Ciphers, Matt Rogers [a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT] 📗

common-sense part of her brain listing all sorts of obvious downsides to committing to something so brash with a man she barely knew who’d stormed into her apartment in the midst of a blackout and practically taken her hostage.

He knew the common-sense part of her brain would win.

And for good reason.

So he started to turn away.

Put his hand back on the doorknob.

But suddenly she was close, too close, and he turned back and she pressed his back to the door and cupped his face between her palms and stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him, long and slow.

Only for a few seconds.

Then she pulled away and stepped back and said, ‘I’d like that, too. It was nice to meet you.’

He didn’t know what to say.

She said, ‘Make sure you don’t die tonight.’

‘I wouldn’t dare.’

His head spinning, both with confusion and disbelief, he readied the Glock and slipped out of apartment 505, ruminating on the improbable directions life can take.

51

You could hear a pin drop.

Everyone cooped up in their apartments were keeping quiet, all the way down the hallway. There was no excited murmuring from behind closed doors, no muffled conversation… no noise whatsoever. Slater imagined couples and single city workers sitting on their sofas in the dark, maybe surrounded by faint candlelight, but no more than that. Mulling over what they might do if the power stayed out. Wondering how long it would take until they had to take to the streets, actively searching for resources. This was Manhattan, after all. People were busy. Most ate out, or ordered meal delivery. What little supplies they had in their pantries wouldn’t last long.

And then what?

The longer the darkness lasted, the more sobering reality became.

Slater knew he couldn’t worry about that. If he did, the pressure would mount. The key to remaining calm was refusing to think about the consequences of failure, but the higher the stakes the harder that became. For now all he could do was move forward.

And reunite with King.

As he set off for the stairwell, he realised how quickly he’d acclimated to working alongside his de facto brother. He’d spent his whole career as a solo operative, but the truth was they functioned better as a duo. Black Force, his old clandestine government unit, should have come to that realisation sooner than they did. The entire division was broken, disbanded and dissolved before the upper echelon put two and two together and invited King and Slater back to work as a team.

Now, he felt strangely exposed on his own.

How quickly the comfort of isolation had worn off…

He reached the stairwell, put a hand out, and pushed the door open.

Stepped into the pitch blackness, one foot at a time, with his Glock raised and ready to fire.

He didn’t get the chance.

The darkness morphed, from nothingness to a sudden flurry of movement, and he squeezed the trigger twice and put both rounds through the forehead of the sicario lunging at him. The man’s own weapon was outstretched, and Slater threw himself sideways as he realised the barrel had lined up with his face. He needn’t have bothered — the body sailed on past, splaying forward, but now he was out of position.

He righted himself, and caught the shadows morphing again, and suddenly the final man barrelled out of the darkness in a desperate final-effort lunge. Slater saw both the guy’s hands splayed and realised he didn’t have a weapon.

He ran out of bullets.

The thought didn’t reassure him. Before he could take advantage of it, the guy had his hands interlocked behind the small of Slater’s back. The two of them were roughly the same size and weight, and when that’s the case it doesn’t really matter how strong either party is. Wrestling technique exists for a reason, and that reason is that it works. So the sicario completed the takedown, demonstrating strangely All-American abilities for a Mexican, and drove Slater down to the carpeted floor.

He tried to bring his Glock up between them, but the man’s weight on top pinned him in an awkward position.

He threw a slicing vertical elbow into the bridge of the guy’s nose, breaking it. The sicario grunted, a tight-lipped animalistic noise, but he didn’t cry out in pain, and he didn’t budge. He got both his hands on Slater’s wrist and smashed it against the ground with the strength of adrenaline.

The Glock went off, the gunshot deafening, but it was out of Slater’s grip before the bullet had left the chamber. It bounced once, coming down out of reach.

Slater switched to desperation mode. The sicario was strong, and capable, and more than aware that he was fighting for his life.

The only thing was, Slater had all three of those attributes in spades, too.

And he knew how to use them a little better.

Instead of wasting time throwing strikes from his back against the pull of gravity, he contorted sideways and reached for the sicario’s ankle. He got a tight grip on it, and the man wrenched his leg forward to try and escape the grip.

Slater had been counting on that.

He rolled with the momentum, pushing the guy’s leg in the direction he’d tried to escape from. The result was the sicario pitching forward, having to tumble over one shoulder to avoid ploughing face-first into the carpet, and when he righted himself Slater had reversed position entirely, winding up with one knee on the guy’s chest.

And he didn’t need to waste time wrestling for control of a weapon.

He just lined up the perfect target and cocked his left elbow and dropped it on the sicario’s forehead, putting all his bodyweight and some extra adrenaline behind it. There was no need for a prolonged exchange of fists. Truth was, in real life, whoever landed the first significant blow usually won the fight. In Slater’s case, it happened almost one hundred percent of the time. His elbow bounced off the guy’s skull and ricocheted his head off the ground and knocked him unconscious with one brutal crack.

Slater