Two men roughly escorted a third, his wrists bound behind his back and a black hood over his head, into a spacious, well-appointed room. The hooded man was sent to his knees with a kick to the back of his left leg, and the bag was removed.

From the head of Canaan Titan.

Canaan blinked as his eyes adjusted to the sunlight streaming in through open French doors. The sounds of seagulls and waves crashing outside confirmed that the ocean was nearby, although all that could be seen of the outside world from where Canaan knelt was endless blue sky.

The two men who’d brought Canaan into the room stood off to the side; thick, rugged mercenaries who looked as though seeing something sweet and innocent, like a kitten or butterfly, would cause them great pain.

The youngest Titan rolled and stretched his wrists and shoulders, attempting to engineer an escape, although he’d already tested the cuffs and found them to be completely secure.

Shortly thereafter, he heard the door behind him open and a tall, slender man was deposited on the floor next to Canaan. His hood was removed to reveal close-cropped blonde hair atop an angular face. He looked to be in his late thirties. A pencil-thin scar ran from his left cheekbone back to his ear. He wore a khaki pants and green polo shirt.

His hands were bound in an unfortunately familiar fashion.

The two captives made eye contact and the newcomer spoke. “You must be Canaan.”

Canaan didn’t recognize him, and made a face to indicate as much.

“I know Atlas and Odin. You’re not them, but I see the resemblance. Sorry to hear about Achilles.”

His English carried with it a mild German accent.

“Forgive me. I’m Matthias Schneider. I’m a, ah, ‘professional’ colleague of Atlas. It’s nice to meet you, despite the circumstances.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Growled one of the two men who’d brought Matthias in. He had a rife slung over his shoulder in addition to the side arms they all carried.

Canaan longed to ask one of their captors, or Matthias, just what was happening, but it seemed conversation wasn’t welcome at this point.

The last thing Canaan recalled was mind-blowing sex, with that stunning redhead from the auction; he could faintly smell and taste her on his lips. He recalled drifting off to sleep with her in his arms. And then… nothing. Where the hell was she? Was she okay?

Canaan had fallen asleep naked, but he now wore a gray t-shirt and the pants of a blue tracksuit. On his feet were Nike running shoes a smidge too tight.

Whatever this was, it was part of Atlas’s world; the presence of Matthias Schneider confirmed that.

But the red head had nothing to do with any of that. For that matter, neither did Canaan, really.

Odin had some enemies, and Canaan had been Odin’s proxy at the auction. Did this have anything to do with that? With Odin? Canaan’s mind raced.

A few minutes later, a third prisoner was brought into the room in an identical fashion. Matthias was to Canaan’s immediate right. Next to him, a man was set on the floor, and his hood removed. This one, Canaan knew.

Nolan Weston.

Nolan bore a split lip, black eye, and an abrasion on his chin. The yellow shirt he wore had blood spatter across the front and a rip on the back. He’d clearly been taken by force.

Whereas Matthias Schneider was cool and calm, Nolan was in a rage.

His head swiveled, and he nodded at Matthias and Canaan before spitting on the floor and speaking to the men standing by the French doors, in broken Russian, a language Canaan spoke fluently. Although the grammar was mangled and the pronunciation less than perfect, every Russian-speaker in the room understood that Nolan Weston was explaining to the guards that they were all the products of their mothers having sex with pigs.

One of the men who’d brought Canaan in, an ugly, barrel-chested bruiser, barked back at him before walking over and kicking him hard in the stomach.

Nolan collapsed to the floor before being pulled back up.

The door opened again, but rather than another handcuffed, hooded hostage, instead an electric wheelchair glided silently across the floor, occupied by a man with slicked-back black hair, wearing glasses. His twisted body slumped sideways in the chair, propped up on a cushion. His right arm controlled the chair while his left curled up against his body unnaturally. Canaan guessed multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy, but he was no doctor and couldn’t have placed a confident wager either way.

The man in the wheelchair was accompanied by a striking woman with short, dark hair, wearing a form-fitting red dress. Tattoos swirled around and across most of the exposed flesh on her sculpted arms and legs. She stood behind the man in the chair, who’d taken a position in front of the kneeling men.

“This is wonderful,” the man remarked, in a dry, raspy voice. He paused as the unmistakable sound of a helicopter landing nearby filled the room. “Where are the rest?”

“They’re coming, sir. They’ll be here shortly,” one of the men who brought Nolan in replied. He spoke with an Irish brogue.

