A Gray Llove

An Insult

Only about a minute after Six and Sasha took out her room's guards and rounded the corner at the end of the hall, Lloyd charged into Sasha's quarters in a full red rage. First the premises were breached, then the control room was torched – and now Sasha was gone. He was shaken at the sight of her helper notes scattered all over the bed – a bloody scalpel on the floor – the window broken like some old Hollywood monster had swung in from the empty night sky – what the fuck had happened to the extra mercenaries who were supposed to be guarding this section of the palace?

His eye caught a black scorch mark and a jagged hole beneath the room's doorhandle. At a closer glance, Lloyd labeled the damage as having come from a gun fired inside the room – something to take out the lock. But Sasha didn't have a gun in her room. So someone had definitely come from outside, shot out the door, swooped her away...and was possibly still inside the house.

Lloyd's thoughts jumped to Donald Fitzroy and his brat. There was one person whom he had counted on coming to get them. Six.

Picking up one of the stray automatics from the ground in the hallway, Lloyd took a few deep breaths and headed towards his prisoners' quarters on the opposite side of the building.

When he was met with an empty room there, his reaction still wasn't much better.

He told himself that even though Six had somehow gotten to Fitzroy and the kid, it still meant that his plan was working. They had to still be on the grounds, and Lloyd Hansen would still get his target tonight if it took all his tricks to do it.

Minutes later, after dodging a suicide grenade blast from Fitzroy and chasing Six and the brat along the palace wall, Lloyd sprinted almost the entire length and depth of the palace to emerge in the courtyard below.

He couldn't see Sasha anywhere, and that just spurred him on towards Six.

Six and the girl were sluggish from a leap from the top of the palace into the moat when Lloyd launched himself at Six for a battle royale. The two men grappled in the gravel – one mercenary attempted to support Lloyd with a few gunshots at Six, but this was really more of an annoyance than a help – and Lloyd saw the end approaching for his quarry in a few short minutes.

Then something hot pummeled him in the back, and Lloyd arched his spine in pain. A second blast – from a flare gun, what the actual fuck? – struck his outstretched hand and turned two fingers to stubs in the blink of an eye. Lloyd screamed and extracted himself from Six to go after the girl now. Two fingers lost to a flare gun felt like a very personal insult.

Six was barely on his feet when Lloyd tackled the kid and put her in a headlock with one massive arm. He aimed the flare gun at her head and yelled, "Don't move!" to Six.

The girl's throat got skinnier beneath his arm as she screeched, "Six! Help!" True to form, the battered agent started forward, drawing his gun and aiming it at Lloyd's head. In response, Lloyd walked backward, raising his eyebrows at Six to let him know he'd better stay in place.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lloyd spotted the dark rectangular shape of the palace maze and made for it. Dragging the girl with him, Lloyd let the shadows of the maze close like a curtain behind him and trusted that the turns and dead ends of Sasha's garden would keep him safe enough to catch his breath for a moment. He needed to turn the tide of the fight back where it needed to be – on his side. He was two fingers and one Sasha short, and even he could admit that that wasn't good. If he could get Six turned around in the maze, there was the possibility he would be made willing to do a prisoner swap: the girl for Sasha.

Then, of course, Lloyd would probably still kill Six and take his counter-intel token. But he would know where to find Sasha.

Little did he know that she would find him sooner than he thought.