Page 22 of Soulmate of the Mafia King
I glanced around a corner and found a patrolling pair. Just the right amount to guard the big guy’s office. I ducked back, dropped my automatic onto its strap, and wincingly withdrew my pistol from its inner pocket. If I dropped one and winged the other, I’d be able to ask a fucking question for the first time tonight. The trio of men around me nodded. They’d be ready, but they wouldn’t act until I fired.
I slipped on the night-vision goggles and leaned just one lens and the muzzle of my pistol around the corner. My shoulder screamed. I squeezed off two shots. One between the eyes. The other in the shoulder the fucker braced his automatic on. As the silenced shots cracked through the air, my guys leapt out and grabbed both of Zahur’s men, the corpse before he hit the floor, and the living man before he screamed. I shed the goggles and strode out to place the barrel of my pistol against the living man’s forehead.
“Tell me where Zahur is, and I won’t fire,” I said.
The man covering his mouth released him. For a breathless moment, only silence and distant gunfire reigned.
Then, the fucker started laughing.
CHAPTER 17
CORA
Isat bolt upright in my crappy cot as soon as I heard the first shot. They taught me a lot of bullshit in the Academy, shit I never ended up using in the real world, but the one thing they gave me was a damn near perfect sense of when a fight had broken out. I jumped out of bed, my body aching from my last night with Zahur, and padded to the door to listen.
More gunfire. Mostly automatic. A lot of yelling. Nearly all Arabic. Another fucking thing they didn’t teach me before putting me undercover that would’ve come in fucking handy.
One of the other women, a college kid named Allie, crept up to me. “Do you think they’re here to save us?”
I looked down at her and tried not to grimace. Her face was all black and blue from a run-in with one of the guards the other day, but she hadn’t even spent time with the fucker holding us all here yet. She’d only got taken a week or two ago. I didn’t want to crush her fucking dreams. But I’d been here for a month and a half, taken for almost a year now, when an undercover op in a sex-trafficking ring broke as bad as it fucking could’ve. I knew the tightrope we walked here. Gunfire could mean someone decided Zahur was too much of a pest to let live, but it didn’t mean a damn thing about what would happen to us.
“Maybe,” I said. “Why don’t you wake up everyone else?”
She nodded and crept away. I pressed my ear to the door. Whatever happened next, it would be better if we were ready.
Slowly, the other three women woke. I gritted my teeth. I’d been mapping the back passages for a while now, and I knew there had to be more women than us. Or a shit stain like Zahur wanted us to have the same palatial life he did and only took advantage of his live-in harem every couple of weeks. I snorted to myself. No fucking chance. But I couldn’t reach the women in the other rooms. As far as I could tell, our parts of the house were completely isolated from one another. I knew a couple of walls I thought connected, but knocking on them loud enough to wake anyone would bring guards down on our heads.
What the fuck was I thinking? The guards had bigger problems than us right now. Maybe I’d make a run. I turned to let everyone else know what I was doing.
The four of them sat clustered on the pillows we spent most of our days on, sewing and trying to stay sane. In the thin shafts of moonlight that cut through the stone covering our windows, I could see Allie shaking. Grace, an older French woman with long, blonde hair who I’d never heard say a fucking word, cried silent tears. Nobody much wanted to talk about their past—me least of all, because in another place, one of the women had gleefully volunteered my ex-profession in exchange for a cushier cell, and my arm still didn’t move right after they broke it—but I knew enough to know they didn’t have any kind of training. All four of these women used to be normal people with desk jobs or homework and families. I didn’t know how many others in here that was true about, but I’d been living this life long enough to know the sounds of violence would wake a lot of women up. This was my unit. I had to take care of them.
The gunfire drew closer. I stepped over and squatted in front of them, ignoring the way that sent cold air over parts of my bodythat used to be private. It wasn’t like we could make ourselves decent in here.
“Hey,” I said, “we’re gonna be fine.”
“You really think they’re here to rescue us?” Allie asked.
The two other women looked up at me with hope in their eyes. They didn’t speak English, but they understood tone. That same tender instinct that made me lie to Allie rose up in me, but this was my unit. Lying to them wouldn’t save our asses.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “And I don’t fucking care.”
Allie’s mouth fell open. “What? But if?—”
“No ifs.” I shook my head. “What we’re staring down the barrel of is chaos. Maybe whatever misbegotten god exists out there finally remembered our sorry asses. Maybe it’s a change of power. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that chaos presents opportunities. No matter who’s fighting who, we have a chance to get out.”
Grace looked at me then, dead in the eyes as always. “How do you know?”
Her voice was rusty from disuse. She outranked me for time here, and with how scratchy she sounded, I didn’t want to know by how much.
I sighed. “Back Stateside, I was a cop. I’ve been in a firefight or two. And I’m gonna get us out just fine.”
My statement rippled through the group as the gunfire drew even closer. Allie straightened up. Grace even nodded. Moment of truth.
“Okay, ladies, if we want out, we need weapons.”
They started following orders like they’d been trained to. I guessed they fucking had, however long they’d been possessions. We sharpened blunted scissors, pried loose stones out of the wall. I shattered the mirror we were supposed to use to make ourselves beautiful for him and wrapped the biggest shard in a pair of his goddamn pants. Crap weapons against automaticrifles. All we had going for us was the element of surprise, and the hope that all the other automatic rifles would distract from us. I fixed grips, adjusted stances, channeling the only instructor I didn’t hate at the Academy as much as I could. When I was done, the two women who didn’t speak English held bricks in their hands and Allie stared wide-eyed at the scissors like she couldn’t quite believe she was holding them. Only Grace, with another shard of mirror, looked like she stood a snowball’s chance in hell of actually fighting.
That was fine. I mentally recategorized the two as injured, Allie as shaken. My unit was fucked, and we were making our last stand. I stepped in front of the three of them.
