The noise of the transaction floor died instantly, replaced by the heavy, rhythmic thud of boots on concrete.

Cyan had been right. The perimeter four, the ones standing perfectly still, moved first.

They didn’t shout. They didn’t hesitate. They converged on us with the cold, synchronized grace of people who had been paid a lot of money to be exactly this dangerous.

I looked at my two men. "Split," I said. It was all they needed. They vanished into the shadows of the crate stacks, drawing half the heat with them.

The first Serbian reached the walkway before I could adjust my stance. He was big, the kind of man who had spent his life believing that being the largest person in the room was the same thing as winning.

He swung a heavy, telegraphed right hook.

I didn’t dodge it. I let it land against my forearm, absorbing the shock to gauge his strength. It was significant, but his balance was garbage.

He tried to follow up with a left. I wasn’t there. I stepped inside his reach, my movement small and economical.

I drove my palm into his throat, heard the wet gasp of air leaving his lungs, and followed with a sharp kick to the side of his knee. The joint buckled. He hit the floor hard, and I didn’t give him a second look as the bullets struck his skull.

Minimal movement. That was the rule. Don’t go where the hit is going; just don’t be there when it arrives.

Every exchange costs energy, and I managed my energy the way people manage their bank accounts, with a very strict eye on the balance.

A few meters away, Cyan was working through his own set of problems. His style was entirely different. Where I was a hammer, he was a scalpel.

The first man to reach him was fast, but Cyan was faster.

I watched him from the corner of my eye as I dealt with a second attacker. Cyan wasn’t just fighting; he was reading the man’s body like a technical manual.

The man was right-handed, dropping his shoulder a fraction of an inch every time he committed to a punch.

Cyan waited for the drop, let the man commit fully, and then simply evaporated from the man’s line of sight.

Four seconds later, the man was on the ground, clutching a shattered wrist.

The second one came from Cyan’s blind side.

Cyan didn’t even turn his head fully. He just shifted his weight, catching a swinging pipe on the meat of his shoulder and driving an elbow back into the man’s jaw.

"You telegraphed that from across the room," Cyan said, his voice remarkably steady for someone in the middle of a brawl. "The footwork was a mess. Very obvious."

A third man stepped up, pulling a short blade. Cyan actually smiled. It was a dark, jagged expression that looked entirely out of place in a shipping warehouse.

"Oh, good," Cyan murmured. "You’re actually going to try."

"Cyan!" I barked, slamming a man’s head into the metal railing of the walkway.

"I’m fine!" he called back. He wasn’t fine by any normal person’s definition, his jacket was torn and there was a streak of oil across his cheek, but he was fine by Cyan’s standards. Which meant he was having the time of his life.

One of the Serbians broke away from the pack. He was older, with a face that looked like it had been carved out of granite and a scar that ran from his ear to his chin. He looked at me, and I saw the recognition in his eyes.

"Wolfe," he said. He sounded bored. "Son of Charles Wolfe."

I didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. I just moved.

He was good. Better than the others.

He’d clearly been trained in a real system, not just a street fight. He blocked my first two strikes and managed to land a heavy blow to my ribs that made my vision swim for a heartbeat.

"I thought you’d be harder to find," he grunted, stepping into a clinch. "I’ve heard about you. The prison reputation. I wondered if it was earned."

He threw a knee toward my midsection. I caught it, twisted, and drove my elbow into the bridge of his nose.

The bone cracked with a satisfying pop. I followed through with a sweep that sent him crashing into a stack of pallets.

I stood over him for a second, my chest heaving. "It was earned," I said flatly.

I didn’t wait for him to get up. I pulled the trigger.

Cyan appeared beside me, his breathing finally showing signs of exertion. His hair was a mess, and his rings were stained with something dark, but his eyes were bright with a frantic, forensic energy.

"Cassian," he panted.

"What?"

He looked around the floor. The bodies of the first wave were scattered across the concrete. Some were groaning; most were still. "These are too easy."

"Don’t get comfortable," I warned.

"I’m not comfortable. I’m suspicious," Cyan said, his head tilting as he scanned the upper darkness of the warehouse.

"Emilio isn’t stupid. He’s rash, yes, but he’s not an idiot. These people are filler. Either he doesn’t value them, or he just wants us busy while he sets something else."

I’d been thinking the same thing. The resistance was too thin for a man who knew I was coming. "Reid," I said into the comms.

"Yeah," Reid’s voice came through, sounding strained. "I see it. There’s a secondary power grid on the facility, Cassian. It wasn’t on any of the blueprints I pulled. Someone added it recently. It’s localized to the transaction floor and the exits, Sir, "

The lights went out.

Every floodlight, every flickering yellow bulb, every LED on the transaction floor died at once. For three seconds, the world was absolute, suffocating black.

Then, the emergency lights kicked in. They weren’t white. They were a deep, blood-red that bathed the warehouse in a hellish glow.

