positions and opening moves of each person in the room.
Dani moved the fastest. A knife she’d produced from God-knew-where sliced through Maya’s bonds, freeing her. Dani dove toward Conall as Rafe snapped free of his bonds with a roar and lunged at a startled mercenary.
Gray ignored his bonds and rolled to his feet close to another soldier. One vicious kick took the man’s legs out from under him, the next snapped his neck on the way down.
Knox crashed into his first opponent—a mercenary whose gun was just coming up. He knocked it out of the way and used the momentum of his spin to pick the man up and hurl him at his comrades, who were only just beginning to react. Two lunged out of the way, but a third went down.
Before the first two could recover, Nina was on them, her knife flashing silver, her gracefully precise cuts now ruthlessly lethal. One soldier staggered back from her, straying too close to Luna. She swung a chair, crashing it into his chest. A grunt of pain was all they had time for before Rafe was there with a brutal punch that knocked the man out before he hit the floor.
Five seconds. Five seconds was all the time it had taken to unleash anarchy.
Five seconds was how long it took for the shooting to start.
He felt the first shot before he heard it, searing heat burning across his upper arm. The graze was minor, but it warned him to dive for Nina before the next shot exploded through the room.
He carried her to the floor as a bullet drove into the wall behind where they’d been standing, and Ava’s voice rose over the madness. “No guns, no guns. Do not shoot at my sister!”
It had been a bluff, after all. All of Ava’s blustering, all of her threats—frustration tore through him, but Knox was still intensely grateful. Not just because the mercenaries’ confused hesitation would give the Devils a fighting chance.
Nina had weathered enough betrayal for one day.
Taking the guns off the table evened the odds. There were still too many men, but they couldn’t stand toe-to-toe with the Devils, or with Dani or Nina. Even Maya was unexpectedly vicious, squirming out of the way of a man who tried to stun her before plunging a fork—a literal fork—into his neck. When he howled and reached up to claw at the utensil, she snatched his stun-stick from him and jammed it into his armpit.
He went down convulsing, and triumph surged through Knox.
They could do this. They could win this—
Agony exploded through him as a stun-stick hit him between the shoulders.
The pain was blinding. He lost momentary control of his body and went down hard, one knee smashing into the floor. Electricity coursed through him, enough to lay a normal human out. He wasn’t normal, but it still hurt, the agony burning him from the inside out as he fought for mastery of his limbs, or even the strength to twist away.
He couldn’t. Not even when he saw Ava using the chaos of the fight to slip out the door.
With a superhuman effort, Knox embraced the pain and locked his muscles before throwing himself back. It dislodged the stun-stick for a moment, and Knox took advantage of the respite by turning his body into a battering ram.
It wasn’t pretty. Knox took an elbow to the cheek and a knee to his ribs as he took the mercenary behind him down. He couldn’t get his arms to move right, but he didn’t need finesse for this. Just a knee across the man’s throat, cutting off his oxygen, and most of the rest was sheer gravity.
For the moment, it was all he was capable of—a truth he regretted deeply when he looked at the door again and saw Nina flying through it in pursuit of her sister.
“Nina!” His voice barely worked. The noise of the fight swallowed his cry, and the mercenary thrashing beneath him had a friend closing in fast. Knox flung himself to the side and rolled toward Rafe, and for the first time since a childhood he barely remembered, he prayed to whatever God might be up there to give him back control of his body before it was too late.
Nina shouldn’t have to be the one to kill her sister.
* * *
SECURITY MEMO
Franklin Center for Genetic Research
I don’t care if you think I’m overreacting. You have to give me the resources to find and eliminate HS-Gen16-B. If you think she