Chapter 20

twenty

This open houseis stressing me the fuck out, but so far, everything is whirring along with perfect, purring dispatch, and everyone who isn’t paid to keep the building’s occupants safe is having a great time.

The rooms are full of members, guests, and spectators, doing everything from impact play to having full-blown orgies; the bar upstairs is crowded and congenial; and the hall is like something from a movie—packed shoulder to shoulder, lights flashing, music filling the space with soaring synths the way that hymns fill up a church.

There’s plenty of sex and kink happening in here too, but at the edges, in the booths and nooks, not on the dance floor. This kind of dancing—all sound and light and sweat—is its own kind of kink practice, just as important to some members as cuffs or paddles, and club etiquette is to leave the floor itself to dancing and dance-adjacent foreplay. Anything more involved should happen along the edges or up in the balconies.

At least Drobny never showed. One less headache tonight.

About fifteen minutes ago, Mark gave a welcome speech that was met with cheers and applause, and now he’s at the far edge of the room, caught in a chain of people who want his time and attention. He looks the part of the underworld lord tonight, in an all-black tuxedo with his collar open and the bow tie undone, customary glass of gin in his hand. Only the small earpiece he wears signals that he’s something more than a devil at his leisure.

I watch him a moment, as he smiles lazily at a young man I vaguely recognize as being famous. The celebrity is flushing at Mark’s attention, and presumably also at Mark’s night-sky eyes and the small lock of hair that’s broken free and is now hanging dashingly over his forehead.

I have to tear my eyes away over and over again, and I’m no better than this flushing celebrity because just being near the knot of his Adam’s apple or the slice of his jaw makes me fumble for my own thoughts. And I spent my morning on my knees between his planted feet as he took phone call after phone call, sucking him quietly the way he likes while he’s working, only to be hauled over his desk when the calls were done and fucked until I came all over its glass surface of his desk.

So it’s not like I haven’t seen him today.

I’m giving our corner of the hall another scan—easily catching the uniformed silhouettes of the extra guards we hired, stationary forms against a backdrop of dancing hedonism—when the air itself splits.

A snap, loud and unmistakable. The calling card of lead tearing through time and space.

A gunshot.

It’s funny how little changes after a war, how instinctive it still is to move, to run, to shield someone with my body. The room is screaming, now a crush of bodies, and I have Mark, my hand fisted in the shoulder of his tuxedo jacket to haul him to safety, and my thoughts are clearer than ever, my mind alert, processing the shouted bits of information coming in through my earpiece.

Can’t find the shooter—

Nat, evacuate the playrooms—

Goran, stay at the cameras; Roz will take Isaac and Emily and clear the bar and roof—

And then a noise I’ve never heard before, a shrill alarm ringing through the earpiece. Mark goes stiff as I’m trying to move him to the doors, and I settle for covering as much of his body with my own as I can.

“Sir, we need to leave!” I shout over the tumult.

“That’s the alarm for the basement,” Mark says tightly.

“Mr. Trevena, we have a problem,” comes Goran’s voice over the earpiece. “I can see two men in the basement trying to get into the server room.”

Mark’s fingers go to his ear. “I need someone there, Goran,” he says, but I already know it’s hopeless—every single staff member we have is trying to evacuate a thousand people from the hall, playrooms, bar, and every other corner of the club.

“Sir, I can’t spare anyone until the guests are safe,” Goran says.

Mark closes his eyes a moment. People are rushing behind us, bumping and elbowing, and my back prickles with awareness that the shooter is still in here. “The guests come first,” he agrees. But then he opens his eyes and looks at me.

“No,” I say instinctively.

“You need to,” he says. “You’re the only one we can spare. Everyone else is keeping my guests safe.”

“I’m keeping you safe.”

“I’ll be fine,” he says impatiently. “This is a feint to distract from what they really want, which is getting into the server room. And if they do get in there, it’s possible many, many people will die with the information they find, and that blood will be on our hands.”

I don’t like that any more than he does, but also I can’t leave him here, unprotected; the very thought fills my mind with a bright, awful static, and for a second, I see McKenzie’s vacant eyes, Sims’s pulpy neck.

“Sir,” I try again, but Mark is past impatience now. He shakes off my hold on his tuxedo jacket with strength that surprises me, his eyes flashing.

“Do as I say.” His words crack through the air like more bullets. “Or I will go and fucking do it myself.”

He means it. I see in his carved, tense features that he means it.

With a bitten-off growl of frustration and a feeling of wrongness so strong that I can taste it, I go, wheeling around and shoving through the crowd to the elevator banks closest to the backstage area. This is a horrible fucking idea, and I’m going to tell Mark exactly that when I get back, and if something happens to him while I’m down there, then it serves him fucking right—

“I can hear your thoughts from back here,” Mark says through my earpiece. “Knock it off.”

“I’m supposed to be protecting you. My job is protecting you.”

“There’s enough security here tonight to declare Lyonesse a sovereign nation. And I’m also a combat veteran, Tristan, so I promise I have better instincts than standing still while someone’s shooting at me.”

