“Who are you again?” the second guy said all of a sudden.
“Terence,” Gideon said, and snorted. “Come on, man. We did a drug run together on Ridge Street.” Gideon must have recognized him from the feeds and known there’d been a lot of Storm people around that night.
“Yeah, yeah,” the man said, sounding chagrined. “Take him inside and stick him in one of the rooms upstairs. He’s dead meat anyway.”
“I didn’t do anything to you,” Roy protested, playing up the prisoner act.
“You picked the wrong side,” the first Storm guy retorted.
“Well, fuck you,” Roy said. We heard a soft thud followed by a grunt from Roy.
One of the Storm’s men must have punched him.
“Keep your mouth shut, dickhead,” the guard warned. “The boss will deal with you once he gets back.”
There was a sound of a slamming door and then muffled chatter. Stairs creaked. We stood braced, hanging on every sound. Gideon’s breath was rasping harder now.
Another door thumped. He let out a sigh of what sounded like relief. “Good to go,” he said as if to himself.
That was our cue. “Be careful,” I murmured to him, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. Wylder motioned to me and Kaige, and we hustled out of the van.
We ran along a side street at a sprint and burst out across from the old hotel. As the men in front of the door shouted an alarm and raised their guns, Wylder hurled two grenades one right after the other.
The guards dodged to the side just as one grenade blasted the door right off its hinges. The other landed on the hood of the car parked outside the hotel, where it exploded with a force that shattered all the vehicle’s windows and blackened the frame.
The car’s alarm began to wail. We dove down behind the vehicles along the opposite curb to wait for the Storm’s people’s response, guns at the ready.
It didn’t take long. Yells were already carrying through the air. Kaige popped his head over the trunk of the car next to ours and took the first shot. Wylder took aim over the roof. I peered around the front bumper.
Storm men were charging out of the building, guns jerking in every direction, searching for their attackers. They didn’t expect someone to make such a bold opening move and then retreat. Which meant they left themselves way too open in their hurry to defend their base.
Kaige and Wylder let loose a hail of bullets. I pulled the trigger on my own gun, aiming as well as I could at the men whose expression shifted from furious to startled in an instant.
They were responsible for destroying my home, every single one of them. I had absolutely no qualms about taking them down when they’d have happily killed me a hundred times over.
I managed to catch one in the thigh, another in the stomach, and a third in the chest. All of them collapsed. More fell with sprays of blood from Wylder and Kaige’s shots. By the time they’d figured out that we weren’t right on their doorstep but firing at them from fifteen feet away, more were slumped on the ground than still standing.
The few who remained ducked behind the smoking remains of the car. Another couple appeared by the front door. Wylder managed to pick one off before the other jerked out of view. We could hear the ones behind the car swearing.
Wylder shot me a devilish grin and grabbed another grenade from his bag. With a yank of the pin, he flung it toward the already burnt-out car.
At the clang of it hitting the car’s roof, the men cursed again and bolted back toward the hotel. Kaige plowed them down with a frenetic series of bangs and a whoop of victory.
Then the street was silent, other than the ringing in my ears after all that gunfire. Wylder reloaded his revolver and pointed it at the blasted doorway, watching for movement.
My heart thudded wildly. The whole idea had been to distract—and destroy—as many of the Storm’s people on site as we could while Gideon was at work, to make sure no one stumbled on his efforts. And to make it easier for him and Roy to get back out again when he was done. Had we bought him enough time?
That wasn’t our only goal, though. “Do you think that’s it for them?” I hissed at Wylder.
“Come on,” he said. “Kaige, you stay ready to take down anyone who shows their face in the doorway.”
Staying low, Wylder and I dashed forward to the bodies sprawled closest to us on the sidewalk and the edge of the road. I felt one guy’s pockets and then another’s, yanking out their phones. Wylder grabbed three more. I tossed the ones I’d gotten to him, and he stuffed them into his bag.
“Between these and whatever Gideon nabs for us, we should come out of this mission with info on every part of the Storm’s operations here,” he said under his breath with a triumphant grin. “Maybe we’ll even find out where these assholes came from.”
There was a stomping sound from inside, and Kaige took a shot over our heads. After he fired a few more times, I heard a body thump against the floor.
“I don’t see any more coming,” he said.