Chapter 15 Sixteen Bodies And A Kitten #2
Victoria’s cold iris and night rain is everywhere—saturating the air, coating the walls, filling my olfactory system with a concentration that makes it impossible to distinguish between her current position and the residual traces she’s left throughout the building over years of habitation.
Her scent is the building’s scent. The two have merged.
Which means I can’t use it to determine if she’s still here or if I’m tracking a ghost through rooms she’s already fled.
Not helpful.
Not helpful at all.
But there’s an odd scent layered in. Something that doesn’t belong—foreign, chemical, carrying the particular acidity of a compound designed for biological interference rather than therapeutic application.
I catalog it without identifying it, filing it in the category of deal with this in thirty seconds if Victoria is alive and burn this building to the ground if she’s not.
I reach the top of the stairs.
The bedroom doorway is inches away. The door itself is partially open—the gap wide enough to admit a body but narrow enough to serve as a visual barrier, creating a slice of the room’s interior that I can see and a majority that I can’t.
What I can see: the edge of the bed. The mirror on the far wall, its surface reflecting a portion of the room that includes—
Bodies.
Multiple. On the floor, against the walls, in the particular configurations of people who were defeated by someone who understands that a bedroom is a confined space and confined spaces favor the fighter with superior positioning and the willingness to use furniture as force multipliers.
Meow.
The sound is small, clear, cutting through the hollow silence with the particular auditory precision of a creature whose vocal range is specifically calibrated to penetrate human consciousness regardless of ambient conditions.
Ruby.
A loud thump follows—heavy, organic, the sound of a body being moved or a body falling, the acoustic signature ambiguous enough that my combat neurology interprets it as active threat rather than resolved threat and engages accordingly.
I’m moving.
Through the doorway, weapon raised, the golden gun’s barrel tracking ahead of my sightline as my body enters the room in the particular low, aggressive posture that my training defaults to when the situation assessment reads unknown and unknown is unacceptable.
Black catches my attention.
A shape. Large. Moving—or being moved—in the bedroom’s dim light, the silhouette obscured by the angle of entry and the shadow cast by the partially open door. The shape is the right size for a person. The movement is the wrong speed for someone who’s in control.
I don’t hesitate.
The trigger pull is clean. Single round. The golden gun delivers it with the mechanical certainty that I need when the margin for error is measured in the distance between my bullet and the person I’m trying to protect.
Direct hit.
The round enters the black shape center mass, and the impact produces the particular, sickening shudder of a high-velocity projectile transferring its energy into biological material. The shape staggers—
My heart stills.
Who did I just shoot?
For a second—one second, one heartbeat, one revolution of the particular hell that exists between firing a weapon in a dark room and seeing who falls—I think it’s her.
The shape is the right height. The black could be her leather coat.
The movement could be her body, struck, staggering, the brass knuckles falling from fingers that have lost the signal from a brain that my bullet just—
No.
No no no no—
My vision threatens to go red. The feral surges—a tidal response to the possibility that I’ve done the one thing that would end me faster and more completely than any bounty hunter or assassination team or neurological deterioration.
The rational mind fights for purchase, clinging to the cognitive surface with the desperate grip of a man who knows that if the feral takes over now, in this room, with these strangers behind him, the outcome will be catastrophic for everyone who isn’t already dead.
Then I see.
The shape—the large, black-clad shape that caught my round in the center of its mass—is not Victoria.
It’s a man. One of the breach team’s operatives, large enough that his tactical vest added bulk to an already substantial frame, dark enough in his equipment that the low light converted him to a silhouette that my combat brain interpreted as threat without gendering or identifying.
And he’s being held up.
By two smaller hands.
Braced against his back, arms extended, using the dead man’s body as a shield between herself and the doorway—the tactical improvisation of someone who heard footsteps on the stairs and didn’t know if they belonged to salvation or another round of death and chose to use available resources to hedge the bet.
Smart.
