is secure. She's alive.

The confirmation lands like a heart restarting.

The operator steps back. The man moves.

I pull the Ka-Bar from its ankle sheath and cross the floor to Lily.

She hasn't moved. She holds her position with the stillness of a woman who understood, in the fraction of a second between the door opening and the first shot, that the safest place in the room was where she stood. In my sight line. Trusting a sniper's accuracy with her life the way she trusts a partner's arms in a lift.

The Ka-Bar slices through the zip tie in a single motion. The severed plastic drops to the concrete.

Her hands come free.

The impact of her body against mine is a physical event—one hundred five pounds of dancer slamming into two hundred twenty pounds of operator with a force that would have staggered me if I weren't braced for it.

Her arms lock around my neck. Her face buries in my chest, pressing into the plate carrier, into the blood-soaked fabric, into the space directly above my heart which stopped beating for her ninety minutes ago and hasn't found its rhythm since.

I wrap my arms around her. The Ka-Bar is still in my right hand, the blade flat against her back. My left arm crushes her against the Kevlar. The pain in my shoulder is a white-hot wire running from deltoid to spine, but I don’t care.

Pain is proof I'm alive.

She's proof it mattered.

I press my lips against the top of her head, tasting smoke, sweat, and victory.

The embrace lasts four seconds. It's all I allow. The operator reassembles around the man who is holding her, sealing the cracks, restoring the discipline that keeps a weapon functional in a combat zone.