Ms. Perkins sat in a dim coffee shop a block from the Charles Building, nursing a black coffee and watching the motorcade come and go.
When Hunter's voice crackled in her earpiece, she dropped her tone to a whisper. "I'm in position."
Perkins had bought intel from the Continental network earlier, confirming that Vladimir Zelvisky had not left his penthouse that day. The Continental's reach in the United States was enormous—hundreds of hotels, countless assets—so when they say a man is home, you believed it.
They were not planning a dawn ambush. Hunter and Perkins agreed to wait until late, when the building emptied and civilian traffic thinned. Between Hunter's patience and Perkins's professional restraint, the stakeout stretched into the night as they traded occasional reports over secure comms about people coming and going and movement on floors fifteen through seventeen.
Hunter scanned obsessively with his scope but couldn't find the target's exact bedroom. From his vantage he could cover most corridors, stairwells, and elevator banks, but the Charles Building's layout left blind spots. He considered relocating to another rooftop, but the perch he had chosen earlier was the best overwatch within two kilometers—so he stayed put.
As midnight approached, the city quieted. Fewer people moved on the streets. Perkins pushed her chair back, slung a travel case over her shoulder, and melted into a shadowed alley to change into plain clothes. She moved toward the Charles Building with lethal calm.
Hunter kept one finger on the trigger. Through the scope he watched Perkins ride the elevator to the fifteenth floor. Two guards stood posted outside the elevator doors—standard procedure. When the doors opened, both men spun toward the car. One reached for his holster; the other stepped forward to challenge.
Perkins moved first. Before the guards could draw, she fired twice, clean and economical. Both men crumpled. She jammed her travel case in the closing elevator doors to buy a few seconds and switched her comm back on. "I'm on the floor," she hissed. "Starting from fifteen and moving up. Cover me."
"I read you," Hunter replied. "I'm watching."
Perkins cleared the first corridor methodically. When a housekeeper poked her head into a service room, Perkins did not hesitate—one controlled shot, and the woman went down. Perkins's professionalism was brutal but practiced; collateral got cut from the ledger before it ever showed up.
Gunshots cracked again—this time coming from the stairwell. Hunter saw two armed men descend from sixteen and took them both out through tempered glass as they rounded the landing. His shots were surgical: one slug, one kill. He cycled a fresh magazine from his private cache and re-acquired the sight picture.
Perkins pushed upward. She swept rooms, found and neutralized mid-level guards. Her progress was fast and clean. From his scope, Hunter could see her silhouette move from window to window, then drop behind a door into a room that momentarily became a blind spot.
Movement below shifted. A column of black-suited men broke out of the stairwell and forced the locked service doors on fifteen with a battering ram. The formation rushed up toward seventeen—clear reinforcements. Hunter's gut tightened.
"Perkins, careful—multiple teams. He has guards living in the same building," Hunter warned.
She moved like a shadow. "Copy. I'm pushing through."
Rounds began to puncture glass and drywall. Hunter's reticle tracked the first two assailants threading the stairwell. Bang. Bang. Another two fell, their bodies folding and blocking the corridor. He reloaded with practiced speed, then reacquired a patrol popping a head toward Perkins's room. Bang. The man pitched forward, motionless.
For a moment their plan held. Perkins ducked into a room Hunter could see and radioed, voice steady but tight: "Lots of men. This guy's not coy—he's stocked this building."
"Lights are coming on across the tower," Hunter said. "Neighbors are waking up. Cops will be on site in twenty to thirty minutes at most. Move faster."
Perkins had cleared most of the fifteenth. She swept the stairwell to the sixteenth and brushed aside two more guards. Then, as she turned to press upward, Hunter's eyes snapped to a cluster of figures in black suits converging from the service corridor—men who had vanished from his earlier sightlines. They were purposeful, trained, and they were moving to intercept her route.
"They bypassed my angle," he breathed. "They're avoiding my lines."
Perkins's breaths came faster. Over the radio came the sharp cadence of rapid gunfire. She appeared briefly in Hunter's scope, pressed against a doorway, and then vanished again as the firefight crossed into blind areas. When she reappeared, there were a dozen men moving through the floors above—more than they had expected. Perkins looked worse for wear but still standing.
Hunter wiped away a sheen of sweat and squeezed off another round into a man trying to breach the door to Perkins's room. The bullet made short work of the attacker and bought her a few precious seconds. "Hold that door," Hunter hissed. "I'm moving in. Give me ten minutes."
Perkins's voice came back, strained: "Understood. Keep them off me."
Hunter stowed the TAC-50 into his private pocket dimension, then pushed off the rooftop and sprinted across the neighboring roofs toward the Charles Building. His speed was not supernatural, but with his near-superhuman conditioning, he closed ground in minutes, descending stairwells and cutting across service corridors the way a shadow moves through a maze.
Inside, chaos broke fully loose. Doors were splintered, alarms began to stutter to life as tenants woke and lights flared across floors. Perkins held her ground in a doorway framed by broken furniture and shell casings, firing into the choke point and working the slide of her pistol with cold precision.
Hunter arrived at the service stairwell and saw the flow of men moving toward the penthouse. He slotted rounds into a compact rifle and moved to intercept—his silhouette a promise of violence. He had cut his path across the building and now barreled down the narrow corridor toward Perkins's last known position.
Perkins's breath was ragged but steady. She had killed more than she intended to; the casualty list was mounting. The situation had escalated—Vladimir Zelvisky had deeper protection than their briefing suggested. The operation had gone from precision to attrition, and neither of them liked the way the room smelled—of cordite, iron, and fear.
Hunter slid into the doorway and slammed his shoulder into the frame, gunsmoke stinging his nose. He took one last look at Perkins: she was alive, blood-smudged, eyes hard as flint. "You okay?" he asked.
She offered him a cold, exhausted grin. "I'm fine. Let's kill our way out."
They moved as a team—no speeches, no theatrics—just calibrated brutality. Hunter covered angles with surgical bursts; Perkins moved on the flank and cleared rooms. But the building had more men than anticipated, and somewhere in the walls a phone had already been dialed.
They had minutes before external police and private reinforcements swarmed the complex. The night had already tilted into a complicated fight—for every man they cut down, two more seemed to stand up. The operation had burned its stealth cover; now it was a race for extraction.
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