Page 105 of The Bratva's Secret Baby
We walk toward the elevator. Dominik presses the call button. Nothing lights up. The display above the doors is dark. We try the stairwell. The handle turns, but the door doesn’t open.
Dominik scans the hallway.
“This isn’t local,” he says.
The lights flicker once, then hold. Somewhere below us, a door shuts hard.
The building is still. Too still.
Dominik looks at me.
“They’re here,” he says.
29
DOMINIK
The change hits my ears first. A chair scrapes down the hall. Then nothing. Doors shut one after another. The ventilation system drops to a low hum.
“The woman,” I say. “She’s the custodian.”
Ana looks at me.
“She stayed at her desk,” I say. “When we opened the shelf, she looked at her screen and picked up the phone.”
“She didn’t call maintenance,” Ana says.
I pull out my phone and dial Igor’s secondary. The number he told me to use only if things were already wrong. The screen lights up. The call timer pulses once. Then again. Like it’s deciding whether to exist. I count to three and end it. Dial again.
Nothing.
I pocket the phone and catch Ana by the arm.
“Move. Now.”
The shot comes through the glass beside the door and slams into the wall behind us. Plaster hits my shoulder. I pull her down as another round punches through, blowing the rest of the panel apart. Glass scatters across the floor where she had been standing.
“Down.”
She’s already moving.
A third round snaps past from the hallway, low and angled. I grab the desk and tip it onto its side, shoving it toward the doorway. It scrapes across the tile and lands hard. Paper spills. The monitor crashes to the floor.
Boots thud outside.
The shelves are tall and bolted to the floor. Narrow aisles run between them. We drop into one of those aisles, metal racks rising on both sides. I push Ana ahead of me.
No shots follow.
She’s a few rows forward now, shoulders tight, the bag clutched to her chest. She keeps her head down and makes for the inner service door at the back of the archive, the one meant for staff, not visitors.
A shadow crosses the doorway. Another pair of boots shifts to the right.
I grab Ana’s sleeve and pull her back just as the third shot cracks. It slams into the far shelf. Metal shrieks. Binders shudder and spill. The shot isn’t meant to hit. It’s meant to close space.
I push her forward again, harder this time. “Move.”
They fire again. The shots strike low, tearing into the tile near our feet and chewing along the base of the shelves. We move left.
