40. Brady #2
She moves the way she moves in the cage—economy, cunning, and violence fused into one motion.
A knee spears into Gerald’s kidney and he goes down hard.
An elbow cracks against his temple. His grip on the knife falters and she sweeps his legs out from under him with a technique I’ve watched her drill a hundred times, and he goes down hard, the blade skittering across the hardwood. She kicks it under the couch.
Then she’s on him.
Her hands find his throat and close, and her face is a stranger’s face, blank and burning at the same time, and Gerald’s heels drum against the floor and his fingers claw at her wrists and she doesn’t stop.
She’s not going to stop. Years of terror have finally found a direction, and it points straight down through her palms into his windpipe.
“Dakota.” I grab her shoulders. “Dakota. Angel. Stop.”
Pulling her off him takes everything I have left. My slashed arm howls. She fights me—actually fights me, an elbow catching my ribs—and I wrap her up from behind and haul her backward while Gerald flops onto his side, gagging, sucking air in wet, horrible pulls.
“He’s done,” I say against her ear. “It’s over. He’s done. You can stop fighting now.”
The sound she makes isn’t crying.
Somebody pounds on the apartment door. A voice shouts, asking if everyone’s okay. Sirens rise in the distance, getting closer, and Gerald lifts his head from the floor and looks at us with his face purpling and his eyes promising this isn’t over.
It is, though. We both know it is.
The next hour blurs. Uniforms and radios and questions asked three different ways.
A paramedic peels my shirt away from the cut and makes a face that tells me I’ll need stitches.
Gerald tries the routine—I was just checking on my troubled stepdaughter, this man attacked me unprovoked—but the picked lock and the hunting knife tell the truth louder than he can lie.
They cuff him for breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, and a list of other charges the officer rattles off like a grocery list. He’s not getting out anytime soon.
He looks at Dakota once as they walk him past the ambulance. She looks back and doesn’t flinch.
Small victories.
Cruz and Dante push through the crowd in the hallway around the time the paramedic starts threading a needle through my shoulder.
I don’t know who called them—a neighbor, maybe, or Dakota while I was being cleaned up.
Doesn’t matter. Cruz sees me sitting on the ambulance bumper with blood down my arm, and all the easy warmth he wears collapses instantly into fear, and then Dakota breaks away from the officer taking her statement and crashes into his chest.
Everything she’s been carrying pours out at once, and Cruz just holds her, one massive hand cradling the back of her head, his eyes finding mine over her shoulder.
Dante comes to me. His hand lands on my good shoulder and stays there. He takes in the blood, the bandages, the tremor in my hands that won’t quit. “Tell me.”
“Gerald broke in. Picked the lock. Bastard had a knife.” The words come out in pieces that don’t quite connect. “He wanted to take her back. I tried to stop him. She finished it.” I look at my hands. “She almost killed him, Dante. I had to pull her off.”
“Good.”
“Good that she almost—”
“Good that she fought. Good that you were there. Good that he’s in a police car with his hands behind his back instead of anywhere near her.” His grip tightens. “You’re allowed to be shaken. You fought a man with a knife tonight.”
“It doesn’t feel real. It feels like it happened to somebody else.”
“That’s the adrenaline leaving. Stay with me. Breathe.”
The police want Dakota at the station for a formal statement.
Cruz goes with her, arm locked around her shoulders, his body a wall between her and every camera phone and curious neighbor in the parking lot.
Dante stays while the paramedic ties off the last stitch, and his hand never leaves me, and I think that steady weight is the only thing keeping my pieces in one place.
“He should be here.” It’s out of me before I decide to say it, and my voice cracks down the middle. “Eli. He should’ve been part of the circle around her when it got real. Instead he’s alone somewhere, being noble, and he doesn’t even know yet.”
“I know.” Dante helps me off the bumper when the paramedics clear me. “I know.”
We stand in the parking lot, red and blue light washing over the asphalt, neighbors murmuring behind police tape.
Two weeks ago we were five people who loved each other, complicated and messy and certain.
Now Eli’s gone, Gerald’s in a cage of his own, and I’ve got a line of stitches I’ll wear for the rest of my life.
Dante’s arm comes around me and steers me toward his car.
“Station,” he says. “We wait for Dakota and Cruz. We figure out what’s next as a group.” A beat. “Even if the group’s four right now.”
His voice holds steady, but I can hear the same grief pulling at all of us.
I lean my head against the window during the drive and watch the streetlights strobe past, and every one of them is that streetlight, that kiss, that one stolen moment of being visible that somebody caught and honed into a blade.
I think about Eli alone in some apartment, still in the dark in every way that matters, exiled by his own sacrifice.
And underneath the grief and the throbbing shoulder and the fear, a small hot coal starts to glow.
Call it determination. Call it stubbornness.
It’s the same thing that carried me through my family’s ultimatum, through years of hating what I wanted.
We survived tonight. Dakota faced her monster with her own two hands and won.
Gerald is finished. And somewhere out there, Eli is convinced his absence is a shield instead of the deep wound it is.
This isn’t over. I won’t let it be over. We fought too hard, and if the world wants to take my family from me, it’s going to have to fight a lot harder than one blackmailer and one broken man with a knife.
The police station rises into view through the windshield. I sit up straight, ignoring the pull of the stitches.
Time to regroup. Time to plan. Time to put the pieces back together.
Starting with bringing Eli home.