The wheelchair crept up closer, and its driver looked down pitilessly at his captives. With a sneer, he reversed back as the door opened again, crowding the room with four more thugs and a pair of black hoods.

To Canaan’s left, an angry man in his twenties with a shaved head, wearing a rumpled suit, shut his eyes tight and opened them slowly to compensate for the brightness of the room. Past him was a statuesque blonde with a puffy right cheek and swelling around her left eye. She wore workout clothes, as if she’d been abducted leaving the gym.

“What’s the meaning of this?” The new man next to Canaan barked, defiantly, with a thick British accent. “Who’s in charge here, then?”

“Is this all of them?” the man in the wheelchair asked, and the Irishman stepped forward to answer in the affirmative.

“You’re in no position to ask questions. Just be grateful you’re still breathing,” the man in the wheelchair suggested. “That could certainly change. But I’ll indulge you. I’m in charge. Since my father was murdered, you can call me QB.”

“That filth was euthanized, not murdered,” Nolan Weston taunted. “It’s just a shame he went so quickly. He deserved to suffer.”

The tattooed woman behind the wheelchair crossed the room in a flash and delivered a brutal kick between Nolan Weston’s legs. Every man in the room cringed, and several gasped. He pitched forward, coughing and groaning, in obvious distress.

The woman who’d kicked him nodded to the henchmen lined up along the wall and two of them approached and lifted Nolan back to a kneeling position. He looked pale, sucking in deep breaths through his nose as he struggled to compose himself.

“Hopefully that will bring any unpleasantness to a close, and Arava won’t have to deliver any additional ‘corrections’, no?” QB asked, and we collectively nodded and mumbled our acquiescence. “We’re all civilized here, and I expect you to behave accordingly. In this house, my word, and my family, is paramount. Any transgressions against either will result in immediate punishment.

“But, that’s why we’re all gathered here, isn’t it?”

QB “paced” back and forth before us in his chair as he spoke. His underlings stood silently against the wall behind him. His woman, Arava, the one who’d kicked Nolan in the last place any man wants to be kicked, walked over to one side of the room and poured herself a drink.

“You’ve been brought here in the interest of justice,” the man in the wheelchair continued. “Justice for my father and my family. As all of you know, he was butchered in Las Vegas last year. In the street, like a dog.”

QB’s rant bore little resemblance to the truth, as Canaan and Nolan knew it, but they had no choice but to endure his revisionist history lesson. He held all the cards. The “audience” contained several high-level intelligence operatives, and each of their minds raced with thoughts of escape, although little could realistically be accomplished against a room filled with armed men, unless something happened to significantly change the odds.

“The way I heard it, he was shot dead while abducting a baby,” Matthias boldly interjected. “Which may have been the least of his sins.”

Arava set down her drink and walked toward Matthias, but QB raised a hand to stop her. He stared Matthias down intensely for a moment, gathering his thoughts.

“The idea that low-born trash such as you could possibly comprehend a man like my father is laughable, Herr Schneider,” hissed QB, menacingly. “No matter. His death will be avenged. All guilty parties will be punished, accordingly. All of you had a part to play in the tragedy, and you’ll all pay. But not before assisting me in bringing the rest of the chickens home to roost.”

The heavy door creaked open yet again, and a tall Arab man in a white suit walked purposefully into the room, flanked by three more nasty-looking thugs. He approached the wheelchair, and greeted its occupant warmly. “Hello, brother!” He bent at the waist and embraced QB.

“Welcome, Qadim,” he replied with a smile.

“Where are we so far?” Qadim asked.

“We’ve only just begun. Nolan Weston, Matthias Schneider, Canaan Titan, Carlton Fox, and Annalise Rubidoux,” QB stated, “introducing” the prisoners to the man called Qadim, who didn’t appear as if he could possibly be QB’s brother, despite the greeting.

“I’d hoped for more Titans,” Qadim conceded. “After that entire Gutenberg Bible charade, no Odin?”

Canaan’s ears perked up. The auction was legitimate, as far as he could tell. Charade? If the entire thing had been a setup, where were Raven and Duncan now? Every moment in the room only filled Canaan with more questions, and no answers.

“Patience,” QB replied. “Canaan’s brothers will come for him. And when they do, we’ll collect the lambs. You’ll have your slaughter, brother. We are polar bears, Qadim.”

Qadim looked quizzically at his older sibling.

