She lifted the bat, testing her grip. But first, she was about to show the piece of shit on the other side of the door what happened when you tried to rob a woman who'd been fighting off assholes since before she could vote.
She was the last unit on this corridor, which meant no one had any reason to be at her door. Especially since they were on the opposite side of the building from the fire escape, so it wasn’t as if the Dust smokers who liked to hang out on the fire escape would wander by and try her door by mistake… They were always doing that to Mrs. Pedlow in Unit 7, and it drove the elderly woman absolutely insane.
Her eyes narrowed. No, this wasn't a mistake. Whoever was trying to get through that door was doing it on purpose, and she was going to have to show them the error of their ways.
Her feet made no sound on the cracked linoleum as she padded across it. Pressing a finger to her lips, she shot Barnaby a look to tell him to STFU. He jumped onto the breakfast bar shelf and looked offended. Then he blinked at her. A slow, innocent blink. She wasn’t fooled. Barnaby was a furry monster and not innocent. That blink meant he was planning something and would pull some shit at the earliest opportunity.
The scraping came again, and she altered her approach to the door, hefting the bat in her hands. The weight of it was familiar and comforting.
She'd be forever grateful to Mark, back in sixth grade, for teaching her to bat. The lessons had come in useful many times in the years since… including the night he and his cousin had tried to break into her parents' place because she'd refused to have sex with him when she was fifteen.
She'd broken his cousin's collarbone that night. Mark had pissed himself as they’d run away before her dad woke up. Good times.
The lock clicked.
She stepped behind the door, her heart hammering against her ribs. Her hands were steady, though. They always were. Fear was something that happened later… after the swinging was done.
The door swung inward with a creak.
She stepped around it and swung. Hard.
The light from the corridor gave her just enough to aim by. She had to aim higher than she expected, a lot higher, but she didn’t let that stop her. The bat connected with something solid in a warm, wet crunch.
"What the fuck—FIRE!” she screamed, already pulling back for another swing. “Do you think—HELP! FIRE!—you're doing, asshole? FIRE ON FIFTH!"
Fire, not help. No one helped if you screamed ‘help’ because, honestly? No one wanted to get involved. But everyone would be out of their apartments if they thought the building was going up, and people in the corridors meant witnesses. Assholes committing illegal acts didn’t like witnesses, so more often than not, they ran away. She'd learned that one in the shelter on 22nd, from a woman whose name she couldn't remember but whose advice she'd never forgotten.
"What the draanth!?" a deep voice growled. "Stop hitting me, female!"
The bat stopped mid-swing. Not because she'd meant to stop, but because he'd plucked it from her hands like she was a child waving a stick.
"Tralling hells! I think you broke my draanthing nose!"
His voice was deep enough that she felt it in her chest. But the accent was wrong—all clipped and formal, with consonants that landed harder than normal. And the curse words…
Draanth. Trall.
She stumbled backward. "House, lights please!"
The lights flickered on.
Oh… oh, shit.
A Latharian warrior stepped into her apartment and closed the door behind him. He had her bat in one hand—her bat, which suddenly looked like a toothpick—and his other hand clamped over his nose. Blood seeped between his fingers, dark and glistening in the cheap overhead light.
Her eyes widened. She’d never seen a guy built like a walk-in wardrobe before. His uniform was black leather, streaked with mud and something worse as he dripped water onto her floor. Rainwater, from the storm outside. His hair was a deep copper, pulled back from a broad face, and his eyes were a green she had no business noticing on a man bleeding onto her floor.
He was gorgeous. Of course he was. Some lizard-brain part of her, the part with no sense of self-preservation whatsoever, filed it away under unfairly hot and went back to screaming.
Copper hair. Green eyes. Built like a tank… shit, he was way bigger than any man she’d ever met.
"Crap! You're an alien!"
Reaching out, she grabbed the frying pan off the draining board—thank the Lord for small apartments—and brandished it at him. The pan was cast iron and had been her grandmother's. It would crack a skull if she swung hard enough, and she was absolutely prepared to swing hard enough.
He lowered his hand from his face. Blood still dripped from his nose, but he wasn't looking at the blood. He was looking at her.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" Her voice came out high and tight. "Where's Emily? Did you fucking kidnap her?"
