“Not yet.” She edges to the corner. “There’s a car between us and the door. If we get behind it, we can move up.”
I check the gap. At least two of his men have eyes on it. “We’ll get cut down halfway.”
“Then we wait for our guys to draw them out.”
I hate the waiting, but I’m not about to run into the open like an idiot. Marco’s group is laying into the trucks from the left, and one of Dominic’s men breaks cover to reposition.
“Now,” Amalia says.
I run low for the car and slide behind it, Amalia hitting the ground next to me. Rounds punch into the door panel above our heads, but the engine block takes most of it. Good enough.
I come up over the hood and fire twice at the man near the warehouse door. He stumbles back inside. My ears are ringing.
“This is going better than I thought,” I say.
Amalia looks past me, toward the far end of the lot.
“What?” I follow where she’s looking.
Vans rush through the back gate, their headlights off, and men spill out of them before they’ve even stopped. They fan out fast and take cover as if they planned this. That’s not Dominic’s usual crew.
“He brought backup,” I say.
“He knew.” Amalia’s jaw clenches. “He fucking knew we’d do this!”
I don’t have time to think about that, because the new men push up our flank, and we’re about to be pinned between them and the warehouse. We need to fall back to the containers, but the open ground is worse now than it was.
“We have to move,” I say. “Back the way we came.”
I lean out to clear a path, firing at the closest van. One of their men crouches behind the second vehicle and lines up on me, and I see a gun pointed toward my chest. I’m too slow. I know it even as I try to drop to the ground.
Amalia slams into me, shoving me down, and the shot tears through the air where my head just was. Metal squeals as the round rips into the car frame.
She ends up on top of me, both of us in the dirt behind the tire. My heart pounds like crazy in my chest.
“You okay?” she gasps, her hand fisted in my jacket, her face inches away from mine.
“Yeah.” I grip her arm. “You?”
She nods, breathing fast. There’s a smear of grease on her cheek, but she’s not hit. I’m not either, somehow.
“That was close,” I manage.
“Too close.” She doesn’t let go of my jacket. “He shouldn’t have known. Nobody knew about the specifics but us and a handful of our own men.”
I want to tell her to focus on getting out, but she’s right to be rattled, because this changes everything. Dominic didn’t stumble into our trap. He set one of his own, and we ran straight into it.
A round skips off the dirt near my boot, and that snaps both of us back. We’re still pinned, and the second crew is closing in.
“We can’t go back the way we came,” I say. “They’ve got the lot now.”
Amalia twists. “The dock. If we get to the edge, there’s a maintenance walkway under it.”
“Under the dock?”
“It runs along the pilings to the next pier. We can come out past the gate.”
I don’t love that plan, but it beats getting shot in the open.