Already working overtime, her heart rate tripled. “I swear to you. I didn’t do anything!”
“Liar!” he spat. At the end of the corridor, he let her go long enough to scan his thumbprint and punch in his code on the security panel. The electronic lock released with a click, and reclaiming her arm, he pushed her through the open door before shoving her toward her desk. “Get communications back online. Now.”
Opportunity presented, she rushed to her chair, and plunking her ass down, she rolled it into position. A couple of seconds later, she entered her password, and her screens lit up, unaffected by the power outage impacting the rest of the facility.
“You,” Roman barked at the guards. “Spread out and shoot anyone who comes through that door.” Gun in hand, he followed in her footsteps, taking position behind her back. “You have sixty seconds to get a message to Alexsandr, or I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
“I’m trying!” A simple task of adjusting transmission parameters in response to detected interference, all she had to do was change frequencies, give a little boost to their signal, and bam, messages could once again be sent and received despite the presence of jamming technology.
Easy enough to do. If she wanted to. She didn’t. Fuck that.
And fuck Volkov, the Imperium Council, and every single person associated with them. They deserved what they had coming. Bastards. Instead, she opened the program she needed to initiate the virus she’d uploaded earlier.
Not like Roman would know the difference. With his attention focused elsewhere, he wasn’t watching her monitors close enough to catch her in the act of setting off the equivalent of a nuclear bomb inside Alexsandr’s mainframe. Well, at least she hoped he wasn’t.
Fingers trembling, she isolated the activation sequence, typed in the cryptographic key, and hit Enter. Her far-right screen blipped, and her codes disappeared in the blink of an eye. “Almost there,” she lied, refocusing on the communication system, scrolling through the settings menu, and accessing the signal and spectrum analyzer.
“What the fuck is taking so long?”
“Nothing, I just have to—” Multiple machine gun bursts turned her words to dust, the distinct sound freezing her hands to the keyboard as her eyes snapped to the front of the room.
Oh God! Johnson’s men were right outside the door. Was her sister with them?
The rapid fire of bullets hitting who knows what accompanied muffled shouts as time slowed, and the world stopped spinning. Then as abruptly as it started, the battle ended, and the silence that filled the void made her skin crawl.
“Fuck!” Roman shouted, grabbing a handful of her hair and pulling her out of her chair. “I promise you, suka. If I die today. So do you.” Dead serious, he jammed the muzzle of his gun between her ribs.
No. No. No! In a panic, she twisted in his grip. She couldn’t die. Not yet. She still needed to get the kill switch from Maya. Still needed to give Jay the two pieces of code required to stop Dominion. Still needed to tell him the truth.
All of it.
Her fear reaching the upper limits of the stratosphere, she looked around the room for help. Wasted effort. The four men with rifles aimed toward the door seemed determined to cut down whoever came through, but none of them was Nik.
Shit! Was he okay? Had he managed to escape? Lord, she hoped so. She wanted to bring him down. Stop his uncle. She’d known her actions would put him at risk. Slap a target on his back. But did she want him dead?
No. Never.
She didn’t want anyone to die. Not even the members of the Iron Guard. They were microchipped machines who followed orders. They’d never been given a choice. Had no free will. They were here—weapons up, fingers on triggers—because that’s what they’d been programmed to do.
Oh God! They were going to die. All of them.
Deciding now would be a good time to start begging for her life, she proceeded to do so. “Please, Roman. I’m on your side. I?—”
“Stop,” he snarled, and releasing her hair, he put her in a chokehold. “I’m not Nikolai. I don’t believe anything you say.” His forearm locked around her neck—he twisted her around until her back lay flush against his chest.
Forced to be his human shield, her terrified gaze stayed glued to the room’s only entrance. Bulletproof, fireproof, but not bombproof, the heavy metal door was the last thing standing between Becca and her twin.
A cold bead of sweat trickled down her back as a shudder rippled through her. Jesus! Things were moving too fast. To be face-to-face with her sister again…
Her already tense muscles cramped tighter as the temptation to run, flee, hide, overwhelmed. “Let me go!” Unable to fight the urge to escape, she lifted her socked foot to heel Roman in the shin at the exact moment a deafening bang stunned her stupid.
An instant later, a blinding flash turned her surroundings neon white before a blast of energy reverberated through the confines of the computer room. The shockwave hit her like a wrecking ball to the chest, and she stumbled sideways, her body slipping free from the arm holding her upright.
Blind, deaf, and at the mercy of gravity, she cried out as she went down, re-splitting her scabbed lip and landing hard on her hip. Senses overwhelmed, she lay in a disoriented heap as an army of black orbs marched across the canvas of her closed lids.
Holy mother of all insanity. The world had gone crazy. Or was it crazier?
Jesus! Whatever.
