Chapter 8 The Night Beneath the Cross #2
I'd done worse. Climbed higher. In worse weather. But my shoulder still throbbed from the bullet graze, and exhaustion made my hands less steady than they should've been.
I reached the window. A gaping wound in the cathedral's side where stained glass used to be. Shards still clung to the frame like teeth. I pressed against the stone beside it, listening.
“—said double payment if we move it tonight. King's too busy with his son's security theater to notice—”
“What about the new guard? The Russian?”
“What about him? One man can't watch everything.”
Laughter. Cold. Confident.
I leaned forward, peering through the broken window.
Fifteen men. Maybe more in the shadows. Armed with pistols and rifles. Moving crates between them with practiced efficiency. Weapons stamped with foreign seals I recognized from intelligence briefs I'd stolen from my father's study.
This wasn't small-time. This was the pipeline. The source.
My heartbeat slowed. The rain's echo became rhythm. Everything else fell away except the targets below and the bow waiting in my hands.
I nocked an arrow and sighted down the shaft.
Time to make them remember why shadows had teeth.
Drew.
Released.
The arrow punched through stained glass that shattered into rainbow shards, and buried itself in a man's hand just as he reached for his pistol. He screamed. The gun clattered to marble.
I was already moving. Already dropping through the window in a shower of glass and rain, cloak flaring. I hit the ground in a roll, came up with another arrow nocked.
Three shots. Three men down with shafts through shoulders and thighs.
But tonight was different.
Tonight I was angry.
“Evening, gentlemen,” I called out, voice echoing through the ruined cathedral. “Hope I'm not interrupting.”
Someone fired. The bullet sang past my ear, close enough to feel the displacement. I grinned behind the hood.
“That's rude.”
I dropped low as more gunfire erupted, using a stone pillar for cover. Counted the shooters by muzzle flash. Five. No, six. All concentrated on where I'd been, not where I was going.
Amateurs.
I vaulted over a pew, fired mid-air. The arrow caught a shooter in the throat. He went down gurgling, weapon clattering away.
A man charged from my left. Big bastard, easily six-four, built like he ate iron for breakfast. He had a machete, rust-stained and wicked-looking.
“You picked the wrong night,” he snarled.
I sidestepped his first swing, feeling the blade whisper past my ribs. “Did I? Because from where I'm standing, you're the ones trafficking weapons in a church.” I ducked under his backswing. “Seems pretty wrong to me.”
He roared and came at me again. This time I didn't dodge. I stepped inside his guard, drove my elbow into his throat, felt cartilage crack. He staggered back, choking, and I pulled my knife, opened his carotid artery in one smooth motion.
Blood sprayed across marble like communion wine.
“One,” I counted.
Two more came at me together. Coordinated. Trained. One high, one low.
I dropped my bow, caught the high man's knife hand, twisted until bones snapped. Used his body as a shield when the low man fired. Felt the impact punch through the corpse I was holding.
“Thanks for the assist,” I said, shoving the body at the shooter. He stumbled. I closed the distance, drove my knife up under his ribs. Angled it toward his heart. Felt it punch through. “Three.”
The others were regrouping. Spreading out. Getting smarter.
Good. I liked a challenge.
I grabbed my bow, nocked an arrow, and sprinted toward the altar. Boots splashing through puddles of rainwater and blood. Someone fired. The bullet sparked off stone inches from my head.
I spun, fired blind. Heard a scream. Didn't stop to confirm the kill.
A man stepped from behind a pillar, shotgun raised.
Too close for arrows. I dropped and rolled as he fired, buckshot tearing through my cloak.
Came up inside his guard and drove my fist into his solar plexus.
He doubled over. I grabbed his head and slammed my knee into his face.
Once. Twice. Felt his nose turn to pulp.
He dropped, and I took his shotgun. Racked it. Fired into the group trying to flank me from the right.
The recoil kicked hard. Two men went down in sprays of red.
“Having fun yet?” I shouted. “Because I'm just getting started!”
Something slammed into my back. Not a bullet. A fist. Heavy. Professional. I stumbled forward, barely kept my feet.
