26. A Second Too Late #2
I followed him into a small room at the back of the house, book lined, with a rolltop desk pushed against the far wall.
The desk matched everything Arthur had described on the phone, dark wood, heavy, brass fittings worked into a crest I didn't recognize.
One of the lower drawer fronts had been pried away from the carcass entirely, the wood splintered around a compartment that had clearly been built to stay hidden, and the compartment itself was empty.
Whoever had done this had known exactly where to look, which meant they had known about the desk before they ever walked into this house.
I went back to the living room. Whatever had come out of that hidden compartment, the piece Arthur had actually wanted appraised, wasn't anywhere in this room either, which I had already half expected, given what we'd just found in the study.
Then I heard a creak from the hallway behind us.
Rowan turned first. The blow caught him across the temple before he'd completed the rotation, a heavy impact from a piece of metal, and he went down hard. His knees hit the hardwood, his hands went out to catch himself, and a second blow landed at the base of his skull. He went flat.
A woman stepped out of the hall closet.
She was smaller than I'd expected a threat to be, composed, dressed in dark clothing chosen for function rather than anything else.
She had a short metal bar in one hand and a small box in the other, held against her hip, partially obscured by her jacket, and I knew, before anyone said anything, that it was the object Arthur had wanted looked at.
Mateo moved before I could decide whether it was a good idea, closing the distance between himself and the woman in two steps.
She turned into him rather than away, faster than anyone her size should have been able to manage, caught his lead arm, and used his own momentum to put him into the wall beside the coatrack hard enough that the tweed jacket came down with him.
Before he'd finished sliding to the floor, her elbow found the side of his head, and he stopped moving entirely.
“Sabine.” I shouted and she turned.
So this was her. The woman who had built the debt chain that brought me to Blackthorne in the first place. She was shorter than Draco's fury had made her seem.
I didn't decide to move. I was already moving, the same way I had been moving in that alley three weeks ago, before the rest of me caught up to what my body had already committed to.
She turned to face me, unhurried, the box still tucked against her hip, and looked at me a second too long, clearly recalculating whatever she had assumed about me on her way in.
“You're not what I expected,” she said.
“Give us the box back.”
She laughed. “I don't know what he wants from this. But good money is good money.”
She turned toward the back of the house, and I went for the box instead of her, which was probably the wrong instinct, but it was the only one I had left.
My hand closed around her wrist as she turned, and for half a second I actually had her, and I felt a pull answer the contact, low and fast under my sternum, the same pull I'd felt in the alley.
She drove her elbow back into my ribs before I understood she had moved, and the air left me in one hard exhale.
I did not let go of her wrist. I don't know why.
Every instinct I actually had was telling me to let go, and I held on anyway, because some stubborn, furious part of me had already decided that this woman was not walking out of this house with anything else that belonged to people I cared about.
She turned into me the same way she had with Mateo, using my own grip against me, and my back hit the wall hard enough that a picture frame came down somewhere to my left and shattered.
Her forearm came across my throat, not choking, just present, a clear demonstration of how little effort any of this was costing her.
“You held on,” she said, and there was a note of approval in it. “Most men let go by now.”
“Get off him,” I managed, the words coming out thinner than I wanted, her forearm doing exactly enough work against my throat to remind me who was actually in control of this conversation.
“I would, but you're still holding my wrist, and that's rather the problem, isn't it.”
I realized, distantly, through the pressure and the adrenaline, that I was. I let go.
She didn't loosen her arm right away.
Then she stepped back, and the pressure was gone, and I was breathing again, ragged and too fast.
“I don't know what he wants from this,” she said again, tucking the box back against her hip, unhurried now, as though the last thirty seconds hadn't happened at all. “But good money is good money.”
She looked past me at Rowan and Mateo, both still down, and then back at me.
“And to you, my dear Nico. We still have some unfinished business, you and I. But for now, I bid my goodbye.”
She stepped over Rowan's body without looking down and walked toward the back of the house, unhurried, and I had nothing left in me to stop her a second time.
My ribs were already announcing themselves, a deep ache settling in where her elbow had connected, and my throat felt raw in a way that had nothing to do with shouting.
“The man on the floor had a wife who collected rare blood samples for the community's medical archive,” she said, still walking. “He didn't know what he had. He called the wrong person to find out. These things happen.”
The back door opened. Closed.
She was gone.
I dropped to my knees beside Rowan first, because he was closer and because the blood on the floor beside him was the kind that scared me more.
He was breathing, which was the first thing I checked for.
The second thing was the gash at his temple, deep, bleeding freely, his eyes open but unfocused, rolling without finding anywhere to land.
“Rowan. Look at me.”
His eyes found mine eventually and held there.
“Stay still. You're okay.”
Behind me, Mateo groaned and pushed himself up onto one elbow, one hand going to the side of his head where Sabine's elbow had caught him.
“Tell me she's actually gone,” he said, voice thick.
“She's gone.”
“Good. Because if she was still here, I was gonna need a minute before I could do anything useful about it.”
“Help me with Rowan,” I said, and he did, wincing, one hand still pressed to his own head as we got Rowan sitting upright against the wall.
The gash was deep, but his healing was already working, the skin at the edges pulling together with the slow, steady effort of a body built to absorb damage and recover from it.
He was going to have a headache for days.
He was alive. That was the only thing in this entire house I was allowing myself to count as good news right now.
“I need to call Draco,” I said.
Mateo handed me his phone before I finished the sentence. It was already ringing.