The supersonic crack of the bullet rattled the chandeliers in the dining room. Shards of glass rained down around Arisa. Without wasting a single millisecond, Abir lunged forward, grabbing Arisa by the waist and tackling her flat onto the hardwood floor. A split second later, a second suppressed round punched a clean hole through the concrete wall right where her head had been.
"Are you hit? Talk to me!" Abir hissed, pinning her down under his own body for protection.
Arisa breathed heavily, her initial shock morphing into pure, unadulterated rage. She gripped the floorboards, her knuckles turning white. "I'm fine. But this shooter is elite. He's taking these shots from at least 800 meters away."
"It's Xero," Abir growled, his mind calculating variables at lightning speed. "He's positioned on the roof of the unfinished high-rise to the north. That's the only angle that gives him a direct line of sight into this room."
Abir crawled beneath the dining table, dragging the briefcase of diamonds with one hand. He reached into his tactical bag, pulling out a compact submachine gun and thrusting it into Arisa's hands.
"Arisa, he's going to keep pinning us down with blind fire to stop us from relocating," Abir instructed, his voice dropping into a lethal, authoritative tone. "I'm heading down to the underground garage. In exactly three minutes, I want you to flip the emergency backup lights and fire out the front gate. Make him think we are breaching the perimeter on foot."
Arisa slapped the magazine into the weapon with a grim, defiant smile. "And what are you going to do, Abir?"
Abir's eyes flashed with a dangerous, feral intensity in the shadows. He secured two combat knives and his custom sidearms into his tactical vest.
"I'm going to teach Draco's ghost that in this city, there is only one apex predator. And his name is Abir Khan."
Abir slipped into the darkness of the stairwell, descending into the concrete belly of the estate. In the garage, he ripped the black tarp off his machine. He mounted the **H2R**, snapping his tinted visor down. As he hit the ignition, the superbike's supercharged engine roared to life with a mechanical scream that shook the foundation of the basement.
Upstairs, precisely at the three-minute mark, Arisa triggered the backup lights and unleashed a devastating barrage of gunfire out through the shattered window, drawing all attention to the courtyard.
Through his high-powered sniper scope, Xero locked onto the muzzle flashes, adjusting his windage. But before his finger could squeeze the trigger, the rear security wall of the estate exploded outward. Like a black comet launched from the depths of hell, Abir's **H2R** tore onto the open highway.
Xero swung his heavy rifle to track the speeding target, but the bike was already clocking nearly 300 km/h, heading straight for the very building he was standing on.
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