Time slowed to a crawl. In the split second before chaos erupted, Alyssa's training kicked in with surgical precision. Three hostiles in the elevator. Night vision goggles. Suppressed weapons. Professional grade equipment. This wasn't a robbery this was an execution.
"Down!" she barked, tackling Dominic to the marble floor as the first muzzle flash lit up the hallway like lightning. Bullets chewed into the wall where his head had been a heartbeat earlier.
"Emergency stairs," Dominic gasped, his breath hot against her ear. "Thirty feet behind us."
"Too far." Alyssa rolled off him, staying low as she assessed their options. The hallway stretched like a killing field no cover, nowhere to hide. But the penthouse door was still open behind them. "Back inside. Now."
They scrambled through the doorway as automatic fire erupted, wood splintering from the door frame. Alyssa slammed the door shut and threw the deadbolt, knowing it would buy them maybe thirty seconds against military-grade breaching charges.
"Your security system," she said, grabbing Dominic by the shoulders. "Can you lockdown the elevators? Seal the building?"
"Already compromised." He was moving toward his desk, pulling out what looked like a modified tablet. "But I have a backup system they don't know about. Independent network, hardline connection."
"How long?"
"Two minutes to lock everything down. Five to call in reinforcements."
"We don't have five minutes." Alyssa was already moving toward the windows, her mind cataloging possibilities. Forty-seven floors up. No helicopter pad. But there had to be something... "The building's facade are there maintenance platforms? Window washing equipment?"
"Southwest corner. Automated system." Dominic's fingers flew across the tablet. "But Alyssa, it's forty-seven floors down and "
The door exploded inward.
Alyssa threw herself sideways as the room filled with smoke and the devastating thunder of flashbang grenades. Her ears rang, vision blurring, but muscle memory took over. She rolled behind the massive mahogany desk, dragging Dominic with her as bullets shredded the air above their heads.
"How many?" she shouted over the gunfire.
"Six, maybe eight!" Dominic was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but his hands were steady on the tablet. "Lockdown initiated! Elevators are dead, stairwells sealed!"
"Good. That means no reinforcements." Alyssa pulled a .45 from the ankle holster concealed beneath her jeans old habits from her intelligence days. "But it also means we're trapped."
A voice cut through the chaos, amplified by tactical comms: "Dominic Hayes. You have ten seconds to surrender, or we start putting holes in things you care about."
"Russian accent," Alyssa whispered. "Definitely Volkov's people."
"Five seconds, Mr. Hayes."
Dominic met her eyes. In them, she saw the same calculation she was making. Surrender meant interrogation, torture, and eventual death. But fighting meant almost certain death right now.
"The window," he said quietly. "Maintenance platform is twenty feet down, ten feet west. If we can "
"Time's up."
The gunfire resumed, but this time it was different. Systematic. They were shooting up his office piece by piece the liquor cabinet, the bookshelf, the priceless artwork. Psychological warfare.
"They're not trying to kill us yet," Alyssa realized. "They want us alive. Which means "
"They need something from me." Dominic's jaw tightened. "Information about the company, or access to something they can't get remotely."
"Or they want to make an example of us."
The shooting stopped. In the sudden silence, footsteps approached their hiding spot confident, unhurried. Professional.
"Mr. Hayes." The voice was closer now, maybe fifteen feet away. "I am Nikolai Petrov. Perhaps Ms. Carter has mentioned me?"
Alyssa's blood turned to ice. Nikolai Petrov. Volkov's top enforcer. The man who'd killed her partner in Prague two years ago. The man who'd left her for dead in a Belgrade warehouse.
"I see from your expression that she has," Nikolai continued, and Alyssa realized he could see them somehow thermal imaging, probably. "Good. Then you know I am not a patient man. You will come out now, hands visible, or I will start removing Ms. Carter's fingers one by one."
"Don't," Dominic whispered, but Alyssa was already moving.
