“Stay behind the table,” Lorcan says into my ear. He's not panicked. That's the part that scares me — how calm he is, how this is justTuesday,like I once threw at him. “Do not move until I move you.”
“Maeve —”
“Maeve's at the compound, she's safe, she's not here.” He racks the slide on a gun I didn't see him draw. “Eyes on me.”
He comes up over the lip of the table and fires twice, and one of Silas's men by the terrace drops with a hole where his throat used to be, both hands going up to a wound that won't be held closed. The other one, Lorcan, takes through the eye, and the man simply stops being a person, drops straight down into himself, and Lorcan is already moving to the next without a flicker.
Kieran is across the floor in the thick of it. I watch a man come at his back with a knife, and I open my mouth to shout, and Kieran just turns into it, takes the blade through the meat of his arm without a sound, and drives his own up under the man's jaw to the hilt. There's so much of it — the blood — it comes out of people in volumes that don't seem possible, sheeting across the parquet, turning the gala's careful gold lighting into something out of an abattoir.
A chandelier shears loose under fire and comes down on the dance floor we were standing on ten seconds ago. The crystal explodes outward. Someone who was under it is justgone, folded into the wreckage, a shoe spinning out across the floor on its own.
And I am not freezing.
That's the thing I notice about myself, distant and clear, while the world ends around me. The old me would be a ball under this table with her hands over her ears. This me is flat to the floor with her cheek in someone else's blood, and she has already opened her clutch, and her fingers have already found the little black knife Lorcan put in her hands and showed her how to use.
I get my thumb on the release the way he taught me. The blade slides out, silent.
Through the gap between the table leg and a fallen chair, I find Silas. He hasn't drawn a weapon. He's standing in the middle of the carnage with his hands in his pockets, watching Lorcan work his way toward him across the room, and he's still smiling, andhe's moving — slow, sideways, toward the service corridor we pulled men off of.The one I told Lorcan to leave thin. The one Silas wanted us to leave thin.
I track him. Low, behind the line of overturned tables, knife flat against my forearm the way he showed me, my heart going so hard I can feel it in my teeth. I don't have a plan yet. I have a direction and a blade and the cold, useful patience that's the only thing this whole insane world has actually taught me.
Not yet,I tell myself, watching him drift toward the dark.Wait for it.
And I wait.
28
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 isget 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.