“When polar bears hunt walruses,” QB explained. “They don’t attack directly. Walruses can weigh more than a ton. Two thousand pounds behind those tusks could be quite damaging. No, instead, the bears bellow and charge at the walruses, and in the ensuing panic, the walruses injure one another. The bears enjoy a leisurely feast with nothing to fear.

“Taking this group will instill panic in the rest. They’ll make themselves vulnerable. We’ll finish them at our convenience.”

“Indeed,” Qadim answered, as he walked toward the kneeling quintet. He began with Annalise, placing a hand on her defiant cheek. “Killing you would be such a waste. I’ve argued against it from the start. You just need the proper… motivation. You could be a useful pet.”

She stared furious daggers up at him. He stepped to the man to Canaan’s left, a stranger to the rest of the room who’d been referred to as Carlton Fox.

Qadim made eye contact, and the two men engaged in an intense, uneasy staring contest.

“You don’t like me, do you Mister Fox?” Qadim asked in his smooth, educated tone.

“Remove my handcuffs and you can find out,” the Brit answered.

Qadim looked back at QB and the two of them laughed. “No, we’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you here. I don’t think so. I’ll try to see to it that you enjoy our hospitality.”

He approached Canaan next. “Are all Titans cowards, or just Atlas and Odin?”

“Excuse me?” Canaan replied.

“I asked if you were a coward like your brothers.”

Canaan had had enough. “You don’t know my brothers. If you did, you’d be terrified right now.”

The tall Arab held out his hand, flattened to demonstrate the steadiness of a surgeon.

“I’m well aware of their capabilities. They’ll find you here only because we allow it, and we’ll be ready for them.” He swept his hand back toward the assembled mercenaries, now more than a dozen in all.

“Hello, Matthias,” Qadim said, with familiarity in his voice.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” Matthias replied.

The two men conversed in German. Nolan’s German was excellent, and Annalise was conversational, but most of the room was left in the dark. Qadim became angry at one point and stuck his finger in Matthias’s face. Arava brought a drink to QB, who watched the proceedings with obvious amusement.

“Nolan Weston,” Qadim stated, moving on. “As I understand it, you were present when my father was killed.”

Nolan nodded his head.

Qadim produced a pistol from the small of his back and pressed it to Nolan’s forehead. He held it there as the rest of the captives held their collective breath.

Qadim’s fury waned, however, and he lifted the barrel of the gun away and replaced it behind his back. Qadim squatted in front of Nolan, so that their faces were very close, almost touching.

“Did you kill Nicholas Mendy? In Iceland?” Qadim asked.

“Why ask questions to which you already know the answer?” Nolan replied. “If you’re going to kill me, stop posturing and get it over with before I die of boredom.”

Qadim measured his words before speaking. “Killing Nicholas is what’s kept you alive. He was scum.” Qadim turned back to his brother. “I didn’t authorize Weston to be part of this. I want him released. He deserves a reward for avenging Quincy. Put the hood back on and get him on a plane. Drop him somewhere far away.”

He returned his attention to Nolan.

“This is your ‘get out of jail free’ card. One chance. Give us a reason, however, and we won’t show such mercy again.”

QB rolled up to where Qadim squatted before Nolan Weston.

“Bollocks,” QB stated. “He stays. He may as well have pulled the trigger in Las Vegas. I loved Quincy just as you did. But father did what he felt had to be done. Nicholas Mendy was just an instrument. A tool. If you want to be upset with anyone, it should be Quincy. Had he been allowed to do the things he wanted to do, it would have spelled disaster for our family. An empire that’s taken generations to build would have been toppled because of his ‘conscience.’ His weakness. He was never one of us.”

Qadim rose to his feet, towering over his brother, anger flashing in his eyes.

“He was my brother!” Qadim bellowed. “The same as you. He could have been made to see reason, to understand.” Qadim’s fists balled, and the mercenaries by the French doors suddenly perked up. Three of them had accompanied Qadim, and were presumably loyal to him. They’d intentionally intermingled with the rest of the men, in case they needed to come to the aid of their boss.

Arava walked over to the brotherly standoff and pulled a weapon from the back of QB’s chair. It was a Mac-10, fully automatic sub-machine gun, and she took up a position next to Nolan Weston, with the entire line of prisoners past him, in the background if she pulled the trigger.

“I can solve this entire debate with my index finger, Qadim,” she warned. “I can kill them all right now.”

The guards drew their weapons, some pointing at each other, some drawing beads on Qadim, QB, and Arava.

