Chapter 17 #2
The shot cracks through the space where they were standing a half-second ago, punching into the concrete behind them.
I try to reacquire the target but Selene is already between me and him, already moving toward the man instead of away, and I can't fire without hitting her.
She doesn't close the distance like a fighter.
She closes it like a woman running at something that's trying to kill the person she loves most in the world.
Graceless. Desperate.
The knife comes out of the thigh sheath and she swings it at him—not a trained strike, not the precise upward thrust of someone who knows anatomy and targeting.
A wild, lunging stab with her whole body behind it, the way you'd swing at someone in a parking lot, all force and terror and no technique.
The blade catches him in the side of the neck.
Not where she was aiming—she was aiming for his chest, the biggest target, the thing directly in front of her—but he was turning away from her, flinching from the unexpected sight of a woman running at him instead of running from him, and the knife found the soft gap between his jaw and his collar where the skin is thin and everything important is close to the surface.
It goes in deep. Deeper than she intended, pulled by momentum and body weight and the fact that she didn't know to stop the thrust once the blade made contact.
She crashes into him and they both stagger, his legs buckling, her weight carrying them forward, and then he's falling and she's falling with him because her hands are locked on the knife handle and she doesn't know to let go.
They hit the concrete together. He lands on his back.
She lands on top of him, on her knees, hands still wrapped around the knife that's buried in the side of his neck, and the blood comes immediately.
Not a trickle.
A rush, dark and hot, pulsing out around the blade and over her fingers and down her wrists and pooling on the concrete beneath them both.
The corridor goes quiet.
Lionel finishes the first man. I don't see how. I'm too busy watching Selene.
She's kneeling on a dead man's chest with her hands still wrapped around the handle of the blade.
Her fingers are red to the wrist.
The blood is spreading in a dark, uneven circle beneath them, soaking into the knees of her tactical pants, and she's looking down at what she's done with an expression I will carry with me until I stop breathing.
Not horror exactly. Not shock, not in the clinical sense. Something rawer than either of those.
The look of a person meeting a version of themselves they didn't know existed until thirty seconds ago.
She's staring at her hands, at the blood, at the man beneath her who was alive and is now dead because she ran at him with a knife, a scream stuck in her throat, and no plan beyond making him stop pointing his gun at Emilia.
Her mouth is open. Not screaming. Not speaking. Just open, like the air she's breathing isn't reaching her lungs properly.
Her whole body is trembling—not the fine, controlled tremor of adrenaline burning off, but a deep shaking that starts in her shoulders and moves down through her arms into the hands that are still gripping the knife because her fingers have locked and she doesn't know how to tell them to release.
I want to go to her. I want to kneel in the blood beside her and pry her fingers off the handle and take her face in my hands, tell her that it gets easier, that the first one is the worst, that the weight of it will settle into something she can carry.
But all of that would be a lie, because it doesn't get easier.
You just get better at pretending it doesn't matter.
Five seconds. She stares at her hands for five seconds. I count them because counting is the only thing I can do from this distance.
Then something shifts in her face.
I watch it happen.
The shaking doesn't stop, but something behind her eyes hardens, or closes, or goes to a place where the shaking can't reach.
She looks at the man beneath her, looks at the blood on her hands, looks at the knife.
She pulls the blade out.
The sound it makes is wet and wrong, and she flinches at it.
A full-body flinch that tells me she's feeling every second of this even as she forces herself to move through it.
She wipes the blade on her pants with hands that won't stop trembling.
She'll get better at this if she stays in my world long enough, and I hate that I'm already thinking about that.
She has to try twice before the knife goes back in the sheath because she can't line up the blade with the opening.
She stands and her legs don't cooperate at first.
She has to put a hand against the wall to steady herself, and she leaves a bloody handprint on the concrete that looks like something from a crime scene, because that's exactly what it is.
Her face closes like a door. Whatever she was feeling, whatever was breaking open behind her eyes, she packs it away with a speed that scares me more than the kill itself.
She turns, walks back to Emilia, who is pressed against the wall with her hands over her mouth and her eyes wide with a new kind of horror—watching her best friend kill someone in front of her.
"Can you walk?" Selene asks. Her voice is almost steady. There's a crack running through it that she's holding together with nothing but willpower, and if you didn't know her, if you hadn't spent years learning every frequency of her voice, you might not hear it.
But I hear it, and Emilia hears it too.
