Bells ismine.
And someone took her.
The opera house materializes through the fog three blocks ahead. Stone façade, arched windows dark, no signs of life.
That's where she is.
The service entrance is a steel door set into the alley side. Locked.
I put my boot through it.
The frame buckles inward with a shriek of metal that echoes down the corridor beyond. Pain detonates through my back where the bullet shifts and I snarl through it, shouldering through the gap.
The thread pulls me left.
I follow it down a concrete hallway lit by emergency strips.
My boots echo off the concrete. Blood drips from my fingertips, leaving a trail behind me that I'm dimly aware of and couldn't give less of a fuck about. Every step drives the bullet deeper into whatever it's nestled against and every step brings me closer to her.
The first guard rounds the corner twenty feet ahead.
He's big. Private security type. Black tactical vest, earpiece, hand on a holstered sidearm. He sees the blood first—my hand, my shirt, the drops on the concrete.
Then he sees my face.
His mouth opens.
No sound comes out for a full second. His brain is doing what brains do when confronted with something that doesn't compute. Running through its library of human faces, failing to find a match, defaulting to the oldest subroutine in the evolutionary playbook.
MONSTER.
"What the f?—"
I hit him before the word finishes forming.
My fist connects with his jaw and the impact travels up my arm and into the bullet wound and I don't stop. His head snaps sideways, his earpiece flying, and I grab his vest with both hands and slam him into the concrete wall.
Once.
Twice.
His skull bounces off the cinderblock and his eyes roll and his legs buckle. I let him drop. He crumples like wet paper, groaning, his sidearm clattering free.
I step over him.
The thread pulls.
Down.
Below.
A stairwell opens on my right. Metal stairs descending into amber light. I take them three at a time, the icy pain in my back biting harder with every jarring step.
I hit the landing and keep going.
Another fucking corridor. This one has velvet-lined walls.
An underground rehearsal level.