Qadim slowly drew the gun from behind his back, making a show of the fact that he wasn’t aiming it at QB or Arava. He held it aloft for all to see, then took a step away from the wheelchair and back to the prisoners.

With tension choking the room, he stepped to Canaan and levelled his piece at the youngest Titan.

“Don’t question my thirst for blood. My willingness to dirty my hands,” Qadim pointed the gun at Carlton Fox next. “I’ll execute three of these men right now. And feel no more remorse than swatting a fly. But Weston deserves clemency. And Rubidoux is worth more, much more, to me alive than dead.”

Every eye and ear in the room was on Qadim. Arava’s finger caressed the trigger of her weapon. Her mouth twisted into a perverse sneer, almost as if she craved bloodshed.

QB broke the silence. “No one doubts your resolve, nor your commitment to the cause. We can discuss Weston. He’s not going anywhere.”

Qadim mulled QB’s words for a moment, then turned to Matthias Schneider. Without a word, he fired a single shot into the German intelligence operative’s forehead, causing him to crumble in a heap to the floor, dead.

Canaan’s eyes widened in horror, and he braced for his own death. Arava looked to QB for direction, and at that moment, Nolan Weston sprang into action.

Nolan had managed, at the expense of shredding his left wrists, to wriggle a hand free of his cuffs. With the room focused on Matthias Schneider’s murder, he leapt toward Arava, swinging the loose handcuff against the side of her head and relieving her of her weapon, all in one graceful move. A burst from the Mac-10 sent live rounds spraying into the carpet and into Matthias Schneider’s still-warm body.

Nolan put an arm around Arava’s neck and used her as a shield, pointing the machine gun at QB as he pulled along, shuffling toward the door.

Blood trickled from above Arava’s right eye as she grasped Nolan’s arm with both her hands, keeping the pressure from her throat.

The henchmen across the room forgot their own beef and trained their weapons on Nolan and Arava.

“Canaan, Annalise, and Fox. On your feet,” commanded Nolan. “We’re walking out of here. She’s coming with us,” Noland added, tightening the arm he had wrapped around Arava to emphasize how serious he was. “Anything happens besides that, and QB and Qadim are dead. And as many of you bastards as I can take with me before I run out of ammo. And it should be obvious to you that if you try any bullshit, I’ll break your fucking neck,” he said to Arava.

“You should thank me for not breaking your balls, bitch,” Arava answered, her voice dripping with malice.

“Oh, Nolan,” QB said, shaking his head. He appeared to be not the least bit worried, nor surprised by the sudden turn of events. “We are not savages. Your death could have been easy. Quick, and painless, like your friend Matthias’s. But now, not only will you have to suffer first, and suffer pain beyond your wildest reckoning, but Camilla will also have to be violated.” QB laughed when he finally finished dragging out each syllable of the word “violated.”

“Not by you, you miserable wretch,” Nolan replied, backing himself and Arava toward the door as the security team positioned themselves to flank him.

Nolan swiftly turned his attention to the nearest mercenary, squeezing off a burst of gunfire into the man’s chest, dropping him where he stood, before setting his sights once more on QB. Discipline and experience kept any of the rest of them from firing a shot, and they stopped as one.

“That’s a warning to the rest of you. Weapons down.”

QB lifted his good hand to signal compliance to his troops. Qadim did the same, and the Arab tucked his own weapon behind his back. “I want the rest of these cuffs off. Now!”

As one of the guards approached the rest of the hostages, Annalise Rubidoux casually tossed her cuffs to him when he was just beyond striking distance.

“Set the keys on the floor. And I’ll have your spare piece. The one in your ankle holster. Left leg. Set it by the keys,” she bossed the man, while rubbing her wrists.

Carlton Fox chuckled.

“Color me impressed. Once this is over, you Yanks will have to show me how you extricated yourselves from the cuffs so easily. SAS doesn’t teach that,” he said, referencing the British Army elite division, the Special Air Services.

“Leave those weapons and step back to the wall,” Annalise Rubidoux commanded the mercenaries. “Turn and face the wall, hands over your heads, flat.” The men complied, and she unlocked the cuffs on Carlton Fox and Canaan Titan. Fox walked over and cuffed Arava’s wrists behind her back and held onto her, guarding her with the gun he’d been handed with the cuffs.

Satisfied that matters were more or less secure, Annalise walked over and collected the guns on the floor, carrying them back and handing one to Canaan. “I know swords are more your speed, but you’re a Titan, you must know how to use one of these, no?”

