Free Enemy in the Dark by Jay Allan Page B

he thought. “Administer two more units.”
    Now I just have to stop the bleeding and get him patched up before I run out of blood substitute.
    Katarina sat on the edge of her cot, staring silently at the wall, replaying the last moments of their escape from the Grand Palais. She was troubled, and a strange expression had taken hold of her face.
    They had barely gotten away. Another minute and they would all have been killed or captured. But Lucas had managed to bring the Claw down over the large roof deck just in time, somehow wedging the ship into the tight confines next to the hotel’s massive tower. He popped the lower hatch and dropped a bunch of lines to the ground, and they had frantically scrambled aboard.
    Her agile mind focused hard on every aspect of the operation: the final fight with the guards, the race to climb up before enemy reinforcements arrived, the effort of getting a wounded Blackhawk and unconscious Aragona aboard.
    Then Ace went down in hail of enemy fire.
    He’d been the last one, the rearguard, standing under the shadow of the Claw, guns in both hands. His assault rifles spewed death and held the enemy back while his friends climbed to safety.
    Katarina had been staring right at him when he was hit. The first shot took him in the shoulder. He staggered back, but he stayed on his feet and kept on firing without so much as apause. It was no more than a few seconds, a fleeting instant, before he was hit again. The shot took him full on in the chest, and he dropped instantly, his guns falling to the ground next to him. He lay motionless on the rooftop.
    Blackhawk saw it too, and he lunged across the deck, now slick with his own blood. He was reaching for one of the lines, determined to go back down and rescue Ace, ignoring his own wound. But Tarnan grabbed him hard, his massive arms holding the captain like a vise while Tarq slid down the cable toward Ace’s still form.
    Katarina felt an urge to follow, but she stayed frozen in place, unsure if it was discipline or panic holding her back. She was as cold-blooded and fearless in battle as Blackhawk, but something about seeing Ace sprawled out on the concrete below hit her hard, stripping her of her normal decisiveness.
    She stood stone still and watched as Tarq dropped to the roof, certain the big man would never make it back up with Ace through the heavy enemy fire. She was about to rush to one of the cables when a blinding flash ripped through the air, and the shattered remnants of the hotel wall erupted into flame and debris.
    Another flash followed, and she stared down where the enemy guards had been a few seconds before. The macabre scene was lit by half a dozen fires. There was nothing visible through the clouds of billowing smoke except wreckage and charred bodies.
    She understood right away. It had been Shira. Through all the confusion and chaos of the final escape, Shira Tarkus had kept her wits. She’d run to the needle gun controls and blasted the enemy guards to bits, clearing the way for Tarq to rescue Ace.
    Katarina was silent now, her mind confused and uncertainas she stared at the wall of her cabin. Discipline was second nature to her, almost a religion. She’d been trained in the ways of the Sebastiani Assassins’ Guild since childhood. Its tenets and commandments had governed her life as long as she could remember—they made her the person she was. She had earned the gold belt, over a hundred confirmed kills. She’d taken out heads of state and leaders of criminal organizations, and she’d survived mission after mission. She had excelled because of her discipline. But it had failed her during the escape, and she had hesitated when she should have acted.
    She knew what it was, at least in part, and it was something she hadn’t wanted to face. Sebastiani assassins worked alone. Solitude was part of the life, hand in hand with discipline. Emotions, loyalties, even vendettas—they all