orry this took so long guys. I caught another bout of writers' block for a while there. Thanks for all the continued reviews, favourites and follows and I hope to wrap up this story soon. Thanks for sticking with me.

Chapter 17

Mika and Raizo didn't appear to be followed as they neared a fenced-in field. Raizo could already smell the sea. He quickly dialled up some navigation software on his smartwatch to be sure they were in the correct location.

This was it alright. "We need to continue on foot." He said to Mika before turning off the engine and cold rolling the truck into a dirt bank on the opposite side of the road.

"Won't we need that for later?" Mika asked confused but still, on guard, her eyes searching everywhere for potential attack in the moonlit darkness.

"We won't be able to come back this way," Raizo said as if it were common knowledge. He made a hand motion for them to move up to the wire fence but stay low. Once they got to the fence Raizo made another hand motion to signal Mika to look into the distance on their far right. She saw what looked like two specs of light flickering intermittently. She couldn't quite tell how far away it was but she knew Raizo would know instantly. Mika raised two fingers to Raizo and he nodded back while rummaging in his bag and pulling out a small pair of wire cutters.

Raizo made short work of the wire fence, cutting a hole large enough for them to crawl through. Once inside the field, Mika felt very small. Whatever was growing there was at least 4ft tall. Mika took some relief in the fact that it probably wasn't a cornfield. She'd seen enough movies to know that no good came from anyone going through a cornfield at night. Her heart was starting to race in her chest again as they crept quickly through the brush trying not to stir the leaves too much. Raizo could sense Mika's tension. He reached back a hand gently and took a hold of her wrist pressing his thumb into her pulse firmly. It made Mika stop moving for a moment and when she caught the outline of Raizo's hooded face staring back at her she knew she needed to focus, to be calm and centred and to do her damn job. She nodded, took a steadying breath and made the hand single to keep moving.

It took them almost 18 minutes to get close enough to see the outline of the grand and seemingly dilapidated stately home in the near distance. They could hair the water crashing against the shore but there was no beach in sight. Raizo made a signal to Mika silently asking her how she'd like to proceed. He was doing her a courtesy as he could have just told her but this was a joint mission and he needed to let her find her feet no matter how much it wrenched at his gut to knowingly watch her walk into danger. Mika made a hand signal to split up. She gestured towards both ends of the house that they could see. She was thinking they should take out the guards one by one at either end and meet in the middle. This way there would be less chance of alarms being raised too soon. There were too many guns for Mika and Raizo to take on alone, that was a fact so they had to even out the odds by trying to take on as many threats, one at a time, as they could. It was classic covert infiltration. Mika knew this much from her days at Europol. It didn't stop a glimmer of fear try to rise up in her stomach. She took another steadying breath then nodded back at Raizo silently asking if he was happy to follow the plan. He nodded back and they moved forward in opposite directions but just as Mika was going out of reach she stopped nearly gasping. Raizo had stopped abruptly, seconds before her. They both looked back at each other acknowledging that they'd both stopped for the same reason.

Down by their feet was a fine wire that picked up the tiniest flecks of moonlight. It was tripwire. Almost certainly hooked up to explosives. Raizo was gone in an instant and back seconds later completely in silence. He moved with the wind, it was still mesmerising for Mika to watch. Raizo signalled that he'd disarmed the wire. Mika didn't ask how, she just nodded and proceeded to move toward the right corner of the house and Raizo moved toward the left end. There were gunmen on the roof overlooking the field so Mika and Raizo had to keep to the deep shadows. The first sets of guards on the ground were quick work. Mika sent a throwing knife into the throat of one and managed to spring up behind the other and put him in a sleeper hold until he became unconscious. Raizo snapped the necks of both the guards on his end. If he was with Mika he would have encouraged her to finish the unconscious guard off.

Once they'd secured the perimeter they signalled to each other that the outside job was done and that they should proceed inside. Raizo made a hand gesture for Mika to turn on her in-ear radio.

"Do you read me?" Raizo's velvet voice was a welcome comfort to Mika's ears.

"Yes, I mean, copy." She replied.

"Proceed to basement, I'll take level 1."

"Copy." She responded and finding a ground-level window open, Mika climbed through.

Raizo made light work of picking a lock at the back of the house and was pleasantly surprised to find that alarms didn't go off. Either these people were very confident in their ability to conduct business with violence or they were very naïve.

Mika crept through the darkness in the basement but found nothing and no one other than a ton of wine that looked like it had been down there for decades. She found the staircase to come up to the ground floor inside the house and had to pick the lock from the inside hoping that no one was on the other side to hear her tinkering.