“I’ve been to the range a time or two,” Canaan admitted, stuffing one gun down the back of his pants and pulling the slide back to chamber a round in a second he’d picked up off the floor from Annalise’s collection.

“What’s your next move, Weston?” Qadim asked. “Four of you against an army. On a battlefield with which you’re unfamiliar. You don’t even know what country you’re in. How far do you think you’ll get?”

The rest of the group looked to Nolan for direction.

“Annalise, you have the door. Carlton, keep that bitch under wraps. Canaan, if QB or Qadim even clear their throats in a way you don’t like, put ‘em down.” Nolan instructed his impromptu team. “The rest of you, away from that door. All in a group. Over there.” Nolan moved them to a corner as far from the door as they could get, and he stepped over the body of the man he’d killed en route to the French doors.

Nolan stepped out onto the balcony, where he saw only endless water past a rocky shoreline. To either side, he could see nothing but cliffs. No hint as to where they were.

A dock sat far below, with several speedboats hitched to it. Nolan looked up and around at the house; part castle and part mansion. On a turret towering overhead, he could see at least two armed men with binoculars. Directly overhead was a smaller balcony, probably part of a bedroom, Nolan surmised.

“Not much in the way of escape routes, I’m afraid,” QB mocked as Nolan reentered the room.

Nolan walked up to Qadim with his gun drawn and relieved the Arab of the gun behind his back. “Matthias was a good man, you son of a bitch,” he snarled, and smashed the gun into the side of Qadim’s head, turning instantly with his weapon to dissuade any of the thugs from intervening.

Nolan backed cautiously toward Annalise, wanting to confer with the nearest thing he had to a peer in the room. He hadn’t worked with her as closely as Atlas Titan had, but he’d only ever heard her referred to as a reliable and capable operative. He’d have to trust her. Canaan had the bloodline, but lacked the experience. Fox was the wildcard. He’d been brought in for a reason, but Nolan didn’t know what he’d done to wind up on QB’s radar or what role he had to play in the unfolding drama.

“What’s the play, Annalise?” Nolan asked quietly, sidling up to the woman guarding the door, his eyes never leaving the guards he’d herded into the opposite corner.

“What’s outside?” she asked.

“We’re on a cliff,” Nolan answered. “It’s rocky, no beach that I could see, just water. Large house, probably a helipad on the roof. Dock down below, but no easy way to access it from here.”

Annalise considered their options. “If we go out this door,” she pointed her weapon to indicate the door through which they were all brought. “It’s forty-four stairs to the ground floor; spiral staircase. No way to know how many corridors off the steps. Came through a large room off the garage to get to the foot of the stairs. I was transported here from a small airstrip, twelve-minute drive. I was in Brussels when I was taken, not sure how long I was out.”

Nolan was immediately impressed. He hadn’t had his wits about him in time to recall anything of the trip to the house they were now in, nor of much of the stairway. He was groggy until they arrived outside the door to the room, in which they now found themselves, completely confused until his hood was removed.

He recalled an ambush leaving a café in Paris; he turned a corner, carrying food and coffee back to Camilla in their hotel room. They’d been enjoying a brief getaway while their baby girl, Larkin, stayed with Camilla’s father, Richard, his wife, Emma, and their daughter, Hadley, in Salzburg, Austria.

Larkin was the most precious thing in the world to Nolan and Camilla, but sleep was a foreign concept to her. They kept expecting her to figure it out and settle down eventually, but after ten months, her record was two hours and forty-three consecutive minutes. Camilla was at her wit’s end, and when Emma offered to have Larkin spend a week in Salzburg, the Westons jumped at it.

After a romantic dinner in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and a moonlit walk along the Seine, Nolan and Camilla retired to their five-star hotel for a night of ravenous love-making. Exhaustion claimed them in the wee hours, and hunger woke Nolan before his bride.

He’d strolled to a nearby café to allow Camilla some more blissful uninterrupted rest, but when he took a turn down an alley to cut back to his hotel, he was accosted by three young Africans.

What seemed like a typical Parisian mugging, however, was anything but. Nolan expected his martial arts mastery to send his attackers scattering, but they turned out to be much more than common street thugs.

He threw hot coffee into the face of the first man to approach, and the second he hit with a spinning back kick, but when he went to grab the third and send him crashing into the first to clear an escape route, he found that his attempted judo throw was countered and his legs were swept out from under him by the second man, who recovered far more quickly than Nolan had expected him to.

The men pounced when Nolan hit the ground, two of them pummeling him with punches while the third set to work securing his legs.

