Chapter 385: Taking The Golden Nugget Hotel [1]
The Golden Nugget’s outer premises came into clearer focus the closer we got, and Lucy slowed our pace to something barely above a careful walk.
She had taken us through a side route on the approach, one she said Callighan’s people weren’t watching, and she had been right. We hadn’t run into anyone. The streets around the back of the hotel stayed dead and dark the whole way through, nothing moving, nothing making sound except the occasional wind off the marina carrying salt and the smell of diesel that had been sitting in the water for a long time.
Still, there was no point in getting casual just because the path had been clean.
"Let’s position ourselves at a reasonable distance," I said quietly, stopping us behind the shadow line of a crumbling retaining wall. "I can already see figures moving ahead."
Lucy looked at me with something between surprise and disbelief.
We were still a good distance from the hotel. The night was as dark as it had been the whole walk over.
"You can see that far? In the dark?" She muttered.
"Perk of having a Symbiote," Christopher answered before I could.
"It is," Sydney agreed from behind us, and I already heard the smirk in her voice before I turned. "And Cindy can do even better, right? Use that radar of yours. Tell us how many are inside the hotel."
Cindy’s expression shifted to her with a dry gaze.
"Don’t exaggerate. The range of my radar is maybe ten feet maximum. If I spread it three-dimensionally, it gets even harder to maintain," she said.
"That’s actually impressive," Rachel murmured, mostly to herself.
"I mean, it’s basically cheating," Christopher said, laughing.
"Let’s not rely too much on Cindy’s radar," I cut in before it became a debate. "At least not until we’re inside the hotel. It takes a toll on her."
The last time I had seen her push it hard, there had been blood running from her nose before she even seemed to notice. Whatever the radar cost her, it wasn’t nothing, and pushing it out here in the open before anything had even started would be stupid.
"How protective you are of Cinderella," Sydney sighed. "Now I’m jealous."
"Don’t call me that," Cindy said quickly, blushing.
"You don’t mind when Ryan calls you that, though."
"Oh, shut up." Cindy drove her elbow into Sydney’s side hard enough that Sydney shifted half a step, and even in the dark I could see Cindy’s jaw go tight with embarrassment.
Sydney looked entirely unbothered.
"So how many?" Christopher asked from beside me, already moving past all of it, his eyes forward and his voice back to something focused.
Lucy stood on my other side waiting for the same answer.
"Four, so far," I said. "Spread out around the hotel, keeping a decent distance between each other. They’re not grouped up, just making slow rounds. Nothing that looks like they’re expecting trouble."
"Still, four walking a perimeter at two in the morning." Christopher exhaled quietly through his nose. "Diligent for Callighan’s crew."
"Yeah," I said.
I kept watching them, tracking the spacing between the figures and the rhythm of their movement. Four on the outside was manageable. What was inside was the part that mattered more and the part we didn’t fully know yet.
"Have the other groups arrived?" Lucy asked then.
I shifted my attention outward, forcing my vision toward the positions Marlon had assigned his people to. The snipers especially. He hadn’t sent many. There were only five total, including himself, and he had picked them specifically because he trusted them to hold a shot rather than waste it. Five was a lean number, but Marlon seemed the kind of man who preferred a handful of people he was certain about over a crowd he wasn’t.
I narrowed my eyes and pushed my focus out farther.
Three of them settling toward the front-facing positions to handle the guards covering the main approach. One on our left for the hotel’s exposed side. Another I caught just barely on the eastern edge, getting low behind cover at the corner of a collapsed parking structure about a hundred and fifty yards out.
"I see them," I said. "They’re placing themselves now." I pulled my attention back to our wall. "We wait for the signal."
"What signal?" Sydney asked.
Rachel’ sighed.
"Did you listen at all, Sydney? Marlon said he’ll flash a green laser beam once. He even showed everyone what it looks like."
"Won’t that alert them?"
"By the time they figure out what it was, it’ll already be too late," Christopher said. "He only sends it once it’s clear to move in."
Sydney made a small noise that was somewhere between accepting that and not being fully satisfied by it.
"Regardless," I said, "once things start, their people inside are going to react fast. They will shoot. So everyone stays sharp."
"We’re all being careful," Sydney said. Then she paused a beat. "You could direct that reminder at the Miss Ivy behind us, though. She showed up in her lab coat like she’s about to conduct a chemistry experiment."
I glanced back at Ivy.
She stood slightly apart from the group, close to Rachel, her coat catching the faint wind off the marina. Her brown eyes were already on me when I looked, no answer in them but no panic either.
Everyone in the group had been quietly worried about her since the moment she announced she was coming. She wasn’t a fighter. She had no weapon any of us could see, and she had refused every version of stay behind we had offered her before we left.
"Stay in the back, Ivy," I said.
She held my gaze for a second without responding.
Whether she had a plan or was running entirely on stubbornness, I genuinely couldn’t tell. But the look in her eyes wasn’t the look of someone who had come this far just to die in a parking lot outside a hotel, so I had to assume she intended to keep her head down when it mattered.
