CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Aoife
EVERYTHING GOES DARK, and then emergency lighting kicks in along the baseboards, casting a dim orange glow that makes the corridor look like something from out of a nightmare.
Smoke is drifting through the broken windows.
Not thick yet, but present, carrying the chemical smell of whatever they hit us with.
"Keep moving. Don't stop." The security man's hand is firm on my back.
We reach the back staircase. Start down. Raven is ahead of me, her feet quick on the steps, her hand white-knuckled on the rail. I'm right behind her. The security men bracket us, one ahead and one behind, and I can see their guns drawn, held low and ready.
We hit the ground floor. The back of the house opens into a kitchen corridor that leads to a service entrance. The security man in front pushes through the door and checks left and right.
"Clear. To the cars. Go."
We step outside.
The night is on fire.
The front of Aidan's house is lit up in orange.
One of the outbuildings is burning, flames climbing the stone walls and reaching for the roof.
Across the grounds, figures are moving—dozens of them.
Dark shapes against the firelight, advancing in groups through the hedges and across the garden I admired this morning.
Men on foot. More than I can count. They pour through the broken perimeter fence like water through a crack, spreading out across the property in a way that looks rehearsed. Coordinated.
The security man grabs my arm and pulls me toward the row of vehicles parked along the service road. We're halfway there when a shape detaches from the shadows to our left.
I don't see his face. Just the silhouette. A man. Big. Moving fast. Something raised in his hand.
The security man in front turns. Raises his weapon. Too slow.
The attacker is on us. He hits the security man with something heavy, and the sound is wet and final, and the man goes down.
Raven screams. I grab her and pull her back, and the second security man is firing, but he's behind us, the angle is wrong, and the attacker is between us now, close enough that I can smell sweat and cordite on him.
He reaches for me.
His hand closes around my arm, and the grip is crushing, pulling me off balance, and I'm fighting, twisting, trying to tear free, but he's so much bigger and so much stronger, and I can't get leverage on the gravel.
Then something moves behind him. Fast. Silent. A shape that seems to materialise from the dark, like it was always there, just waiting.
Matty.
He doesn't hesitate. Doesn't call out or announce himself or give a warning.
His arm comes up in one fluid motion and the blade goes into the base of the man's skull with a sound that I will never be able to unhear.
It's a crunch. Wet. Like stepping on something that shouldn't be stepped on.
The blade punches through bone and the man's grip on my arm releases instantly.
His body doesn't drop so much as shut down, every muscle going slack at once, his knees folding and his weight collapsing forward.
I stagger back.
Matty catches the body. Lowers it to the ground. Pulls the knife free with a twist of his wrist that is so practiced, so economical, it turns my stomach worse than the killing itself.
He looks at me. His face is blank. Not angry. Not afraid. Not anything. He wipes the blade on the dead man's jacket and straightens.
"Stay behind me," he says. His voice is flat—the voice of someone performing a task.
I can't move. The man's body is right there. The back of his skull is open. I can see... I look away. My hand is shaking so hard I can barely feel my fingers.
"Aoife," Matty says my name the way you'd say an instruction. "Now."
Raven grabs my hand, and we follow Matty across the gravel toward the tree line that borders the western edge of the property. He moves fast and low and silent, and I have to work to keep up.
Gunfire erupts to our right. Close. Raven flinches and ducks, and I pull her along, my free hand gripping the back of her cardigan.
Through the trees, I can see the battle unfolding.
Aidan's men have formed a line at the front of the house, using the vehicles and the stone wall as cover.
Muzzle flashes strobe in the darkness. Somewhere behind them, Aidan is shouting commands, and I catch his silhouette as he moves between positions, directing fire.
William.
I search the chaos for him. Every figure in the dark could be him. Every shape that falls could be him. My chest constricts until I can barely breathe.
Then I see him. At the corner of the house, gun raised, firing in controlled bursts at a group of men trying to advance through the garden. Jason is beside him. The two of them are moving together, covering each other's angles, communicating with gestures I can't read from this distance.
A light crosses the sky. Fast. Trailing something bright behind it.
I don't understand what I'm seeing. My brain is trying to make it into a firework or a flare or something that belongs in a normal world, and then it hits the east wing of the house, and the understanding comes with the explosion.
The light is everywhere. White first, then orange, then a wall of heat that reaches us through the trees.
The shockwave follows a half second later, and it picks me up and throws me sideways.
I don't feel myself leave the ground. I just feel the tree trunk when I hit it, my right shoulder and the side of my head connecting with the bark, and then I'm on the ground, and I can't breathe.
My lungs won't expand. I'm pulling at the air, and nothing is coming in, and there's a high-pitched whine in my ears that drowns out everything else.
I try to get up. My right arm buckles. Pain shoots from my shoulder down to my elbow, sharp enough that my vision goes white at the edges. I try again with my left and manage to push myself onto my knees.
