the two security men, then he would shoot her just as he’d shot the two others with her.
She called to the Russians. “A man shot these three, then went up the stairs.”
Both men rose, lowered their guns, and began running forward towards the stairs behind where Won stood.
They made it less than ten feet before Court sat up suddenly and shot them both twice in the chest. The two men fell dead, still thirty feet from where Won stood.
Won saw the gunman struggle to get back up to his feet, as if he had a problem with his back and shoulder. But soon he was with her, turning her roughly up the hallway, away from the rear stairs.
* * *
• • •
Zoya Zakharova descended the rear stairs surrounded by muscular men. She was behind Fox and Hines and in front of five Bratva foot soldiers now, all moving at speed to get the hell out of there.
The circular stairwell was open in the middle, and glancing down she could see all the way to the ground floor, some fifty feet down. She knew there would be more Russians down in the parking garage waiting for them in vehicles, and although her chances for escape now were not good, they would only get worse once she had more men around her to deal with.
She slowed her descent, a man pushed her from behind, and she stopped on the stairs, spun around, and grabbed his arm. As she yanked him forward and off balance, he stumbled into Hines, who was only able to keep from falling by grabbing the railing.
This was Zoya’s chance. She put her own hand on the railing, kicked her legs over the side, and then spun back around to face the staircase as she let go, falling straight down.
CHAPTER 52
She dropped one entire flight before landing on the balls of her feet right on the outer edge of a step, collapsing her body to absorb as much of the shock as possible while also lowering the momentum of her fall. And then, before her body absorbed all the impact, she let her feet slide from the step. Her hands slammed on the railing and again on the step below to try to break her fall a little more, and then she dropped another story.
This time she used her hands to grab onto the railing at the third floor, repeating the maneuver with her feet that had her just catching the edge of the stairs to slow herself. Still, her arms were wrenched nearly out of her shoulder sockets when her feet slipped off and she dangled there.
Above her she heard men racing down the circular stairs. They had been instructed by her father not to kill her, but that didn’t mean one of them wouldn’t go off mission and try to put a bullet in her during the heat of the chase.
She slid her hands down the vertical bars of the railing and then quickly swung her legs in and dropped on the stairs. She found herself on the second-story landing, so she opened the door and started to run up a tiled hallway.
She made it all of thirty feet before the door opened behind her, a voice shouted for her to stop, and a pistol cracked.
Zoya ducked lower and kept running, but as she passed an open doorway she ran right into a hand that reached out, grabbed her by the left arm, and swung her inside.
Zoya spun back around to face her attacker, balled a fist and drew it back, then let it fly.
Court Gentry caught Zoya’s small but powerful fist in his hand, wincing with the pain of the impact. “Hey! It’s me! How many of them?”
The echoing footsteps of men running up the hall was cacophonous now.
“Five, I think.”
“Your dad has a fucking army.”
“You got another gun?”
“Negative,” he said, then spun out into the hall and fired four times with his suppressed Glock 19, sending two men to the tile with wounds to their legs, and three more diving into other laboratories and offices.
Hines and Fox were nowhere in sight.
Zoya turned back around and saw that she was in a lab of some sort. A large fermentation tank took up the center of the room. She stepped to the side to look for another exit, and when she did so she saw a small Asian woman in a lab coat sitting on the floor.