Emilia doesn't answer. She stares at Selene's hands.
At the blood that's drying on her fingers, darkening under her nails, staining the cuffs of her sleeves.
At the knife that's back in its sheath on her thigh, smeared and wet.
"Em." Selene's voice softens. Just at the edges, just enough to sound like the girl Emilia knows instead of the woman who just killed a man in a basement corridor. "Please. We have to move."
Emilia takes her hand. The bloody one.
She takes it and holds it and I watch her fingers close around Selene's red-stained palm with a tenderness that breaks something in me I didn't know was still intact.
"Okay," Emilia whispers. "Okay."
We move.
Getting out of here is a fucking mess.
The gunshots in the hall brought the perimeter guards down the stairwell, which means our planned exit through the service tunnel is no longer clean.
Lionel leads us to a side door that opens onto an alley on the building's north face, and the night air hits us like cold water after the stale, iron-smelling basement.
Peter and Paul have the vehicles staged a block east.
Two black SUVs, engines running, headlights off. The twins are in the first vehicle. Our car is the second.
We cross the alley at record speed.
Lionel has Emilia's other arm over his shoulder, taking most of her weight while Selene steadies her from the right side.
Emilia's legs keep buckling beneath her and between the two of them they're half-carrying, half-dragging her toward the vehicles.
I cover their backs, gun up, scanning the alley and the fire escapes above us and the dark windows of the buildings on either side for the shape of a rifle or the glint of a scope.
A man rounds the corner ahead of us. Russian. Armed.
He sees us and hesitates, just for a fraction of a moment, the fraction that separates the men who survive from the ones who don't.
Lionel doesn't hesitate. The man goes down and we step over him and keep moving.
We reach the SUV.
Lionel opens the rear door and Selene lifts Emilia inside, gentle, so gentle, easing her onto the seat the way you'd lay down something precious and fragile.
Then she climbs in after her and pulls Emilia against her chest and Emilia curls into her, small and shaking, her face pressed into Selene's neck.
I get in the front and Lionel drives.
The city closes around us as we pull away from the factory, and in the rearview mirror I watch Selene hold her best friend and stroke her hair and murmur things I can't hear over the engine.
Selene's face is turned toward the window, half-lit by the passing streetlights, and the expression on it is one I know.
I know it because I've worn it, after the first man I killed, after the second, after the tenth.
The expression of someone whose body did something their mind hasn't caught up to yet.
She's running the moment on a loop behind her eyes, I'm sure of it.
The weight of the knife. The way it felt going in—the resistance and then the give, the awful, easy give. The sound the blade made coming out. The heat of his blood on her hands, hotter than she expected, hotter than anything she'd ever felt on her skin.
She'll wash her hands later and the blood will come off and the stain won't, because that kind of stain lives somewhere soap and water can't reach.
Her hands are still trembling.
I can see it from the front seat, the fine vibration in her fingers where they rest against Emilia's hair, and she keeps curling them into fists and uncurling them, like she's trying to shake something loose that won't let go.
Emilia shifts against her. Murmurs something into Selene's collarbone.
Selene tightens her arms and presses her lips to the top of Emilia's head, and the gesture is so tender that it seems impossible it's coming from the same woman who drove a blade into a man's throat twenty minutes ago.
But that's Selene.
That's what she is now—or maybe what she's always been, and I just gave her the circumstances to find out.
The killer and the caretaker.
The woman who holds a knife and the woman who holds her best friend, and the hands that do both are the same hands, and the blood is still on them when she strokes Emilia's hair.
Two versions of her, existing in the same body, in the same breath.
She looks up and catches my eyes in the rearview mirror, holds my gaze for a long moment while Emilia trembles against her chest.
I don't know what she sees in my face. Whatever it is, she doesn't look away.
Neither do I.
She's chosen.
Not with words. Selene never chooses with words.
She chose the moment she strapped that knife to her thigh and walked through a sewer tunnel beside me instead of calling the FBI.
She chose when she shoved Emilia out of the line of fire and ran at a man with a gun because the only thing between him and the person she loves most was ten feet of concrete and her own body.
She's mine now.
Not because of the collar. Not because of the sex. Not because of the years I spent shaping her into something that could survive my world.
Because she looked at what she is and she didn't look away.
The woman looking back at me in the rearview mirror isn't the girl I found in Hell.
She's the queen I didn't know I was building.