Raizo had killed three more guards on the ground floor before Mika made it out of the basement. His voice came over the radio again. "Move to level 2, expect company. They'll know we're here soon."

Mika nodded forgetting Raizo couldn't see her. "Moving to level 2."

"If you secure the target, get out. I'll find you." Raizo added.

Mika didn't like the sound of that order but she didn't argue it either. There will be time for that later. "Out." She replied signalling that she heard but now her concentration was elsewhere. She found a stairwell at the back of the house which must have been how the maids got back and forth. She climbed it slowly to level 2. The house only had 4 stories so this was going to be half the job done. That was a pretty thought.

Mika saw two men stood either side of a door down a hallway ahead of her. It was an awkward angle to get a good ambush on. She glanced to her side and saw another door. She tried the handle and luck smiled on her as the door opened with ease. She hurried inside the dark room and headed for the window. She climbed out of the window and onto a narrow ledge. When she glanced across the building trying to count the number of windows it would take for her to get to the guarded room she nearly lost her nerve altogether.

"Mika?" Raizo's voice came over her radio and she audibly gasped.

"Shit!" She'd nearly lost her footing.

"Status? Your breathing is erratic."

"Sorry," She shook her head and focussed, "Heading west on 2. 4 windows in. Investigating guarded room. Accessing from perimeter."

For a minute split of a second Raizo felt a tightening in his stomach. Mika was hanging from a fucking window 2 stories up. The mansion was built up from the ground so there was at least a 150meter drop it Mika were to fall. She didn't have climbing gear. He settled himself and refocussed. He needed to trust her. "Going dark. Radio if you need me."

That was Raizo's way of telling Mika that he needed to take his attention off her and concentrate at the task at hand but what that really meant was that he couldn't concentrate while thinking about her doing something so reckless. Yeah, pot, kettle. He knew and he would work on that another day. Right now they had a job to finish and time was ticking. This softly, softly crap was taking too long. Careful what you wish for.

Mika got to the window of the room with the guards out the front. It was dark inside but she saw a figure crumpled up against a wall in the corner. This had to be the journalist. Mika tried to ease the window open but it was locked. Shit.

The figure on the floor moved slowly noticing someone outside the window. When they locked eyes Mika put a finger to her lips in the gesture for him to keep quiet. He nodded and slowly got to his feet. It looked like he was in pain. Mika shone a torch light through the window quickly and caught sight of Noah's battered face. His clothes were covered blood and sweat. The room seemed to be some kind of storage room filled with boxes and crates and a few old painting. Mika pointed to the window lock and Noah shuffled over to try and open it. No luck.

Mika shook her head and made the mistake of glancing down at the ground. It made her head spin for a moment but she regained herself to see Noah pick up a large vase by the door. It took Mika a moment to understand what he was doing. He was coming to the window, he was going to break the glass with the vase.

"No!" Mika whispered and gestured at the same time. She shook her head. She knew what she had to do. So much for stealth. Mika gestured at Noah and then up at the vase. She then gestured for him to break the vase on the floor on her signal. She gestured at herself and then at the window and put bought her two fingers together in a scissor motion. She held up her palm. Noah nodded and held the vase in a shaky grip. Mika pulled a gun from her holster and squared up to the window. She then held up three fingers. "Securing target. Get ready for noise in 5, 4…"

Mika lowered her three fingers in succession. Noah hurled the vase at the ground at the same time as Mika sent an elbow and then a knee through the window pane. Noah was crouched back in the corner and as Mika hurled herself into the dark room, the door opened. Mika put a bullet in the guards head as soon as she saw flesh. Bullets followed.

"INTRUDERS!" someone yelled as they came into the room too. Mika put a bullet in his throat but it was too late. The alarm had been sounded and feet could be heard rushing to their location.

Raizo heard the commotion from the fourth floor. It sounded like at least 20 men were headed to Mika.

Mika peaked her head around the door frame into hallway and bullet grazed her forehead. She whipped her other gun out and started shooting. Holes were filling up the plaster of the old mansion. Dust was rising like a fog.

"STAY DOWN!" she yelled at Noah who was slowly getting back to his feet.

He crouched back down with his hands over his ears. The sound of gunfire was deafening. They needed to get out of there. "Stay here," Mika ordered Noah between firing into the hallway.

"Where are you going?" he called over.