I don’t answer, at least not out loud, instead venting my irritation in an unending litany of silent swear words and curses, finally breaking free of the crowd and climbing up the stage as I pull my firearm from my holster. I didn’t draw it earlier because I wasn’t going to return fire in a room full of people, but in the basement, there won’t be guests to worry about. I won’t have any compunctions about leveling the playing field.

The elevator takes its sweet time coming up, and then even longer to shut its doors and get moving again. The whole time I listen to the chaos happening elsewhere in the club, the evacuations, the head counts. They still can’t find the shooter.

I did all my combat in body armor and MCEPs, but you’d think that I’d only ever fought naked like an ancient Celt for how fucking stifling my suit jacket feels right now. I quickly strip the jacket off and drape it over my arm like I’m a gentleman about to walk into a nice restaurant.

“Goran,” I say as the elevators tick down. “Tell me what I’m walking into.”

“Still just the two. They finished dicking with the electronic lock and are walking through the doors now. If they go anywhere near the servers, it’ll trigger the weight sensors and the security doors, and they’ll be trapped. There’s a clear line of sight from the vestibule into the server room, so if they’re paying any attention, they’ll know you’re there right away.”

“Got it,” I reply. The elevator bobs to a stop on the server room floor. It dings and then opens.

“Good luck, kid,” he says, and then I’m in the corner of the elevator, carefully angling myself into the space, gun first.

Nothing.

Jacket still over my arm, I creep forward, the blue light of the vestibule glinting off the glass doors, which are currently gaping wide.

“They haven’t triggered the sensors,” I say quietly to Goran.

“They’re on the far wall, sticking to the edges of the room,” Goran says. “It’s weird. It’s like they know not to—”

A shot cracks into the glass just behind me, and I duck into the server room, the heat coming off the machines already pulling blood to my skin. Adrenaline beats through me like a drum.

“Sorry about that,” Goran says. “I didn’t see him moving until just now. He’s using the last row of servers as cover, but he’s staying on the edge. His friend is still moving away from the main door?.?.?.?actually, now they’re both moving away. Fucking weird.”

There are really only two reasons to move away rather than engage: to avoid fighting or to trap me. And I really, really don’t want to walk into a trap. Especially since I suspect the trap is the room itself, with its waiting aluminum cage.

I crouch and creep forward until I can see straight down an aisle between two banks of servers. Their lights blink and flash, making it hard to detect anything past the first few rows.

“They’re not moving now,” Goran says. “Everything upstairs seems to be stable, although we’re still nowhere near evacuated. So I can’t send you help, but you can take your time. Keep them pinned in place until I can send reinforcements.”

I’m relieved to hear that it’s stable upstairs—that Mark is okay without me—but something about this whole moment feels wrong. Like these guys aren’t interested in the servers at all.

So why come down here?

I creep to the next aisle, and it’s a mistake. Several gunshots ring out, going into the concrete wall where I was just crouching a second ago, one hitting a server inside its glass case and sending chunks of glass and metal and plastic everywhere. Sparks spit.

I use the cover to move to the next aisle, and then I see the second man just around the corner.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I call. “Just set down your gun.”

He spins, already shooting at me, and oh well, it was worth a try. I run right toward him, not interested in our slow-motion game of Duck, Duck, Goose anymore, and as he’s adjusting his aim, I fling the jacket I’m carrying over my arm at his face.

In the moment it takes him to bat it away, I shoot him in the knee, like I did Sims. Unlike Sims, though, he drops his hands to catch himself as he pitches sideways, and for a moment, I think it’s going to be fine. I’ll go over there and kick his weapon away, his buddy will surrender, and by then Goran will have sent the team down—

Gunshots come from behind me, and I only move out of the way just in time, my foot almost grazing the grated floor of the central server area. Not wanting to risk the aluminum trap, I fling myself the opposite direction, turn as I do, and shoot.

It’s all luck, what happens next. I’m moving, he’s moving, it’s dim and hot and lights are blinking everywhere. But my first shot punches into his shoulder and the second, fired right after the first, drills into his temple.

The first guy, the one I just shot in the knee—that’s not luck though. I hear him move, and years of combat take over. I turn back, and by the time I see his own gun lifting, I’m squeezing the trigger.

And it’s over.

“Tristan, you okay?” I hear Goran’s voice ask. Even though it’s right there in my ear, it feels a million miles away.

The adrenaline makes everything hyperreal, so vivid that time itself feels like syrup sliding down the tines of a fork, and I’m kneeling next to the first dead man before I even really catch up to what’s happened. I’ve taken his gun, I’m searching his pockets, and—

There’s nothing. Nothing at all.

He’s wearing tactical clothing, gray and black, with all the labels removed. His pockets are empty, and he’s got nothing clipped to his belt save for a knife and a few extra magazines. And I don’t recognize him. He’s got a ruddy, broken face like a bar brawler, with hair the color of Oklahoma mud.

I’d remember him if I had seen him.

The other guy is the same story—tactical clothes with no labels, carrying nothing save for a knife and some ammo.

I sit back on my haunches and think, and then tap my earpiece. “Goran,” I say, and I hear his loud exhale of relief.