Raven.
She's on the ground two meters from me. Curled on her side. Her cardigan is torn, and there's blood on her arm, a gash just above the elbow where something caught her. Her eyes are open but unfocused, blinking at the sky like she can't remember how she got here.
"Raven." My voice sounds wrong. Muffled and far away, like I'm hearing myself through a wall. "Raven, look at me."
She turns her head. Blinks again. Then something clicks behind her eyes, and she pushes herself up, wincing, her hand going to the cut on her arm. Blood runs between her fingers.
"I'm okay," she says. Her voice is shaking. "I'm okay, I'm okay."
She's not okay. Neither am I. My shoulder is throbbing, and there's something warm running down the side of my face, and when I touch my temple, my fingers come away red. The whine in my ears won't stop. Everything sounds like it's happening at the bottom of a well.
Matty is on his feet. I don't know how. The blast that threw both of us women to the ground didn't seem to touch him.
He's standing exactly where he was, steady, scanning the tree line.
He looks back at us. His eyes move from Raven's arm to my head to our legs, checking if we can move, and the assessment takes less than two seconds.
"Get up," he says. "Now. We have to keep moving."
I reach for Raven with my left hand. She takes it, and I pull, and she grabs my good arm to steady herself as she gets upright. The world tilts. We lean on each other. Neither of us is steady enough to stand alone.
We reach a low stone wall at the edge of the property.
Matty vaults it and reaches back for Raven.
She tries to climb, and her injured arm gives out, and she makes a sound between a gasp and a cry.
Matty grabs her under the arms and lifts her over.
Then me. I use my left arm to grip the top of the wall and swing my legs over, and the landing sends a jolt through my shoulder that makes me hiss through my teeth.
My knees buckle, and I go down hard on the other side.
The ground is cold and damp—grass, not gravel. I stay on my knees for a moment because getting up feels impossible.
"Wait here," Matty says. "Don't move. Not for anything."
"Where are you going?"
He doesn't answer. He's already gone, slipping back into the dark like it's a place he belongs.
Raven and I crouch behind the wall. The stone is cold against my back.
I press my hand to my temple and hold it there.
The bleeding has slowed, but the throbbing hasn't.
My other hand is shaking. Both hands are shaking.
I press the free one flat against my thigh and try to make it stop, but it won't.
Raven has her good hand clamped over the gash on her arm, her jaw tight, not complaining. She's braver than me. Or better at hiding it. I can feel my heart hammering so hard it's moved up into my throat, each beat pushing against the skin like something trying to get out.
The sounds of the fight reach us muffled and distorted through the ringing in my ears. Gunfire in waves. Men shouting, though I can't make out the words. The crack of something heavy hitting stone. A scream that cuts off abruptly and leaves a silence worse than the noise.
I can't see what's happening. The wall is too high, and I don't dare look over it.
All I have is sound, and sound is the worst part because my brain fills in the images.
Every burst of gunfire means someone is dying.
Every shout is William's voice. Every silence is the moment before the worst thing I can imagine.
My stomach turns. I swallow hard, and the taste of bile sits at the back of my tongue. My teeth are chattering. Not from cold. From something deeper, something animal, my body is trying to shake out the terror because there's nowhere for it to go.
"They're holding." Raven's voice reaches me like she's speaking from the far end of a corridor. She's found a gap in the stonework, her cheek pressed to the wall to peer through it. "Headlights on the road. More of our men are coming."
I don't look. I can't make myself move closer to the wall. The sound of engines reaches us, distant, and then more gunfire, heavier now, and Raven nods to herself.
"They're here," she says. "The families. They're here."
The ringing in my ears is fading. Not gone, but thinning. Sounds sharpening at the edges. My shoulder still hurts, but the pain has settled into something steady, something I can push to the side if I don't think about it.
I need to see him. The not knowing is worse than anything on the other side of this wall. I rise onto my knees and press my face to the gap in the stonework where Raven was looking.
The gap is narrow. I can see the garden, part of the stone wall that borders it, and beyond that a section of the house still lit by the fire from the east wing. Smoke drifts across everything in thick bands. Figures move through it, but I can't tell who's who. Dark shapes against orange light.
Then I see him. William. I know his shape, the way he carries himself, even at this distance, even through the smoke. He's at the garden wall. Gun raised. Firing.
A man comes at him from behind a hedge, and William drops him with two shots. Doesn't slow. Doesn't check. Keeps moving.
Something explodes near his position.
The ground where he was standing erupts.
Dirt and stone and fragments of the garden wall were thrown high into the air.
The blast reaches me as a thud in my chest even from here.
Debris rains down through the smoke, and where William was standing, there is nothing—just a cloud of dust and rubble and the orange glow of fire behind it.
I can't see him.