Nolan managed to deflect and dodge most of the barrage, but just when he thought he had an opening, two more men appeared; the two men who brought him into the room he was now in.

He was overwhelmed by their numbers and injected with what he guessed must be a sedative. A car pulled up, black to his recollection, then everything was blank until he was put on his knees next to Matthias Schneider.

If anything had happened to Camilla, he’d dismember the men in this room, slowly. If they’d somehow gotten to Larkin or Hadley, then however they defined pain would prove sorely inadequate.

“I was with my wife, in Paris,” Nolan replied. “We need time. We need to regroup and figure this out. My first instinct is to clean this room; stack bodies in that corner and be done with it. Between the two of us, armed, I have no doubt we could escape, but I need intelligence. I have to know if my wife was taken as well. How did you come to be here?”

“Something in my water. I was working out at my hotel gym in Brussels; I was there doing some recon for your father-in-law. Stupid, I let my guard down.

“I was put on a plane, something small, and during the flight I came to. They knocked me back out.” Annalise pointed to the swelling on her face. “And put a bag over my head. Did you know QB had a son?”

“No. But QB was a phantom. Our entire dossier on him would have fit on a business card. I’ve never known anybody with a such a gift for disguise, disinformation, and evasion.

“Canaan, come here,” Nolan summoned the youngest Titan.

Canaan stepped back toward Nolan Weston and Annalise took up his post, not wanting the three known quantities in the room to be clustered too closely together.

“You were in Vienna, right? Tell me everything you remember.”

“Yes…?” Canaan answered, warily.

“Business or pleasure?” Nolan asked. “Alone?”

“Business. Buying books at an auction for Odin. Raven Conway and one of Odin’s guys were with me.”

“Gilchrist?” Nolan asked.

“Yeah,” Canaan replied, “that’s right. How did you…?”

“Never mind that,” Nolan countered. “Where were you taken?”

“A hotel.”

“You were at The Sacher, right?” Nolan asked.

“Yeah, that’s correct. What the fuck, Nolan?” Canaan replied, annoyed that Nolan Weston seemed to have his entire itinerary committed to memory.

“I try to make sure I know where all the pieces are on the board at all times,” Nolan explained. “But this shit came out of left field.”

“There was a woman, we met at the auction,” Canaan admitted. “We wound up back at her hotel room. Fell asleep next to her, woke up here, in these clothes. Wherever ‘here’ is.”

“Shit, then we have to assume they have Conway,” Nolan said, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “And the woman you were with. Unless she’s working with them. Describe her.”

“Red hair, lots of it,” Canaan explained. “Pretty enough to stop a train. Voluptuous, I guess you’d say. Her name was Madeline Carmichael. Ring a bell?”

“Nah, not at all,” Nolan replied.

“What’s our next move?” Canaan asked, trying to swallow his mounting panic.

“First of all, we—”

Nolan’s words were cut short by the door next to him being blown off its hinges.

The room filled with splintered wood and smoke, and a cacophony of voices shouting instructions.

Nolan grabbed Canaan’s wrist as they scrambled away from the door, winding up practically in Annalise Rubidoux’s lap.

“The French doors!” Nolan barked before bolting toward the exit with Annalise and Canaan in tow. Carlton Fox discarded Arava, pushing her to the floor and springing away and toward his fleeing colleagues.

Nolan Weston knelt in the open doorway, firing his weapon back into the room. Dangerous-looking, heavily-armed men poured into the room through the remnants of the heavy oak door.

The three escapees hit the balcony and stopped in their tracks. A perilous fall, past and over jagged rocks, to the waves far below awaited anyone foolish enough to jump.

Annalise Rubidoux raised her weapon and unleashed a barrage of rounds back into the hazy, chaotic room before she dropped the gun and took a running start before executing a flawless swan dive off the balcony.

“Bloody Hell!” Carlton exclaimed, and Canaan gasped as she disappeared over the railing.

“Go! Follow her! Go now!” Nolan barked. “There’s too many of them, they’ll be on us any second!”

Bullets whizzing past Canaan’s head convinced him, and he climbed up on the railing and leapt as far out into nothing as he could manage.

Carlton discarded his sport coat and dodged bullets as he took his own running dive off the cliff.

Nolan was last, aiming center of mass at the largest target in the room, a giant of a man who’d burst into the room when the door exploded. He didn’t bother to watch the man fall, rather he said a silent prayer that Camilla and Larkin were safe, and he abandoned the balcony at terminal velocity.