Page 72 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
Not what I had expected–not the distant crack of an approach, not the sound of a vehicle on the compound’s road. A compression of sound from the direction of the front gate, something that was not the ambient operations of a maintained facility. I had been in the room long enough to know thecompound’s acoustic baseline, and what I was hearing was not in it.
The guard’s footsteps outside the door accelerated. There was a voice in the corridor–not the guard’s voice, another one, someone moving quickly toward this room with the specific quality of movement that was urgent rather than routine.
I stood up from the chair and moved to the center of the room, because the center was where I could move in any direction from, and I wanted every direction available.
The door opened.
The professional from the vehicle–the one who had adjusted for my resistance twice–came in with the specific efficiency of someone executing a procedure that had been pre-planned. He did not look at me as a person. He looked at me as a thing to be moved. His hand was at my arm before he had fully cleared the doorway.
“Move,” he said.
I moved. Cooperatively, at the pace he was setting, because resistance now used resources I was going to need in a different configuration. I tracked the corridor as he moved me through it–right, then left, then a door I had not seen before, a staircase going down. The compound’s ground level, a hallway running east toward the back of the building.
The sound from the front of the compound was louder now. Gunfire. I identified it with the flat accuracy of a person who had been near gunfire before and understood what it was.
Dmitri.
Or Viktor.
The diversion coming from the direction of the approach road.
Which meant Mikhail was somewhere else.
The professional opened a door to the outside. Volkov was already outside.
He was moving with two men, the specific movement of a person who had a plan and was executing it, and when he saw me being brought out his expression had the quality of a man who had revised his position and found it still viable.
“Good,” he said. To the professional: “The vehicle. Now.”
I looked at the eastern wall.
The wall was lower than the front perimeter. Utilitarian construction, chain-link topped with wire, a gate at the far end that was not the main gate–a secondary access, smaller, the kind of gate that existed for maintenance rather than security.
I knew this gate. I had looked at it from the window of the room I was confined to.
More specifically: I had watched the gate’s lock from the window, had noted its position and type–the padlock, commercial weight, the specific color of oxidization on the shackle that told you something about how long it had been exposed to the desert air without maintenance. I had estimated the gate’s distance from the secondary structure at approximately sixty meters.
I had been doing the math on this gate for hours.
Mikhail was coming through that gate. Or had come through it already. The eastern approach was the one that was not covered by the front cameras, the one that split the defensive response, the one that a man who had looked at this compound’s layout and identified its vulnerable point would have identified.
He was already inside.
The professional had my arm and was moving me toward the vehicle that was positioned at the compound’s rear–not the eastern gate, a different direction, south, away from the gate. Volkov was moving ahead of us and his two men were flanking and the gunfire from the front of the compound was a sustained exchange now, not brief.
I let my knees go. My weight shifted backward and down and the professional’s grip, which had been designed for a compliant forward motion, had to readjust. The readjustment took two seconds.
In those two seconds I had moved my weight fully backward and gotten my elbow into a direction that found something and heard the grunt that meant the something had landed.
“Elena.” Volkov’s voice. Sharp, the pleasantness gone entirely.
I looked at the eastern gate.
Fifty meters, maybe.
The professional recovered and his grip became the adjusted version, the version that accounted for resistance, and I was being moved again, and I was looking at the gate and thinking about what was on the other side of it—
The gate opened. The movement a rapid movement of a man who knew exactly where he was going and what he would find when he got there.
