Damian pushed himself to his hands and knees, barely registering the blood dripping from his face onto the marble floor. It was hard to see through the smoke, hard to breathe through it, but he had only one thought.

Aria…

He moved toward the kitchen and was immediately pulled back to the floor.

“Stay down,” Christophe commanded.

A split second later, gunfire ripped through the lab, the staccato of a semiautomatic rifle breaking the eerie silence that had followed the initial explosion.

Damian turned over the desk where he and Christophe had been sitting at the time of the explosion. It would give them cover while they regrouped.

He looked at Christophe. The man was surprisingly intact, his disheveled hair the only indication they were under attack.

“Weapon?” Damian asked him.

Christophe reached for one of the drawers on the desk and removed a handgun. “This is it in the office,” he said. “There are more in a safe downstairs. You?”

Damian removed the gun from the holster strapped to his side. “Same.”

“Charlotte?” Christophe called out.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Aria is fine.”

“Stay down,” Christophe shouted, his voice aimed at everyone else still in the lab. “Don’t move until we tell you.”

Damian shouldn’t have been surprised by the answering silence. Anyone working for the Syndicate — even in a cyber lab — would have been vetted and trained. If Christophe’s hackers were rattled, you wouldn’t know it.

“What about the women?” Damian asked.

“Charlotte will stay down until I come for her,” Christophe said, checking the magazine in his gun. “I’m betting Aria will do the same.”

Christophe’s words calmed Damian’s desire to charge through the office, push Aria behind him, dare anyone to come for her. Christophe was right: Aria would know. She wasn’t stupid — and she was no coward.

This was their war — their life.

Damian followed the path of the gunfire that had torn through the wall after the initial explosion. “I didn’t hear any other shots, did you?”

Christophe shook his head.

“It’s on the exterior wall,” Damian said.

“A warning?” Christophe asked.

It would make sense — the lab was locked down and none of the gunfire had come from inside. The explosion could have been a molotov cocktail thrown through the window. The gunfire would have to come from the building across the street.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Damian said.

They crouched low, staying under the windows as they made their way into the lab’s main office.

“Is everyone all right?” Christophe called out.

“Mac’s bleeding, but I think he’ll be okay,” someone shouted through the smoke curling the air.

“Someone call our contact at the police department, have them send an ambulance.” Christophe moved through the office. “And for god’s sake, stay down until we get back.”

They were almost to the door when Damian heard Aria’s voice.

“Damian!”

He looked back, saw her crouched on the floor with Charlotte. Her face was surprisingly calm, her eyes bright.

“Stay put,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

He followed Christophe into the stairwell and down the stairs. They flanked the door to the empty lobby — there was no need for a receptionist in an office that required a palm scan for entry — and Damian counted down their coordinated movement through the door.

They burst into the lobby. It was quiet, no sign of the assault that was taking place on the second floor.

“Tell me about the buildings around this one,” Damian said as they headed for the exit.

“They’re mostly empty,” Christophe said, “And only one of them has more than one story.”

He and Christophe were thinking the same thing: the shots fired into the second floor exterior wall could only have come from an adjoining building with a second floor.

“Where is it?” Damian asked as they flanked the exit in the same formation they’d used to enter the lobby.

“Across the street.”

Damian counted down and they stepped into the small alley that led to the lab’s entrance. It was empty.

“Let’s go,” Damian said, already heading for the street.

He half expected to be picked off by a sniper on their way across the street, but it was quiet except for the distant sound of sirens heading their way.

They hurried toward a crumbling brick building across the street, each of them covering different angles, watching the windows of the adjoining buildings for movement that never came. If Damian’s head hadn’t been dripping blood, he almost would have thought he’d imagined the whole thing.

The sirens grew louder as they reached the main floor of the abandoned building.

They stepped carefully into the shadowed recesses, trying to be quiet as they stepped over loose floorboards and trash left behind by vagrants and partying teenagers on their way to a staircase that didn’t look like a sure thing. The smell of mildew and old wood assaulted his nose as they approached the base of the stairs.

Christophe pointed to the rotting wood on one of the treads. Damian shrugged.

There was only one way up, and up was the only way to see if the assholes who had shot at them — and their women — were still there.

Damian led the way, stepping carefully on each tread, trying to minimize the creaks and groans of the rotting wood. He hesitated when he came close to the top of the staircase. There would be a split second when he wasn’t covered, when there would be no choice but to step into whatever was waiting on the second floor.

He waited for Christophe to catch up and hurried up the last few steps with his gun drawn.

He was standing on what looked like the landing of an old apartment building, the plaster walls long ago crumbled, exposing the rooms on the other side of the landing. As with the ground floor, there were broken bottles and empty food containers, used condoms and an occasional needle.

He started for the front of the building. It was the only place the gunfire could have originated. He had just stepped over the threshold of what must have been a front-facing apartment when he spotted the shell casings shimmering on the ground in front of the window.

“They’re gone,” Damian said, lowering his weapon as Christophe entered the room.

“Son of a bitch…” Christophe bent down and picked up one of the empty casings. “Who did this?”

The walls were closing in on Damian. All he could see was Aria’s face after she’d met with Primo, her insistence that no one had followed her after their meeting.

She was probably right. She probably hadn’t been followed.

But Primo knew she was in Paris. That meant he knew Damian was in Paris too.

Damian turned to Christophe. “I need to tell you something.”