28. Lorcan
Lorcan
The room is mine. They just don't know it yet.
That's the part people never understand about a panic.
Everyone in a panic runs the same direction — for the doors — and the doors are where I put my men.
So the civilians break against a wall of my people and scatter, and what's left moving in the open is Silas's.
It makes them simple. The only things still coming toward me are the only things I have to kill.
“Kieran. Hold the east doors,” I say into my cuff. “Nothing leaves that isn't ours.”
“On it, boss.”
The first one comes around the end of the bar with a shotgun half-raised, and I'm already inside it.
I catch the barrel, shove it past my hip, and it goes off into the ceiling — plaster and light rain down — and I put my pistol under his jaw and pull.
The back of his head opens against the mirror behind him.
He's still falling when I take the shotgun out of his hands.
“Two on your left, on the floor,” Echo says in my ear.
I see them. I rack the shotgun and turn into the two coming low between the toppled tables, and I give the first one both barrels in the chest at six feet.
It folds him backward over a chair, almost in half, and the spread catches the second across the face and throat, and he goes down, clawing at himself, making a sound I don't stay to listen to. The shotgun's empty now. I drop it.
“You're walking into the middle of it,” Kieran says, tight. “Fall back to the column, I'll bring men —”
“No.” Silas is at the far end of the room, and I am going to him. “Hold the doors.”
A third one steps out from behind a pillar with a knife, thinking close quarters is smart.
It isn't, not with me. I let him commit to the lunge, slip it, catch the wrist, and break the elbow backward over my forearm.
The crack of it is louder than the gunfire for one second, and while he's screaming, I take the knife out of his ruined hand and put it through the side of his neck, twist, pull.
He drops into a spreading dark pool, and I'm already past him.
My suit is soaked through. Not mine. I don't feel any of it. There's a flat, cold quiet in my head where the noise should be, the one that's kept me alive for twenty years, and the only thought running underneath it is get to him, get to him, end this tonight.
Number four tries to run. I don't let men run. I take him through the back of the knee with a round, and when he goes down, I'm on him before he lands, and I finish it with the knife at the base of his skull because I'm not wasting bullets on a man already crawling.
“Boss, the fifth's got a vest —” Echo starts.
I hear it. The big one, by the overturned cake table, coming straight at me with a handgun and body armor under his jacket, and he's a professional, he aims center mass like he's been taught.
I don't give him center mass. I drop my shoulder, take us both into the wall, pin the gun arm, and put three rounds up under his chin from below where there's no plate.
His weight comes down on me, and I shove it off and step over it.
Five down. The floor between me and Silas is mostly clear now.
His men are folding, the ones who are left, and I can see it move through the room — the rival dons stop reaching for their own guards and start reaching for the exits, because they know how this ends and they don't want to be standing near me when it does.
Silas hasn't moved. That's been bothering me the whole way across the floor, somewhere under the cold. He hasn't drawn. He's just stood there in the wreckage with his hands in his pockets, watching me carve a path to him, and he's smiling, and Silas doesn't smile at a fight he's losing.
Then he takes his right hand out of his pocket, and he reaches down to his side, and he pulls a child out from behind him into the light.
Maeve.
The world stops being a room.
She's in her pajamas. The yellow ones, with the cloud on the front.
Her hair's a mess from sleep, and her face is white and wet, and her eyes find me across the floor, and she opens her mouth, and nothing comes out.
She's supposed to be at the compound. She's supposed to be behind forty men and three walls and a bunker. She was asleep an hour ago, Maria checked, I had the report —”
He took her from the house. He walked into my house, took her out of her bed, and brought her here in her pajamas, and I had her counted as safe the entire time.
Silas turns her so she's in front of him, his hand flat on her small shoulder, his body behind hers. He tips his head, almost gentle, and rests his other hand — and the gun in it — along the side of her neck. Same height. Same angle. He's standing exactly where her mother stood.
And my body stops.
My mind doesn't. That's the part nobody sees from the outside.
My mind is working faster than it's worked all night — the angle is bad but it's there, two feet of clearance over her head if she drops, Kieran has the flank, Echo could take the side if I gave the word, if I move left he has to track me and his arm comes off her neck for half a second — I can see all of it, every option, laid out clean.
My mind is screaming the order down to my arm.
My arm will not lift the gun.
Because I have done this before. I have stood in a room with a man behind my daughter and a blade at her throat, and I have made the calculation, raised the gun, and fired, and it worked.
The price of it working was Elara on the tile, her hair going dark, her hand twitching, and Maeve's eyes that I covered too late, that I will never know if I covered in time.
I hear the sound a silenced round makes as it enters a body.
I hear it now, in a ballroom full of screaming, clear as if it's the only sound in the world.
My hands remember the kick. My hands remember the warmth.
I am standing in the middle of my own trap, in front of every man I command and every rival who has ever feared me, and I cannot move.
“There he is,” Silas says. His voice carries. He wants it to. “There's the king. Look at you.”
“Let her go.” My voice comes out wrong. Low, cracked, not mine. “Silas. She's six.”
“So was she that age once. My sister.” He doesn't stop smiling. “You remember how steady your hand was that night? I do. I was on the floor. I watched you do it. I've thought about your face every day for five years, and here it is again, except it's not so steady now, is it? Look at it shake.”
It's shaking. I can see it at the edge of my vision, my own hand, the gun pointed at the floor where it's useless, and I cannot make it come up.
Lift it. Lift the gun. She's right there, she's looking at you, lift the gun and end him — and nothing happens.
Twenty years of a body that has never once failed me, and it has chosen this, of every moment in my life, to stop.
“Daddy?” Maeve says.
It's so small. It goes through me like the round did that night, the one I didn't feel until after.
She's not crying anymore. She's just looking at me, waiting, the way she waits for me to fix everything, because I have always fixed everything, and I am standing twenty feet away from her doing absolutely nothing at all.
Silas watches me not move, and his smile widens, because this is what he came for. Not the routes. Not the war. This. Me, frozen, broken open in front of the whole room, paying again.
My men are watching. I can feel it. Kieran's gone still at the doors, Echo's gone still at the flank, all of them waiting for the word from the man who always has it, and the word won't come. I have never in my life given them nothing. I am giving them nothing now.
“Go on,” Silas says softly, almost kind. “Do the math again. I'll wait. You're good at the math. It's the doing you can't manage anymore.”
And then I hear her.
Behind me. Not my name, she doesn't call my name. Not a question, not asking me what to do, not waiting for the king to come back into his body.
Just Atara, low and certain, already moving.
She's already decided.