Page 101 of The Triangle

“The other side of what?” growls Danny.

“The house, bru!”

Danny’s eyes close tightly, and he says, “I’m an asshole for not having an escape route, but you only have guns on the other side of the fucking glass house?”

Fair point he makes.

“They’re really good guns, bru! We just have to get them!”

He shakes his head and Christine asks, “Fuckin’ fine! How do we get to them?”

Tipping my chin, I say, “Down the hall.”

Their faces drop.

“The exposed glass hallway?” Christine asks.

“I’m sorry, luv. The house was designed for privacy and seduction and all that. It wasn’t intended to be used as a goddamn bunker!”

Danny looks at me, grinds his teeth, then gets a tiny smile and in what is a clear imitation of me says, “Shame.”

“All right!” Christine yells. “Let’s go fuckin’ get ’em!”

She starts to leap out from under the piano, but I hold her back. I take Danny with my other hand. I pull the three of us toward each other until all of our heads touch. Then I close my eyes and breathe.

I let my lungs fill. This time not just with my own breath, but with the breath of all three of us. We breathe into each other. I take from them, I give back, and I feel myself growing in my body to thrice my usual size.

When I open my eyes and sit back, they are looking at me. They don’t say anything. I squint at them with a tight-lipped grin on my lips and then give a tiny nod.

And at that, we scurry out from underneath our nominal cover, like the proverbial rats fleeing the proverbial ship, and we clear our harmonic canopy just as a ribbon of small-arms fire lacerates the legs, and the strings and keys comes hammering to the floor in a kind of screeching death knell.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - CHRISTINE

“Glass house. Fuckin’ ridiculous.” I’m whispering that under my breath like a mantra as Alec, Danny, and I make a break for an interior concrete wall. Bullets chase us. The spray shatters the concrete floor in the exact place the soles of my feet were less than a moment before.

This is a serious fucking ambush.

But I don’t have time to think about that. I don’t have time to think about anything. Not even the hopeless nature of this stupid plan that isn’t a plan. Because a fresh round of automatic fire comes bursting through the window, making Alec duck back.

He looks at Danny. Small hand movements. Eye gestures. Danny moves his head in a way that tells me he’s disagreeing with Alec’s proposal. But then a shoulder shrug.

Whatever. We’re dead anyway, that’s what that shoulder shrug says.

We’re not really in stealth mode. I mean, shit. There is only one reason for that platoon of fucking people to be outside the house shooting at us.

They know we’re here.

But the silent shorthand language of gestures feels right for some reason.

Danny lifts up his hand, flicks his fingers at me, and the second the fire lets up, we break for the interior stairwell that will take us down to the art gallery—I mean, death trap. Because that’s what it is.

But those are details that can be worked out later. And by later I mean ten seconds from now. Because the only thing that matters in this moment is that we make it to the concrete tube of a stairwell that will act as a shield.

I run. Oblivious to the thousands of pieces of shattered glass under the bare soles of my feet. And when we duck into the stairwell and realize none of us were hit, we lean back and smile.

It’s sick, the way we smile when we’re in the middle of shit.

But it’s familiar too. And comforting.