Chapter 27 - The Shattered Dome
As the heavy rifle fell through the air, Marcus Cole smiled—a fleeting, triumphant grin of utter superiority.
It was the fatal mistake he had made four years ago in Bogota. He underestimated the speed of Naomi Reyes.
The rifle had not yet completed its two-foot drop to the floor when Naomi moved.
Her right hand did not wait for the weapon to land. Instead, her foot snapped forward in a blinding, low soccer kick, striking the falling rifle mid-air by the barrel, launching the heavy metal receiver directly into Cole’s extended pistol arm like an improvised missile.
*CRACK!*
The impact shattered Cole’s wrist. The Sig Sauer flew out of his hand, discharging a wild shot that pulverized an oversized potted fern.
At the exact same instant, Naomi closed the fifteen-foot distance in the span of a single heartbeat.
Cole roared in fury, desperately attempting to squeeze the trigger on the detonator with his other hand. But Naomi’s fingers locked around the detonator casing with the same monstrous, inhuman strength that had stopped Vanessa Sterling’s kick—the grip of an operative whose hands had spent a decade breaking bones and tearing steel.
She didn't try to pull it away. She drove her thumb hard underneath his, wedging her flesh between the trigger switch and the release mechanism, manually overriding the dead-man's circuit with her own body.
"I told you," Naomi whispered into his ear, her eyes inches from his scarred face, "I don't play your games."
Cole lunged with a hidden combat blade drawn from his boot with his good hand, driving the steel toward Naomi’s throat.
Naomi didn't step back. She leaned inside the arc of the blade, letting the sharp steel slice a shallow line across her collarbone, and drove a vicious headbutt directly into Cole’s broken nose.
The crack of cartilage echoed through the glass cathedral.
Cole stumbled backward, blood pouring down his mouth, but he kept his grip locked on the detonator, his eyes wild with psychotic rage. "If I die, we all die, Reyes!"
He threw his entire body weight backward, slamming his back against the glass perimeter wall, dragging Naomi with him. With a savage, dying burst of strength, he used his knee to kick the detonator's auxiliary override toggle.
A high-pitched, piercing whine resonated from the charges mounted along the iron ribs of the dome.
**00:00:03... 00:00:02...**
"Get out, Ethan!" Naomi screamed.
She grabbed Cole by his lapels, pivoted on her left heel, and executed a massive hip throw, launching his heavy, armored body through the expansive glass panes of the conservatory wall into the stormy night outside.
Before she could turn back to Ethan, the charges detonated.
*BOOM!*
The concussive blast blew the entire glass dome into a million glittering razor blades.
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The massive iron framework collapsed inward, groaning like a dying leviathan. Naomi threw herself across the cast-iron bench, covering Ethan Whitmore with her own body as an avalanche of structural iron, heavy glass, and flaming debris rained down from sixty feet above.
***