Turned to find a man built like a tank. Shaved head. Tattoos crawling up his neck. Military bearing in every line of his body.
“You talk too much,” he said. Then hit me again.
This time I felt ribs crack.
Pain exploded through my chest, white-hot and immediate. I gasped, tasted copper. He followed with a left hook that caught my temple. Stars burst across my vision.
I hit the ground hard. Rolled. His boot came down where my head had been, cracking marble.
I swept his legs. He went down heavy. I was on him before he could recover, raining elbows down on his face. His nose broke. Then his orbital bone. Then something else that crunched wet.
But he got his hands up. Caught my throat. Squeezed.
The world started to narrow. Gray at the edges. My lungs burned.
I fumbled for my knife. Found it. Drove it into his armpit where armor couldn't protect. Twisted.
His grip loosened. I ripped the blade free and opened his throat.
Blood fountained. Hot. Arterial. Soaking us both.
I shoved him off and stood, gasping. My ribs screamed. My shoulder throbbed. My throat felt crushed.
But I was smiling.
“Who's next?” I called out, spitting blood. “Come on. Don't make me hunt you.”
Three left standing. They looked at each other. At the bodies. At me, standing in the center of carnage, drenched in blood and rain.
One ran.
I put an arrow through his spine before he reached the door.
The other two opened fire. I dove behind the altar as bullets chewed through wood and stone. Splinters rained down. Something hot grazed my calf, tearing through muscle.
I gritted my teeth against the pain and counted shots. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.
Click. Click.
Empty.
I rose from cover, arrow already nocked.
“Bad luck.”
I fired. Caught one in the chest. He went down clawing at the shaft.
The last man dropped his gun and raised his hands. “Wait. Wait, please. I've got kids. I've got—”
I shot him in the throat.
He went down gurgling, hands scrabbling at the arrow. Blood bubbled between his fingers.
I walked over and crouched beside him. Close enough to see his eyes. Close enough to watch the light fade.
“You should've stayed in the light,” I whispered.
He died staring at me. Trying to understand. Failing.
I stood slowly, every movement agony. My ribs ground together. My shoulder was on fire. My calf leaked blood into my boot. Something warm trickled from my temple where that bastard had clocked me.
The cathedral went quiet except for rain through the broken roof and my own ragged breathing.
I stood in the center of it all, surrounded by bodies and shattered glass and pools of blood turning pink in the rain.
Counted.
Twelve.
Twelve men dead because I'd decided they needed to be.
Not justice. Not protection. Just rage wearing righteous clothing.
I looked down at my hands. Blood mixed with rain, running between my fingers. Some of it was mine. Most of it wasn't.
My reflection stared back from a puddle at my feet. Hood thrown back. Face streaked with blood and mud. Eyes wild. Feral.
I looked like my mother's ghost.
I looked like the thing that had killed her.
And I couldn't tell anymore which one I was supposed to be.
Sirens bled into the night. Not one. Many. The city waking all at once.
I climbed back through the window, scaled the wall, and ran. Rain hammered my hood. Thunder shook the air. Lightning turned everything white and merciless.
The alley spat me out three blocks from the docks.
I cut left, then right, then climbed a rusted ladder to the roof of a shuttered fish market and went still.
The sirens grew teeth. Blue light washed the warehouse facade, jittering across broken glass and wet brick.
Uniforms spilled in waves. Fire crews. Ambulances.
Unmarked sedans that did not bother with markings because the men inside did not need them.
I should have gone. I stayed.
From this height I could see patterns. The way officers take corners when they think someone might be waiting. The way a perimeter breathes. The way a command post grows out of nothing. A white van door slid open. Scene techs pulled on gloves. Floods snapped on. Rain turned to glitter in the beams.
Then he arrived.
Not loud. Not late. A dark coat, a quiet stride, a presence the weather did not touch.
Detective Akintola crossed the tape, flashed his badge at no one in particular, and went straight to the center of the mess.
He spoke to the first uniform on scene. He listened for ten seconds, asked three questions, and everything around him sharpened.
