29. Atara
Atara
I figure out what's happening to him before anyone else in the room does.
From down here, crouched behind the table that used to hold the seafood tower, my knees in something warm I am not going to look at, I can see the back of Lorcan and the side of Silas and the small white shape between them that I am absolutely not going to let myself think about as Maeve.
Not yet. Not if I want my hands to keep working.
My ears are ringing from the chandelier.
There's a smell over everything, copper and cordite and somebody's spilled perfume, and somewhere behind me a woman is making a sound that I've decided isn't my problem right now because I only get to have one problem at a time.
And I can see Lorcan's gun hand. It's pointed at the floor. It's shaking. It hasn't come up.
For one second, I think he's been hit somewhere I can't see. Then I get it, and the realization is almost worse.
I've seen the inside of this before. Not the freeze, the thing beneath it.
A few weeks ago, I sat on a study floor with this man as he told me, in that flat voice he reserves for the worst things, what it did to him to raise a gun at someone standing behind his daughter, pull the trigger, and have it work.
He's not frozen because he's a coward. He's frozen because it's the same room.
Silas built him the exact same room and walked him right back into it on purpose because he knew it would work.
Honestly, it's the part that makes me want to throw up, how good it is. How well Silas knows him.
“Go on,” Silas is saying, soft and patient, like he's got all night. “Do the math again. You're so good at the math.”
“Let her go.” Lorcan's voice doesn't sound like Lorcan's. “She's six.”
“So was my sister, once.”
He's not coming back from this in time. The thought arrives whole, and I don't argue with it.
I love you, you stupid, ruined man, and you are not coming back in time, and she is right there.
I don't even trip over the first part of it, which is new information I'll be dealing with later, assuming there's a later, which currently I would not bet a dollar on.
Fine. If the most dangerous man in this room is out of commission, then the math is mine now, and I have always been faster at math than he is.
Here's what I know, and I know it the way I used to read a balance sheet and spot the lie before I'd finished the first column.
The whole room is watching Lorcan. Every gun, every eye, every one of Silas's people still standing.
All of it is pointed at the king, who's gone still in the middle of his own floor, because that's the show.
That's what they came to see. Nobody is looking at the carpet.
Nobody has looked at me since I dropped behind this table ten seconds ago, which means I have not existed for ten seconds, and this is the most useful I have ever been.
Three things. Count them. You like counting.
One: Silas has Maeve in front of him, his left hand flat on her shoulder, the gun in his right hand laid along the side of her neck.
Two: He's turned three-quarters away from me, squared up to Lorcan and the room, which means his right side, the gun side, is open to everyone except the one person who matters, because I'm behind his right shoulder.
His blind side. Three: Between him and me, there's an overturned chair for two feet of cover, and then nothing, just open marble.
I will have exactly one attempt at this and no version of a second one.
The angle of the gun is the whole game. It's resting along her neck, not pressed into it. That's a half inch. That's a tendon. That's the difference between a reflex that pulls the trigger toward her and a reflex that yanks it away.
The knife is already in my hand. I don't remember opening it.
The little black one he closed my fingers around in the war room while he said don't fight the weight, let it work for you, and I stood there pretending I wasn't memorizing the heat of his hands on mine.
Light. Balanced. Speed, not strength. It's about where you aim.
I'm aiming for the inside of the forearm, the soft underside of it, the cords that tell a hand whether or not it gets to keep holding things.
“Daddy?” Maeve says again, and her voice cracks straight down the middle, and I feel it land on Lorcan from twenty feet away and do absolutely nothing, because nothing is the entire problem, and I am done waiting on it.
It's enough to move me anyway.
I go. Low and fast, on the balls of my feet, the way you cross a room you don't want to be heard crossing — I learned that here too, in this terrible house, from watching men who kill people for a living move through hallways.
Past the chair. Onto the open floor. The marble is slick, and I don't go down because I planned my feet three steps back, and the dumb little part of my brain that never shuts up, not even now, observes that if I survive this, I am never again allowed to claim I'm bad at sports.
Silas hears me at the last half-second. They always hear you at the last half-second. It is never, ever enough. His head starts to turn toward the sound.
I drive the knife into the inside of his right forearm, and I pull down hard, all my weight on it, exactly the way he showed me.
The blade goes in clean, and the noise Silas makes isn't a word.
The gun jumps in his grip, his fingers do precisely what cut tendons do, they quit, they open, and the barrel falls away from Maeve's neck, and the round he fires on pure reflex goes into the floor between his own shoes.
Stone chips sting my ankle. My other hand already has a fistful of her pajama shirt, the one with the cloud on the front, and I haul her sideways and down into me and roll us both across the wet marble away from him.
“I've got you,” I'm saying into her hair. “I've got you, don't look, baby, don't look.”
She doesn't look. She presses her whole face into my shoulder and grabs my arm hard enough to leave marks and shakes, and I keep my hand spread over the back of her head so she stays facing my collarbone and not the room.
Good girl. That's it. Just like that. You don't have to see any of this.
I would burn the entire building down before I'd let her see any of this.
And Silas — Silas screams.
It's the first ugly sound he's made all night.
The whole performance, the patience, the little smile he wore the entire time he was taking apart the most dangerous man I've ever met — it's gone, all of it, off his face at once.
What's underneath is just a furious man bleeding hard from his forearm in the middle of a room he doesn't run anymore.
He's got his good hand clamped over the wound, and the blood is coming through his fingers anyway, fast, and the gun is on the floor four feet from him, and he's not looking at it.
He's looking at me. At me, like he's only this second understood there was a third person in his careful little picture.
Like the spreadsheet grew hands and stabbed him.
“You —” he starts.
“Yeah,” I say. “Me.”
The room is two full seconds behind him, and in a room like this, two seconds is the whole rest of everyone's life.
His men set up to watch Lorcan break, not to watch their boss take a blade from a girl in a cocktail dress and start coming apart at the seams, and for those two seconds, not one of them knows whose move it is or who they're supposed to be afraid of.
The standoff that held this entire room frozen just hit the floor and shattered, and I'm the one who dropped it, and I am so far past scared that I've come out the other side into something cold and clear and almost calm.
I push Maeve down behind me and put my body between her and all of it, and I make her a promise I don't bother saying out loud because she's six and it's not the kind of thing you say to a child. Then I lift my head.
Lorcan is already looking back at me.
And I get to watch it happen. I watch him come back into his own body.
It isn't slow, the way I'd have guessed something like that would be, it's fast, like a current that's been hunting for ground and finally finds it.
The tremor in his hand stops. His shoulders reset into a line I recognize.
The man who was twenty feet away a second ago, drowning in a night five years gone, is just gone, and the one looking at me now is all the way here, every inch, and his eyes move, from me, to Maeve tucked down safe behind my arm, to Silas bleeding and unarmed and open, and then back to me, and they stay there.
Whatever is on his face when he looks at me, I don't have a name for it.
It isn't gratitude, and it isn't surprise, and it's not the heat I'm used to from him either.
It's bigger and quieter than any of that, and it is aimed completely and only at me, and I understand even in the middle of all this noise that I'm going to be turning it over for a long time after tonight.
“Get them clear,” he growls.
“Go,” I tell him. “I've got her. Go.”
Then he moves.