It was the kind of light that showed you shapes and movement, but swallowed the details. You couldn’t see faces. You could only see targets.

"Sir," Reid’s voice was a frantic whisper now. "The exits. They’re sealed. East is mag-locked. West is barred from the outside. The monitored entrance you came through? A steel shutter just dropped. And the underwater access... someone is physically blocking the pipe from the inside. You’re contained."

The silence of the warehouse was broken by a new sound. The metallic clatter of dozens of weapons being readied.

New shooters appeared on the upper levels, angles that hadn’t been occupied minutes ago. They were behind crates that had been stacked specifically to provide cover for this moment. They weren’t the Vincenti goods. They were the walls of a cage.

"Don’t kill them!" a voice shouted from somewhere in the red gloom. It was an authoritative bark, carrying the weight of a command that had been repeated many times. "We have to capture both of them! Alive!"

The order changed everything. A man trying to kill you is predictable. A man trying to capture you is a different kind of problem. They would aim for the legs. They would use numbers to overwhelm.

"They’re trying to take us alive," I said, backing up until I felt the cold metal of a shipping container against my spine.

"Oh," Cyan said. I heard the rustle of his jacket as he shifted his weight. "That’s actually more fun."

"Cyan."

"I mean, it’s also objectively worse," he clarified, "but definitely more fun."

The next ten minutes were a blur of red light and shadows. We moved from cover to cover, the geography of the warehouse working against us at every turn.

Every time we found a solid position, a new group of men would appear to flush us out.

They weren’t trying to win each exchange. They were wearing us down. It was a strategy of attrition, keep us moving, keep us fighting, until our muscles burned and our reactions slowed.

Cyan was a blur in the red light. His movement was adaptive, almost instinctive. He was reading the body language of the shooters before they even pulled their triggers, ducking and weaving through the crossfire like he was following a map only he could see.

And he was laughing. It wasn’t a fake laugh; it was the genuine, terrifying delight of a man whose nervous system had finally been given exactly what it wanted.

"There are so many of them!" he shouted, ducking behind a crate as a hail of non-lethal rounds peppered the wood above his head. "This is genuinely exciting, Cassian!"

"Focus!" I yelled, sliding across the floor to take out a man’s ankles.

"I am focused!" Cyan replied, dropping two men with a rapid-fire combination of strikes. "This is my focused!"

He got reckless. I saw it happening before I could stop it. He saw an opening, an angle that existed for maybe four seconds, and he took it, leaping out from behind cover into the open space of the floor. He engaged three men at once, a whirlwind of rings and silk.

He didn’t see the fourth man.

The shooter was positioned on a staircase, his weapon leveled at Cyan’s unprotected back.

I didn’t think. I moved. I covered the distance in a blind sprint, tackling the man off the stairs just as he pulled the trigger. We went down in a heap of tangled limbs and metal. I neutralized him with a short, brutal punch to the temple and rolled back to my feet.

"You took the angle without checking behind it!" I hissed at Cyan as he scrambled back to cover.

Cyan was breathing hard now, his chest heaving. "I know. I saw it when I was already committed."

"Then you committed too early."

Cyan looked at me, and for a second, the performance dropped. The wild light in his eyes softened into something real. "Thank you for covering it," he said, his voice quiet. "I won’t pretend I didn’t need it."

"Don’t make me cover the same mistake twice," I said, already looking for our next move.

I ducked as a shot grazed the top of the crate I was leaning against. Six inches lower and it would have found my shoulder.

The realization was settling in. This wasn’t a fight we could win by standing our ground.

The exits were sealed, the lights were rigged, and the rotation of enemies was endless.

This wasn’t a battle; it was a container. Emilio had built this entire operation just to hold us in place so he could watch us fail.

"Reid," I said, my voice low and urgent.

"Yeah, Cassian?"

"This isn’t resistance. It’s a cage. He wants to watch us exhaust ourselves." I paused, watching a fresh group of Serbians enter from the far side of the room. "The accounts. Move on them. Now."

"But the cascade risk, " Reid started.

"Accept the risk," I snapped. "The money is less important than the exit. Use the cascade as noise. If it triggers the federal alerts, let it. That brings outside attention to this facility. It puts pressure on the exits that Emilio didn’t account for. Do it."

There was a pause. I could hear the hum of servers through the earpiece. "That’s... that’s actually a brilliant, terrible idea," Reid said. "Moving now."

I prepared to move to the next stack of crates. I’d done this crossing six times already. I knew the timing. I knew the gaps in the fire.

I stepped out into the open space.

But the angle had changed. Someone had repositioned. Someone had anticipated the pattern I’d been using for the last ten minutes.

BANG.

A sharp, white-hot sting erupted in my side. The world tilted. I hit the concrete hard, the red emergency lights spinning above me like dying stars.

"Cassie!" Cyan’s voice sounded miles away.