“Fuck, you scared me, kid,” he says. “I could see you on the cameras, but I couldn’t tell if you’d been hit or not. Seems like something you’d do, pretend that you weren’t bleeding out.”

“This is wrong,” I say. “There should be more than two. And if they wanted to steal something down here, I don’t know how they’d do it. They don’t have any drives with them, nothing electronic. Not even phones. Not even earpieces.”

“Maybe?.?.?.?” Goran starts and then stops. The channel’s dead; he’s talking to someone else, I think.

I stand up and holster my gun after checking the magazine. I look at the two men dead on the floor, and then I make myself turn away and walk to the vestibule. I need to go upstairs. I’ll need to wait for the police so I can talk to them. I’ll need to walk them through the night and its events and how it ended with two dead bodies in the server room.

When I reach the elevators and press the button, I notice for the first time that I have blood on my sleeve. With steady fingers, I unbutton the sleeve and roll it up to my elbow. I do the same with the other side.

I just killed for the first time since the war. The knowledge splits and seeps inside me like rotten fruit.

I ignore it.

Turns out you can get really good at ignoring things like that.

I tap the earpiece again. “Goran,” I say. “I’m coming up. I think?.?.?.?something’s not right.”

“I think so too” comes a cool voice, still tight with impatience. Mark. “If there were only two—”

Gunshots, bright, staccato, echo through the earpiece, and then I hear the screams of the remaining guests in the hall.

Goran is shouting now. “Shit, there are six, seven of them? Eight? I’m coming down—”

“Sir?” I ask wildly as the elevator doors open and I rush inside. “Mr. Trevena? Are you hurt?”

Fuck!

I stab at the button to close the doors and hit the button for the second floor, my heart racing, my blood up, but my thoughts coming fast and clear in this slow-syrup world. I see it all now, the clever mechanism of it, a double feint. Tie up the security team with evacuations, lure attention downstairs to the decoys. And then attack.

“I’m coming, sir,” I say, my jaw tight. I’m bouncing on the balls of my feet as the elevator gets moving, gun back out, my skin prickling.

Mark has to be okay. He has to be. If he’s not, if he’s not answering right now because he’s hurt—

I suck in a breath. It’s the first panic I’ve felt tonight, the idea of him being hurt, killed, in danger without me, even though I know he’s capable and dangerous in his own right.

“How many, Goran?” I ask as the elevator slows. I back into the front corner as the doors open and then ease my way out. The corridor is empty.

“Can’t tell,” Goran finally replies. He sounds out of breath, and there’s mayhem in the background, gunshots, screams, grunts. He must have left the office. “I think seven. All armed. Nat’s going to take over for Roz, and Roz and Isaac will join us. I can’t see Trevena.” It’s a sign of his stress that he’s forgotten the Mister, slipping into the military habit of calling everyone by their last name.

“I’m almost there,” I say, now running through the empty space to the hall.

When I push through the doors, I find pandemonium.

The fresh swarm of assailants has meant that any guests who haven’t been evacuated are stuck, pinned down, hiding behind overturned tables and the stairs to the stage. Bullets pop and snap, burying themselves in walls and leather booths, and no one’s turned the lights or the music off, so all of this is happening in a steady, engineered scatter of lights. Without the DJ, the music is stuck on the same heady, ethereal loop.

It’s in this nightmare that I finally find Mark in the center of the hall with another man dressed all in black tactical clothes, an abandoned and presumably bullet-less gun kicked off to the side.

Mark is fighting.

Badly.

He’s too slow. He’s clumsy. Out of practice, maybe. His blocks come too late, his parries are too far off-center, leaving him open and unprotected for whole seconds at a time. There’s a glint of metal in his opponent’s hand—a knife—and he should turn or tuck his shoulder or anything, and he’s not—he’s moving like he’s moving through tree sap, and then it hits me.

The gin. The gin he drinks like water, that he was drinking tonight?.?.?.

He’s out of practice and he’s drunk and he’s going to get stabbed.

I’ve come in on the second floor, thinking I’d want the better sight lines, and I don’t give myself time to reconsider. I tear to the railing as fast as I can, grab it, and swing myself to hang from my hands on the other side. I drop the single story to the dance floor, which is sprung wood and absorbs a decent amount of the shock, although my knees and ankles still yip at me as I start moving again.

Gunshots tear into the balcony where I was just hanging, and they haunt my steps like vengeful ghosts. I can’t risk leading the shooter’s aim to Mark, and so I take a sharp right, following my intuition to the bar, where I see my attacker. He jerks back and I’m running at him at full-tilt, my own gun up, firing enough to make him duck, second-guess.

I’m tackling him, I’m on top of him, and then I squeeze my trigger and he’s dead.

I don’t spend a second more there, already stealing his gun and shoving to my feet to run to Mark. I turn just in time to see the flash of his attacker’s knife in the club’s dizzying lights, just in time to see Mark miss the chance to block it and then stupidly, incomprehensibly, step forward into the attacker’s range.

I turn just in time to see Mark get stabbed in the chest.