"We're pinned down here. I need to clear us a path and I can't do that from this room." She took one of her guns and reloaded then handed it over to Noah. "Take this."

He reached out reluctantly. "Shoot anything that comes in here. You gotta full magazine. I'll come back for you."

"But…" Noah didn't have time to finish. Mika was out the door and into the hallway in a spinning roll that took out one guard. She crouched down still shooting and spun on her heel to take out the knee of another. She grabbed his arm and wrapped it around himself and then his body up in front of her and let him take a flurry of bullets. While shooting around him. When the body got too heavy to hold up, she let the guard drop. They don't call it dead weight for nothing. Mika had one chance and one chance only. She needed to get rid of some of those guns so instead of shooting to kill she shot to disarm, aiming at hands. She took two bullets, one to the chest and one to her stomach. The Kevlar kept them out of her flesh but it felt like she'd been kicked by a mule She was on the ground struggling to get her breath back as 4 guards approached her, two were without guns. The two armed guards took aim at her as they got closer,

"It's a fucking gir…" Two throwing dart to the neck stopped the sentence before it could be completed. The other armed guard spun around in time for Raizo to toss another throwing knife into his eye.

"GET UP!" Raizo's voice boomed through the hallway.

Mika sucked up her strength and getting to all fours, charged the two guards in front of her. It was messy. But she needed to get them down to her level. They went down grabbing out for her but she spun a heel into one while sending her fist into the windpipe of the other causing him to gasp out loud and pull a knife from the small of his back. He wasn't using it with much precision and Mika dodged the first few strikes as she felt hands grab her from behind. An arm was looped tightly across her throat.

More guards came spilling into the hallway and Raizo stood his ground like a warrior. His confident stance seemed to make them hesitate before charging him but Raizo simply charged back pulling kyoketsu-shoge from its holster and spinning and flipping and slicing his way through.

Mika drove back into the hallway wall twice as hard as she could and then drove her head back into the nose of the person grabbing her. The guard with the knife charged her but she sprung her legs up and wrapped them around his neck and used the momentum to bring both men to the ground. On impact, she instantly pulled her knife out from her back and drove it into the guts of the guard that held her from behind and used the leverage of her leg hold to break the neck of the guard in front of her. She felt a sharp pain in her thigh as his neck cracked and for a split second she thought maybe a bone had gotten through his skin. She untangled herself from the two bodies and climbed to her feet. For now there were no more left to fight and Raizo was finishing up making short work of the 12 guards he was fighting. The hallway looked like a human meat market. So much blood and sounds of life leaving the mass of limbs.

Mika got up and her left leg gave slightly. She used the wall to get her balance back and stumbled over to the room where she had left Noah. She reached or the door handle and pushed it open quickly while ducking back as a bullet flew over her head. She almost smiled.

"It's me Noah. Don't shoot." Mika put her hand inside the room and gave him a thumbs up. "Slide me the gun."

Noah did as he was told and Mika entered the room fully. "Good job, let's get out of her." She said catching her breath while she leaned against the door frame.

"You're hurt."

Mika shook her head. "I'm fine. We need to go. We have help outside." Mika gestured for Noah to follow her. He looked older than his picture. Tired and gaunt. Raizo saw Mika easing Noah out of his room.

"DOWN!" Raizo yelled and Mika instantly threw her body around Noah and pulled him down to the floor as Raizo sent a knife into the neck of the guard that Mika stabbed in the side. Raizo would have to have words with her about killing blows when they got home.

"Thanks," she said almost involuntarily.

"We need to leave. We only have 80mins." Raizo said glancing down at Noah with Mika's arms around him.

Mika nodded letting go of Noah and trying to rise to her feet. She grunted again as her left leg protested. Raizo stopped moving and was instantly by her side. "I'm fine." She said again. "We need to get out of here!"

Raizo was on his knee in a second. "Not with this you're not." He had his had wrapped around the hilt of a knife buried in Mika's thigh.

Mika braced a hand on Raizo's shoulder as pulled the knife out slowly. She grunted into her mask quietly but the grip Raizo felt on his shoulder told him that the adrenalin was wearing off. She felt that and it was painful. She pulled his fabric belt from around his waist and tied it around Mika's leg to stem the bleeding. Something deep inside of him wanted to leave Noah there to fend for himself while Raizo picked up his woman and took her out of this place, but he stifled that thought. He was on the job. Being wounded wasn't new. He buried all the feelings that were trying to bubble up inside him and cause him to lose focus.

"Move out." He said with less authority than he'd intended.