Page 91 of You Can Run

Not toward him. Toward the console. Her hand found the intercom panel and she hit the building-wide channel—every speaker in the Dollhouse, main floor to basement, all of them live— and she leaned into the microphone and said three words in a voice loud enough to cut through the bass line and the noise and the pink-lit oblivion of three hundred people having a Friday night.

“FBI. Get out.”

The effect was instantaneous. She heard it through the monitors before she heard it through the walls: the music cutting out, replaced by the sound of three hundred people processing the wordFBIsimultaneously. It sounded like a single collective gasp followed by scrape of chairs and the crash of glasses and the first screams.

The man in the doorway turned toward the sound and Sofia used the fraction.

She hit him low, driving her shoulder into his midsection, using the momentum to slam him into the doorframe. The gunwent off, a single shot that punched into the ceiling and rained plaster. Then they were on the floor, tangled in the doorway, and she felt his weight shift as he tried to bring the weapon around.

Her hand found the knife.

It was fast. It was the thing she'd always been best at. She sunk it into the man’s side, below his ribs and directed upwards. A sharp thrust that made him scream.

He rolled off her and she scrambled free.

She pulled herself up using the doorframe. There was blood on her jacket, some of it his and some of it hers. The gun had gone off between them, the muzzle pressed against her side when it fired, and she'd felt the impact before she'd felt the pain. It was a deep, concussive punch beneath her ribs that had rearranged something fundamental inside her.

She leaned against the wall. Breathing was different now. Shorter, wetter, each inhale catching on something.

From below, the sound of the building coming apart. The FBI was inside—she could hear the commands, the organized shouting that was different from the civilian panic, the specific vocabulary of a federal raid in progress. Cole's team, through the service entrance, into the basement. The front team would be coming through the main entrance now, meeting the flood of civilians pouring out.

She slid down the wall until she was sitting. The blood was coming faster now, pooling beneath her hand, soaking through the jacket into the carpet in a slow, warm spread that she could feel but couldn't stop. She pressed harder. It didn't help. The wound was below her hand, deeper than her hand could reach, and the pressure that had always been enough—in every other situation, in every other room—wasn't enough here.

She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket. The medal was where it always was. Her thumb found the blank space where the Saint’s face had been and pressed into it.

The edges of the hallway dimmed. The medal grew warmer in her hand, or her hand grew colder around it—she couldn't tell which, and then she couldn't tell much of anything, and the last thing she was aware of was the silver pressing into her thumb and the distant, fading sound of a building being taken apart, piece by piece, by people she had let in through the doors.

THIRTY-SEVEN

They were separatedfor the statements.

Dante was taken to a mobile command vehicle parked on Wharton Street. It was the same van, he realized, that Cole's team had been staging from. There was a dry-cleaning logo on the side and inside it smelled like cold coffee and electronics.

Cole was there. Dante hadn't known his name until the agent introduced himself. He was a compact man in his forties, tired around the eyes.

“You're Dante Cruz,” Cole said.

“Yeah.”

“Sofia briefed me on your involvement.” Cole sat down across from him at the narrow counter that served as a desk. “I need your statement. Everything from tonight, starting with when you arrived at the building.”

Dante gave it to him. The arrival, the front door, Sonny, the booth. Borya's questions. The twenty minutes. Jessica's arrival, the pat-down, the Ruger. Borya's description of what he'd planned for the basement. The lights going out. The escape through the kitchen.

Cole wrote it down without interrupting, his pen moving steadily, his expression giving nothing away.

“The woman who was brought to your table,” Cole said. “Jessica Meeks. She arrived independently?”

“She wasn't part of the plan.”

“No,” Cole said. “She wasn't.” He looked at Dante for a moment. “Sofia didn't mention her.”

“Sofia didn't know she was coming. Nobody did.”

Cole absorbed that. He made a note. Then he set the pen down and leaned back.

“We found Sofia,” he said.

The way he said it told Dante everything. The slight shift in Cole's voice from procedural to something more hesitant.