She stood slowly, hands raised, the .45 hidden behind her back. "Hello, Nikolai. Miss me?"
The man who stepped into view was exactly as she remembered six feet of cold efficiency wrapped in an expensive suit. Pale blue eyes that held no warmth, no mercy. A face that belonged in a morgue.
"Very much." His smile was a predator's smile. "We have unfinished business, you and I."
"Let Dominic go. Your fight is with me."
"My fight is with whoever Mr. Volkov tells me to fight." Nikolai gestured, and two of his men moved to flank them. "But you are correct you are the priority. Mr. Hayes is simply... leverage."
"What do you want?"
"Information. About your investigation into our operations. About what you've discovered regarding our financial networks. About who else knows what you know."
Alyssa felt Dominic tense behind her. He was going to do something stupid she could sense it in the way his breathing changed, the slight shift in his position.
"And if I tell you?"
"Then you die quickly." Nikolai's expression didn't change. "If you do not... well. I have become quite creative in my methods since Prague."
"Prague was a long time ago."
"Not long enough." His hand moved to the knife at his belt the same knife he'd used to carve up her partner. "You cost me six months in a Serbian prison, Ms. Carter. Six months of my life I will never recover."
"Should have been sixty years."
Nikolai's smile widened. "Such spirit. I will enjoy breaking it."
Behind her, Dominic was moving. Slowly, carefully, reaching for something. The tablet, she realized he was still working on something.
"The money trails," she said, buying him time. "What's Volkov really planning? Arms dealing is small-time for an operation this sophisticated."
"You think this is about money?" Nikolai laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "Money is just the tool, Ms. Carter. What we are building... it will reshape the world."
"Into what?"
"Into something more honest. A world where power is not hidden behind democratic facades and corporate boardrooms. Where the strong rule openly, as they always have." His eyes gleamed with fanatic fervor. "Mr. Volkov is not just an arms dealer. He is a visionary."
"He's a psychopath."
"He is a man who understands that chaos is the natural state of humanity. We simply... accelerate the process."
Dominic's hand found what he was looking for not the tablet, but something else. Something he'd palmed from his desk drawer during the initial attack.
"Enough philosophy," Nikolai said, stepping closer. "Where are your files? Who else has access to your research?"
"Go to hell."
Nikolai backhanded her across the face with casual violence. Stars exploded across her vision, but she stayed upright.
"I can do this all night," he said conversationally. "But I think we will start with your boyfriend. Viktor has specific instructions about Mr. Hayes....he is to be kept alive long enough to transfer his company assets to our shell corporations. But he said nothing about keeping him... intact."
That's when Dominic struck.
The device in his hand wasn't a weapon it was a high-intensity strobe light, modified to pulse at frequencies that would overload night vision equipment. The room exploded in blinding flashes, and Nikolai's men staggered, their tactical advantage evaporating in an instant.
Alyssa moved like lightning. The .45 came up and she put two rounds center mass in the closest hostile before spinning toward Nikolai. But he was already moving, diving behind the overturned couch with the fluid grace of a trained killer.
"Window!" Dominic shouted, grabbing her hand.
They ran toward the floor-to-ceiling glass as gunfire erupted behind them. Dominic raised his other hand some kind of remote device and pressed a button. The window didn't shatter; it dissolved, smart glass technology reverting to liquid state and flowing away like water.
Wind and rain lashed into the penthouse as they reached the opening. Forty-seven floors below, the city lights looked like distant stars.
"The maintenance platform," Dominic said, pointing to a narrow metal walkway barely visible in the storm. "We have to jump."
"That's impossible."
"So is surviving the next thirty seconds in here."
Behind them, Nikolai's voice cut through the chaos: "Kill Hayes! Take the woman alive!"
Alyssa looked at Dominic this billionaire tech mogul who'd somehow become her partner in the span of an hour and saw her own desperate determination reflected in his dark eyes.
"Together?" he asked.
"Together." They jumped into the storm.