Terrifyingly, beautifully smart.
The hands release.
The body drops—two hundred-plus pounds of dead operative collapsing to the bedroom floor with the graceless finality of weight that is no longer being managed by the living.
It falls forward, hits the hardwood, and the impact produces a sound that joins the chorus of violence this room has already absorbed tonight.
And there she is.
Victoria.
Standing behind where the body fell. Catching her breath—the first indication that the effort of the last however-many-minutes has exceeded even her considerable capacity, because Victoria doesn’t catch her breath.
Victoria controls her breath the way she controls everything—through discipline and void and the refusal to acknowledge that her body has limitations that her mind hasn’t authorized.
She’s a mess.
A sweaty, bleeding, magnificent mess. Her long sapphire-blue strands with their pale blue highlights are plastered to the sides of her face and her forehead, the damp hair that she’d left down after her shower now soaked with perspiration rather than water.
Sweat rolls down her temples, her neck, collecting in the hollow of her throat above the tank top’s neckline.
Cuts—multiple, none deep, the defensive wounds of someone who fought in close quarters against edged weapons and redirected blades away from vital areas with the trained precision of a person whose body knows where to accept damage and where to refuse it.
And her gait.
She’s shifting her weight to her right leg.
Favoring it. The left—the nerve-damaged one, the one that taps when she’s nervous and carries less sensation than its counterpart—is compromised.
Injured. How badly, I can’t assess from here, but the weight redistribution tells me that whatever happened to it during the fight was significant enough to override even her exceptional pain tolerance.
But she’s breathing.
My girl is breathing.
She reaches inside her jacket. Her fingers find a zipper on the coat’s interior—the bottom pocket, the deep one, the fleece-lined compartment that I installed for ammunition and that she repurposed for—
The furry culprit of the meow plops onto the dead man’s back.
Ruby lands on the corpse with the weightless precision of a creature who considers all surfaces equally acceptable as landing zones and does not distinguish between hardwood and human remains.
She stretches—a full, theatrical, spinal extension that arches her tiny black body from nose to tail—and then sits.
Upright. Proud. Her silver-gold-brown eyes surveying the room of bodies and blood and traumatized humans with the serene self-satisfaction of a creature who has decided that she is personally responsible for the outcome and expects appropriate recognition.
“Ruby,” I huff.
I’m not a fan of cats. Never have been—too independent, too judgmental, too willing to observe human suffering from an elevated surface without offering assistance or emotional support.
But Victoria has a loving kindness for this particular feline that operates outside the void’s jurisdiction, and anything that operates outside the void’s jurisdiction is something I respect on principle because the void’s jurisdiction is comprehensive and its exceptions are almost nonexistent.
“Meow!”
Ruby hops off the body, trots across the bedroom floor—navigating blood pools and fallen weapons with the nimble indifference of a creature whose relationship with death is purely observational—and rubs against my ankle.
The contact is brief, warm, the particular feline acknowledgment that translates roughly to you exist and I’m choosing to confirm it before she’s running off into the hallway with the self-determined urgency of a kitten who has places to be and zero interest in the emotional complexity of the scene she’s leaving behind.
I roll my eyes.
Then I’m moving. Straight to Victoria. The distance between us is six feet of body-strewn bedroom floor, and I cross it in two strides that my legs produce without consulting my brain because my legs have been walking toward this woman for years and don’t require conscious direction to find her.
My arm wraps around her.
Immediately. The gesture is not gentle—it’s structural.
Load-bearing. The arm of a man who knows that her legs are going to give way in the next three seconds because he knows her body the way he knows his own weapon, and the signals it’s sending—the micro-tremors in her quadriceps, the slight sway of her torso, the almost imperceptible lag between her brain’s commands and her muscles’ responses—all indicate that consciousness is being maintained through willpower alone and willpower is a resource she’s burning through at an unsustainable rate.
“I got you,” I whisper.
And she crumbles.