Chapter 12
I'd been at the dining table, reviewing the Mendez files.
Lindsey had gone to bed an hour ago, and the penthouse had been quiet in that particular way it got late at night, the hum of climate control, the distant murmur of a city that never fully shut up.
I'd allowed myself to relax into the work.
Stupid. Comfortable. The kind of carelessness that got people killed.
Then: darkness. Total. The security panel went black. The climate control died mid-hum. And in the sudden ringing silence, the soft click of the primary locks releasing, one after another, like someone counting down.
Ninety seconds. The backup generator's delay. Someone had done their homework. Someone knew the gap.
The weighted flashlight was in the drawer before I'd finished the thought. Heavy. Balanced. I'd chosen it for exactly this. My feet found the hallway without sound, positioning me between the elevator vestibule and the corridor that led to the guest room.
To her room.
The door whispered open. Three shapes against the slightly less dark hallway, moving with the fluid economy of people who did this for money. No fumbling. No hesitation. The first one through the door was already scanning left when I hit him.
I came out of the shadow beside the bookshelf with everything I had.
The flashlight connected with his kneecap and the sound it made was something between a crack and a wet snap.
He went down hard, the noise he made not quite a scream, choked off, trained out of him.
His weapon skittered across marble and disappeared under the console table.
"Contact left!" The second one. Already pivoting. Suppressed pistol, professional grip, stance too clean for street work. Military. Former, probably. Current problem, definitely.
I was inside his reach before the barrel found me. Elbow to the throat. Not elegant. Effective. He gagged, stumbled back, and the gun went off once into the ceiling. Plaster rained down like snow.
The third one had done the smart thing and hung back, waiting for a clean shot. Now he had one.
I moved as the muzzle flash lit the room.
Heat scored across my bicep, a line of fire, and I registered it the way you register a paper cut when you're carrying something heavy: noted, filed, irrelevant.
Two steps and my shoulder drove into his chest. We went down together in a tangle that was nothing like the choreographed fights in movies.
It was ugly. Close. His elbow found my liver and the world went white for a half second.
I gave him a knee that made him fold, and brought the flashlight down on the back of his skull before he could unfold.
The second man was up. Wheezing, one hand at his throat, the other scrabbling across the floor for his dropped weapon. I kicked the gun into darkness and he came at me anyway, which I respected in a distant, clinical way right up until his hands closed around my throat.
His fingers dug in. The pressure built, steady and professional, and black spots started eating the edges of my vision. The penthouse was very quiet except for his breathing and mine and the wet sound of someone choking, which was me.
One thought. Clear as a bell in all that static.
If I go down, there's nothing between them and her door.
I drove my thumb into his eye socket. He screamed. The grip loosened. I rolled, pinned him, and slammed his head against the marble. Once. Then again. He went limp under me with a sound like air leaving a tire.
I knelt over him, gasping. Blood in my mouth from my own bitten tongue.
My arm burning where the bullet had grazed it, worse now that I had time to notice.
My hands were shaking and I couldn't make them stop, which was a problem because there might be more of them, and shaking hands didn't shoot straight.
A click from down the hallway.
My head snapped up.
Lindsey stood in the doorway of the guest room, backlit by the dim emergency nightlight in the bathroom behind her. My old t-shirt hung to her thighs. Her hair was tangled from sleep. Her face was white.
Her hands were wrapped around the compact 9mm from the bedside table, and she held it exactly the way I'd shown her. Proper grip. Arms extended. Weight forward on the balls of her feet.
The first man, the one with the destroyed knee, was dragging himself across the marble toward his weapon, leaving a dark smear behind him like a slug trail.
"Don't." Lindsey's voice came out quiet and flat and completely steady, which was somehow worse than if she'd screamed. The gun didn't move.
He froze. Looked at her. Looked at me, bloodied and heaving on the floor. I watched the calculation in his eyes. Scared woman. Hurt man. Maybe.
