It only took them four seconds to take out four men.
Axel turns back to me, and his eyes do a fast sweep of my body.
"You're okay," he says.
I look at the men on the floor. One of them is still moving. One of them isn't, and the angle of him is all wrong, and bile surges up my throat so fast I have to press my fist to my mouth.
"Aurora." Axel's hand on my face, turning it away. "Look at me."
I look at him.
"In through your nose." His thumb presses under my jaw. "Do it."
I breathe in. It comes out as a sob.
"Again."
Again.
"Good girl." His eyes hold mine for one more second, steady and absolute. "We're going outside. Stay with me."
We go outside, and it's so much worse.
The cold hits me, and my brain tries to process what my eyes are showing it and simply cannot. Vehicles burning at the perimeter, the flames massive and orange, and throwing lurching shadows across the grass. Men running in every direction. Muzzle flashes strobe through the smoke in sharp white bursts. Something explodes to the left — a vehicle, maybe, I don't know, the shockwave hits my chest, and I stagger, and Axel's arm comes around me and keeps me moving even though every single cellin my body is screaming at me to stop, to get down, to disappear into the ground.
This isn't happening. We were watching the northern lights six hours ago. His hand was on my stomach, and we were watching the northern lights, and this isn't—
There's a man on the grass ten feet away who isn't moving.
I know him. I've seen him at the estate a dozen times. He always nodded at me in the corridor, this small respectful dip of his chin like I was someone worth acknowledging.
He isn't moving.
The sound that comes out of me is inhuman. I clap both hands over my mouth, and Axel says eyes forward in a voice that cuts through everything, and I look forward, and I keep moving because stopping means dying, and some small functioning part of me understands that.
Axel fights as we move.
Not retreating and occasionally shooting. Actually fighting, moving through the chaos with Viktor flanking him, engaging attackers who come at us from the sides with a brutality that is both terrifying and the only reason I'm still breathing. One gets close enough that I see his eyes above his mask — pale, focused, pointed directly at me — and Axel is between us before I finish the thought, and the man goes down, and we keep moving.
We're going to make it. We're almost at the car. Fifteen feet. We're going to make it.
The first shot hits Axel in the arm.
A grunt. A slight stagger. Then he's moving again, gun switching hands, and I grab his sleeve, and he shakes me off gently and takes down the shooter and another who comes from the right, and I'm screaming his name, or maybe just screaming, I genuinely cannot tell.
He's okay. It's his arm. He's still moving. He's okay.
Ten feet.
The second shot hits his shoulder.
He goes down to one knee.
"AXEL—"
Viktor hauls him up. Axel gets his feet under him and surges upright, and the look on his face is pure furious refusal, nothing else, like his body suggested something, and he rejected it completely.
"I'm fine," he snarls.
