Page 72 of Kidnapped Bride

I could hear it in the shouting, the way commands overlapped and contradicted each other.

I could tell they'd never fought together.

They were trying to figure out who was in charge.

Three of them clustered behind the hood of the nearest SUV, bunching up instead of spreading out, and Gregg caught them from the side with a sustained burst that blew out the windshield and sent safety glass showering over their bodies as they dropped.

When a shooter came out from behind the box truck with his weapon up, aimed in Yakov's direction, completely unaware I was closing from his left, I fired twice.

The shots spun him ninety degrees and put him on the concrete.

His gun skidded away from him across the wet ground and I stepped over him and kept pushing forward.

It was all happening so quickly, I barely had time to think about what to do next. I reacted on instinct, all while trying to track where Markin went so I could keep him in my sights and not let him get away.

Another one came around the end of a container to my left with his gun up, but he was sweeping the wrong direction, looking south toward Vlad's position.

I grabbed the barrel of his weapon with my left hand and wrenched it sideways, torquing his wrist with it until something popped.

He yelped and tried to yank free, but I drove my right elbow into his throat hard enough to feel cartilage shift under the impact.

He dropped to his knees choking and clawing at his neck, and I raised my gun and put a round right in the back of his head.

Blood splattered the ground and my shoes before I stepped over him, moving onward toward my goal of capturing Markin.

"Six down," Vlad reported through the earpiece, but I kept stalking forward, searching for the man I'd come to hunt.

The rest of Markin's crew fell apart.

Without leadership or anyone directing fire or establishing positions, they scattered in every direction.

Two of them tried to run for the water at the far end of the port and Vlad dropped the first one at thirty yards with a single shot that caught him mid-stride and sent him tumbling hard across the gravel.

The second one watched his partner fall and stopped dead and put his hands straight up in the air in surrender, but by then Gregg and the rest of my men were swarming the place.

I pushed up to the storage unit and found the man I'd been searching for backing out of the doorway clutching two sealed packages of product to his chest.

He'd been inside grabbing merchandise while a firefight raged ten feet behind him, either too greedy or too stupid to realize his entire crew was getting dismantled around him.

He looked up, and his face went slack.

He dropped both packages on the ground and raised his hands without my having to say a word.

"On the ground," I told him anyway, and he went down to his knees.

What I wouldn’t have done to put a bullet right in this fucker's brain, but my promise to Kira haunted me.

I heard the rushing of footsteps behind me and knew my men were close, but I opted not to shoot.

I kicked him and he fell over flat on his back on the concrete with my boot planted on his throat.

He grabbed at my ankle with both hands, but I didn't let up as his face started to go red and his eyes bulged out of his skull.

"You've got one chance at mercy, Viktor." I pressed my boot down harder and he squirmed. "And you have your daughter to thank for it."

His eyes flicked around at my men who now surrounded me. His hired hands were gone—dead or run off in the night to escape their demise, and he knew he was bested.

"Fuck you," he hissed, choking on my foot and gasping for air. How easy it would be to crush his windpipe and kill him. But I bit back the desire.