Page 47 of Hawkeye

Chet stopped several feet from the table. “Open the bag.”

Josie rested one hand on the leather handle but left the zipper untouched. “I want proof you’ll stay away from my mother.”

Chet’s jaw tightened. “You’re in no position to make demands.”

“I’m holding the records that connect your company to every stolen lot Wynnock confirmed.” She tapped one finger against the bag. “You’re here because I’m the only person who can tell you whether that’s all of them.”

He took a step closer, then stopped when she shifted the bag toward herself. The movement kept him exactly where we wanted him—away from the furniture, fully exposed beneath the gallery lights, and too interested in what she knew to rush her. His right hand remained visible, but the tension in his shoulder told me he carried a weapon beneath his jacket.

“How many copies?” Chet demanded.

Josie tilted her head. “How many families did you rob?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to the woman whose father’s medals you sold while she was burying him.” Anger filled her eyes. “It matters to the family whose letters were left damp inside a plastic sleeve because nobody in your company cared whether they survived.”

Chet’s practiced control cracked. “Do you think anybody gives a damn about a stack of old paper once the people who wrote it are dead?”

“I do.”

The certainty in her answer hit me with the same force it had the night she walked through our gate protecting the shadow box with both arms. My finger rested alongside the trigger guard while pride and possession burned through my chest. Tippon saw a young apprentice he thought he could frighten. I saw the woman who had dismantled his entire operation because she refused to treat another family’s history as simply merchandise.

A muted impact sounded through my earpiece from the annex. Smoke cursed, then a second voice shouted as furniture scraped violently across the adjoining floor. Two men had come through the service side together, hitting the annex team hard enough to turn the quiet building into a burst of boots, grunts, and breaking wood.

“Annex engaged,” Breach reported, his breath rough. “Two hostiles.”

“Contain them,” Stryker ordered. “Floor team holds the gallery.”

Trigger shifted behind one of the display walls, his attention cutting briefly toward the annex passage before returning to Josie and Chet. The movement lasted less than a second, but Tippon noticed it, and relief flickered across his face. The disturbance had been timed to pull our eyes toward the obvious breach.

Mine stayed on the wall behind Josie.

Dust slid from the narrow seam beside the armoire. The change was slight enough to look like vibration from the annex fight, but the reflection in the glass display moved in the wrong direction. A dark vertical line widened behind the furniture as the old service opening eased inward.

“Hidden passage moving,” I warned over the comm. “Do not turn toward it.”

Stryker gave no visible reaction below. Zero kept his focus on Chet, and Trigger remained behind cover, but every brother on the channel understood the angle had changed. The opening widened another six inches, concealed from Josie by the armoire and from most of the floor by the arrangement of the displays.

A man slipped through sideways and held still behind the furniture. He wore dark clothes and gloves, with the expression of someone who had built the entire operation around other people looking where he told them to look. Chet’s gaze never shifted toward him, but the tension left his shoulders.

The crew leader used the armoire as cover and moved along its rear edge. His path kept him inside the narrow dead section beneath the mezzanine until the final two steps, when he emerged behind Josie with a compact handgun already raised. Trigger started toward them, but Chet drew his weapon near the front of the gallery and forced Smoke to redirect before either brother could gain a safe angle.

Josie sensed the movement a fraction too late. The crew leader caught her around the waist, dragged her back against his chest, and drove the muzzle into her ribs beneath the curve of her breast. Her breath stopped in my earpiece, while his head disappeared behind hers.

My scope settled on the narrow strip of his face visible beside Josie’s hair. Her body blocked his chest, her head covered most of his, and the weapon remained pressed tightly against the ballistic panel beneath her dress. One bad inch would send the round through her before I could correct it.

Every part of me went still. My breathing slowed, my finger took up the first pressure on the trigger, and the gallery narrowed to Josie, the man holding her, and the shifting geometry between them. I could hear the careful breath she finally released through the microphone.

She knew I was watching.

I held the sight steady and waited for the line.

21

HAWKEYE

Every exit was blocked, but it didn’t do me any fucking good while this asshole kept his gun on Josie. But my woman kept her head and got him talking so he’d be distracted.