Jax worried about Chibs and Opie, glanced back and saw that they’d turned to follow him, Oleg, and Ilia. The Harleys roared up beside them, using the car as a shield. Smart. Stay alive, he thought.
Oleg shoved the AK-12’s nose out the window and opened fire, strafing the Escalade. One of the men stood his ground and fired back, but the other ran for cover, trying to get behind the giant SUV. The Mercedes—with Gavril at the wheel and Kirill firing out the window—slammed into the man and then into the Escalade, sandwiching him between the two vehicles in a scream of metal and human anguish.
Then they were alongside the hotel and out of sight of the melee out front.
“Here we go,” Ilia said, cutting the wheel to the left as they turned, skidding around the corner. The fence around the empty swimming pool loomed ahead.
“Kitchen door,” Oleg said. “Close as you can.”
Ilia said nothing, only nodded grimly.
Jax felt a dreadful calm descend upon him. The job was killing. The path from here to the other side of this chaos would be one of unhesitating bloodshed. He’d been down this path before.
His jaw tightened. His heart calmed. The car skidded to a halt. Jax was out the door before Ilia had a chance to throw it into park. Cold inside, he felt the sun baking his skin. The world seemed to shift into lower gear. He called for Ilia to open the trunk and was headed around the back of the car when he saw one of Lagoshin’s men come around the side of the Dumpster, tall and pale with thinning hair and pockmarked skin. Jax shot him twice. The man pulled his own trigger as he went down, blowing in the Audi’s windshield and putting a bullet so close to Jax that it zipped over his left shoulder.
Jax glanced down, saw the furrow in the fabric of his shirt, saw the blood welling and soaking into the fabric, and realized the furrow had been dug not just in cloth but in skin.
He bled, and he moved, running to the trunk. He jammed his handgun into his waistband and pulled the assault rifle Oleg had given him out of the trunk. Then he ran for the hotel.
Ilia and Oleg were ahead of him, yanking open the kitchen door, whose frame had already been shattered by the intruders. Motion in his peripheral vision made him glance left, and he saw Opie and Chibs running toward him, and suddenly he woke from the strange, dreamlike feeling that had enveloped him. He felt the searing pain of his wound and smelled the copper of his own blood and the smell of cordite.
“You all right?” Opie asked, in that familiar gravel voice. He’d turned a little pale, seemed to be favoring his left side where the bullet had grazed him, but it didn’t appear that he’d started bleeding again.
Chibs went to the door but hesitated to follow the Russians inside, waiting for them.
Jax still felt calm, focused, but a new confidence made him exhale. He was with his brothers. They would prevail.
“Let’s go,” he said, suddenly hating the weight of the assault rifle. It would help even the odds, but he’d rather have a handgun any day. More precise. Less unwieldy. “Chibs, check the stairways, top to bottom. Opie and I are going room to room. Take out anyone in your way. If Trinity’s alive, we’re getting her out.”
“What about Lagoshin?” Opie asked.
Jax nodded, remembering the beating Lagoshin had given him and the vow he’d made. “Trinity comes first. We stay alive, we can take care of that asshole later.”
Boots scuffed the ground. They turned to see another Russian coming around the corner beyond the Dumpster. Opie lifted his gun but didn’t need to fire. The Russian threw his arms up as bullets stitched up his back, some of Kirill’s men having come around from the other side.
Jax tried not to keep count of how many men he saw go down. His side was badly outnumbered, but numbers didn’t tell the whole story. Even so, he was glad to have Rollie and the SAMNOV crew on the way. He just hoped they would hurry.
Chibs led the way through the kitchen. They spotted Oleg and Ilia for a second, but then there was gunfire in the corridor ahead, and the two Russians raced headlong toward it. Jax pulled the trigger on the TsNIITochMash, and a barrage of bullets burst forth, the silencer muffling the noise. Then he ran on. He wanted to back Oleg and Ilia up, but he had other priorities.
“Go,” he said to Chibs, who nodded and set off at a run, swinging right and left in search of a stairwell door.
Jax called his sister’s name in the kitchen. Opie checked the walk-in cooler. Then they went into the corridor and started their search. Room to room, watching each other’s backs as they listened to shouts and gunfire echoing through the hotel.
“Wonderland,” Opie said, voice dripping with irony. He winced at the pain in his side but said nothing of it.
Jax didn’t smile. He slammed open a bathroom door and went in, gun ahead of him, calling his sister’s name in a voice that echoed back to him.
The place sounded hollow. Empty.
For the first time, he understood that she might already be dead.
18
Chibs glided along the corridor, back to the wall. He glanced into a few open doorways, turning and then moving on in fluid motion. His pulse was steady, his breathing calm. During his time as an army medic, one lieutenant had said if they’d monitored his brain waves during combat, the test would show that Chibs was asleep. “Maybe even dreaming.” Every time violence erupted around him, Chibs assumed he was going to die—he just wanted to make the bastards pay before he did.
When he wasn’t in the field, though… it was then that Chibs had trouble. Under fire, he was calm, but when things were quiet, he could feel old anger simmering inside him. Even now, years later, he spent most days with an electric tension buzzing along his spine. He’d been a man without a country, and the brothers of SAMCRO had opened their arms to him. Without SAMCRO, he had nothing.
Jax had made some questionable choices in the past few days, but Chibs had Jax’s back no matter what, partly because they were both SAMCRO and he loved the man, and partly because he knew that if Trinity was his sister, he’d have made the very same decisions.
Chibs stopped at the elevator, punched the button to see if it was working. The button didn’t light up, and he put his ear to the metal door. No hum. Boots pounded somewhere upstairs. Gunfire came from the front of the hotel.
“Behind you,” came a low growl.
Chibs glanced back. Opie and Jax had turned the corner and were following him at a distance.
Someone swore in Russian. Chibs whipped around, saw the man who’d come into the hall up ahead, and took aim. He squeezed off two rounds. One caught the Russian in the arm, just a graze, but the man dove around a turn in the corridor ahead.
“Go, go!” Jax snapped.
Chibs glanced up, saw the stairwell door to his left, and pushed through. Jax had given him one job, and he intended to do it. As the door swung shut, Chibs glanced back into the hall and saw Opie thundering along with his gun, taking aim. Opie fired, and someone swore. Then the door clicked home, and Chibs was alone.
On the stairs, the violence sounded muffled, almost distant. Chibs was dead calm. He hustled up the steps, watching and listening for the presence of Lagoshin’s men. Halfway between the third and fourth floor, he paused and listened to the way his heartbeat thumped inside his head. He might be calm under fire, but he hadn’t gotten any younger these past few years. Running up multiple flights of stairs forced him to catch his breath.
The stairwell had a chalky, dusty smell, with dampness underneath it, like something had crawled behind the wall months ago and died.