I turned back toward the Golden Nugget and watched the slow drift of the four figures moving around its outer walls, waiting for the green flash that would mean everything was about to start.
The silence that settled over us while we waited wasn’t comfortable. It was the kind that came from everyone keeping their mouths shut because there was nothing useful left to say, and because the body had already decided it was time to get serious regardless of what the brain thought about it. The cold off the marina pushed through in slow gusts, carrying that salt and rust smell across the outer walls of the hotel, and every one of us was very still, watching the dark and keeping our breathing even.
We knew where Marlon was positioned. There was nothing to do now but wait for him.
The seconds dragged.
Then the green beam came.
Three short flashes, bright and sharp in the dark, there and gone so fast that if you had blinked at the wrong moment you would have missed them entirely. But none of us blinked. The signal cut through the night and vanished, and in the half-second of silence that followed, I heard it before anyone else did, the high, thin whistle of suppressed rounds moving fast through cold air.
Then the patrol figures dropped.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Clean and almost simultaneous, each one folding without any dramatic stagger or shout, just a body going from upright to down so quickly that it barely registered as violence. A pause. Then a second salvo, quieter but just as fast, handling the ones farther out that the first sweep hadn’t covered.
I had already shifted my focus to our side of the hotel.
Three guards over here. The two closer ones went down immediately, shots catching them in the face before they even had time to turn their heads, and they collapsed forward into the dirt without a sound. The third one was at the back, farther from the snipers’ sightlines, and still standing.
"Let’s move," I said, coming up from behind the wall and raising my Beretta as I pushed forward at a run.
I hadn’t brought anything heavier. I didn’t want the weight or the bulk. I needed to be able to move in whatever way the situation demanded inside the hotel, and a sidearm handled that better than a rifle when corridors got narrow and corners got tight. Lucy and Christopher were both carrying assault rifles. Christopher had his AK-47 up and sweeping as he came around beside me. Lucy was carrying something with a shorter barrel that I didn’t recognize, moving like she had done this a hundred times.
We crossed the open ground fast and came around the back corner of the hotel at a run.
The third guard had heard something. He was already half-turned toward us, one hand moving toward his radio.
"Hey, what’s happening—"
The shot came from beside me.
Banggg!
One round, and the man dropped with the bullet centered clean in his forehead. He was down before the question even finished leaving his mouth, crumpling sideways into the wall and sliding down it without a sound.
Lucy already had her weapon moving to the next angle before anyone else had processed it.
"God," Sydney said from behind me, her voice quieter than usual. "That was terrifying." She recovered fast. "Rachel. Get your barriers ready, halfway deployment on standby. Things are going to move."
"Already on it," Rachel said, and when I glanced back I caught the red glow bleeding out between her open fingers, steady and controlled.
"Follow me," Lucy said, and she was already walking again.
She led us across the remaining stretch of the back lot at a quick pace, keeping low and cutting between dead vehicles. We followed without argument.
Then from somewhere on the far side of the hotel came the first real gunshots.
Loud ones. No suppressors. The sharp crack of rifles carrying fully across the open night air, followed almost immediately by return fire, and then a burst of automatic rounds that echoed off the surrounding buildings long enough to make the whole area sound busier than it probably was.
It had started.
Every one of us tightened up slightly at the sound, a collective half-second of adjustment, then kept moving.
"Don’t let Mark near any of these cars," Sydney said, scanning the rows of rusting, long-dead vehicles on either side as we ran. "He would turn the lot into a nuclear event."
"You bet he would," Christopher said, not breaking stride, a brief grin visible even in the dark.
"Here," Lucy said sharply.
She had pulled up in front of a service door set into the concrete wall, recessed just enough to be out of sight from the lot. She got the handle open in seconds, unlocked, exactly as she had said it would be, and pushed through into a narrow interior passage with fluorescent ceiling fixtures long since dead and an elevator bay sitting dark at the far end.
"We take the stairs," she said without pausing, pushing straight past the elevator and shouldering open the stairwell door.
"Hey, careful, we move together," Christopher said from behind her, his frown audible.
"Let her go, Christopher," Cindy said. "She knows what she’s doing."
She was right, and Christopher knew it too. It was obvious in the way Lucy moved. She had been a Marine. The way she cleared a doorway and checked a stairwell without being told to said everything about the kind of muscle memory she had built up long before any of this.
"Cindy," I said, glancing back.
She was already nodding.
She closed her eyes and I watched the subtle change in her expression as the radar went out, that faint concentration tightening around her forehead.
"Light use only," I said. "Don’t push the range."
"I’ve got it," she said, her voice low and steady.
I turned back to the stairwell and followed Lucy up, the rest of the group falling in tight behind me, the sounds of the fight outside already growing through the concrete walls as Marlon’s people and Callighan’s men started tearing into each other in the State Marina right in front of the Hotel.