He reached for the gun.
I crossed the distance in two strides, and the strike to his temple was the cleanest thing I'd done all night. He slumped sideways into unconsciousness, and the room finally, finally went still.
The backup generator kicked in with a thump that made us both flinch.
Lights flooded the penthouse, harsh and clinical, and for a moment, we just stood there blinking at each other across the wreckage.
Overturned furniture. Three unconscious men.
Blood, some of it theirs, most of it mine, smeared across pale marble like a painting nobody asked for.
Lindsey lowered the gun. The steadiness left her hands all at once, the tremor arriving like something she'd been holding back by sheer will, and she set the weapon on the hallway table with a care that suggested she didn't trust herself to keep holding it.
"Will." Her voice was different now. Cracked at the seam. "Your arm."
I looked down. My sleeve was soaked through, darker than it should have been. The graze was deeper than I'd thought. Adrenaline had been doing a lot of heavy lifting.
"It's fine."
"It is literally the opposite of fine, you are bleeding on your own floor..."
Sirens. Far away but closing. The silent alarm had done its job, just ninety seconds too late to be useful.
"Later," I said. "We deal with this first."
What followed was an hour of the particular chaos that happens when your penthouse becomes a crime scene.
Police filling the rooms with radios and cameras.
FBI agents appearing with Bates in the lead, his face a study in grim professionalism as he catalogued the damage.
The intruders were cuffed and removed. One of them groaned.
The one with the knee didn't. The paramedics cleaned my arm, declared the graze superficial in a tone that suggested their definition of superficial and mine were having a disagreement, and pushed for a hospital visit I declined.
Through all of it, I tracked Lindsey across the room the way you track a heartbeat on a monitor.
She was giving a statement to a female agent, her voice even, her posture composed, her shoulders holding a fine tremor she probably thought nobody could see.
She'd held a gun on a man. Hadn't hesitated. Hadn't flinched.
I kept circling back to that. The steadiness of her hands. The flat calm of her voice when she'd said don't. She shouldn't have needed to be that person tonight. I was supposed to have made sure she never needed to be that person.
Then the police left. The agents left. Bates paused at the door and looked at both of us the way a doctor looks at an X-ray.
"Safe house," he said. "Tomorrow. Both of you. I'll send the address."
"Fine."
The door closed. The lock engaged, the new one, the one that hadn't been bypassed, and the penthouse was quiet again. But a different quiet. The kind that comes after something has been broken and you're standing in the pieces trying to figure out which ones are sharp.
The place smelled like gunpowder and copper. The cleaning crew would earn their money this week.
I found myself sitting on the floor in the hallway outside her bedroom.
I didn't remember deciding to sit. My legs had just stopped cooperating, the adrenaline vacating my system all at once and leaving nothing behind but a hollow, ringing exhaustion.
I leaned my head against the wall and stared at the opposite baseboard and thought about nothing and everything at the same time.
Lindsey appeared. No announcement. She just lowered herself to the floor beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and sat.
We didn't look at each other. We stared at the wall like it held answers to questions we hadn't formed yet. I could hear her breathing. Could hear mine. After a while I realized they'd fallen into the same rhythm, and I didn't know when that had happened.
The shaking started in my hands and moved inward.
My fingers, my forearms, my shoulders. I clenched my fists and the tremor just migrated somewhere else, like trying to hold water.
The crash. Not the adrenaline crash, but the other one.
The understanding of what I'd just done, what I was capable of, the speed and precision with which I'd taken three men apart in the dark.
I'd been good at it. I'd been good at it and part of me hadn't wanted to stop, and that part was the thing I kept locked away from everyone, and now she was sitting next to me and there was blood on my hands, literally, and the room smelled like violence, and she was right there.
"Will." Her voice was very quiet. "Your hands."
I looked down. Knuckles split. Blood drying in the creases. The shaking was obvious now.
"They'll stop," I said. "Give it a minute."
"That's not what I meant."