He did not look up at the roofs. He did not need to. He looked where I had stood.
He walked to the mouth of the alley I had used and crouched by a scatter of glass.
He lifted a shard with two fingers, angled it to the light, then set it in a paper envelope.
He took four steps, paused at a scuff on the wet concrete that I had not meant to leave, and called a tech over with a small tilt of his head.
The tech photographed the mark. Akintola’s gaze tracked from the scuff to the fire escape to the line of guttering I had climbed.
He marked each without moving his hands.
He paced the interior next, guided by a sergeant.
I watched him count shots by the pattern of holes.
He stopped under the skylight where rain dripped through and considered the angle.
He looked at a pallet with an arrow still quivering in the wood and did not touch it.
He spoke to the sergeant again. The sergeant swallowed.
For a heartbeat I let the fantasy breathe. Drop down. Tell him why. Tell him the crate markings, the route, the names whispered before the bullets. Hand him the map I carry under my skin and ask him to finish what I cannot.
Lightning cracked the sky in answer. The fantasy died.
Akintola stepped back out into the rain and did something that made the hair rise on my arms. He lifted his face to the rooftops and let his eyes move, not random, not hopeful. A slow grid. Corner. Parapet. Sign. The fish market. Me.
I lowered behind the lip of the roof and let water pool at my collar.
Counted to ten. Came up an inch. He had already moved on.
He spoke into his radio. Units peeled off to hold intersections I had used once too often.
Another unmarked eased into position at the end of the block where my bike slept.
Time to go.
I slid down the far side of the building, boots silent on wet steel.
I cut through a laundry yard that smelled like bleach and diesel, then slipped into a maintenance tunnel where the city keeps its bones.
The tunnel spat me out a block from the bike.
I listened. Sirens to the west. Radio chatter ghosting from open windows.
A dog barked once and then thought better of it.
I rolled the bike from shadow without starting it, coasting down the incline until the street noise could swallow the ignition.
The engine turned over like a held breath.
I kept my head down, visor low, body small.
The unmarked at the corner held position.
I turned away from it as if I belonged to the night more than to myself.
Streets blurred into watercolor. My shoulder burned. My hands shook. Adrenaline guttered and left the cold.
I ditched the bike in the hidden garage and stumbled toward the carriage house bathroom. My reflection in the cracked mirror looked like a stranger. Mud and blood streaked across my face. Pupils blown wide. Hair plastered to my skull.
I stripped off the gear with shaking hands, hissing when fabric pulled at the graze on my shoulder. Blood welled up fresh, running down my arm in thin rivulets. Not deep enough to need stitches. Just enough to scar.
I cleaned up quickly, mechanically. Cold water and harsh soap. Watching pink swirl down the drain and pretend it mattered.
I pulled on clean clothes I kept stashed here. Jeans. Dark sweater. Nothing that screamed I'd just come from slaughtering twelve men in a cathedral.
The walk back through the tunnels felt longer. Each step echoed like guilt. Like confession. Like all the prayers I'd stopped saying the night my mother died.
I emerged into my quarters just as dawn started to pale the sky. The palace was still quiet. Still sleeping. Nobody had noticed I'd gone.
Nobody ever noticed.
I locked the door behind me and collapsed on the floor beside my bed, back pressed to the wall, staring at nothing. My shoulder throbbed in time with my heartbeat. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Apollo padded over, pressing his warm body against my side. I buried my fingers in his fur and tried to remember how to breathe.
“Still breathing,” I whispered to the empty air. To the ghosts. To whatever was listening. “Still damned.”
The first light of morning touched the cut on my shoulder through my sweater. Blood had seeped through the fabric, dark and damning.
A crimson halo.
I closed my eyes and saw faces. The men I'd killed tonight. The ones from the warehouse. All the bodies I'd left in my wake over the years, convinced I was making the city safer.
Convinced I was different from the men who'd killed my mother.
But sitting there in the dawn light, blood on my clothes and exhaustion in my bones, I couldn't remember the difference anymore.