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He pulled up outside her building and killed the engine, and neither of them reached for a door handle. The rain traced slow lines down the windshield, streetlight catching gold in it, and for a moment, neither of them moved to end the night.
“You’re not coming up for a nightcap, are you?”
“No,” he said without apology, eyes on her, nothing polite left anywhere in the look. “I intend to stay a great deal longer than that.”
“Good. I was hoping you’d say that, extensively, at length, with enthusiasm.”
He was out of the car and around to her side before she’d finished unbuckling, opening her door with the same easy certainty he brought to everything, and the kiss he gave her on the sidewalk left absolutely no ambiguity about how the rest of the night intended to go.
His hand closed around hers on the walk to her door, lacing his fingers through hers, and neither of them said anything else about it. The rain kept falling, light and steady, and the quiet between them read less like the absence of conversation and more like two people who’d already said everything that needed saying out loud and were finally, fully, ready to stop talking altogether.
SEVENTEEN
ROMILY
The lobby installation times ran late most nights now, the atrium empty except for her and the panels and the deep quiet that settled over the space once the last guest had wandered off toward the elevators. She’d gotten used to the rhythm of it — the hum of the building settling into its overnight systems, the echo her own footsteps made on scaffolding thirty feet above marble that never quite felt as solid from up here as it did from the ground.
She liked the late hours. Nobody interrupted her up here. Nobody needed anything from her that wasn’t directly in front of her hands. Security did their rounds on a schedule she’d memorized without meaning to, the same rhythm every night, which was either reassuring or, in hindsight, precisely the kind of predictable pattern somebody could learn to exploit.
She was thirty feet up, running a final check on the last mounting point before calling it a night, when the air changed — a shift in pressure, the hush of a room that had quietly gained people not planning to announce themselves.
She looked down. Two men were through the service corridor door, moving fast, moving quiet, the kind of quiet that came from practice rather than politeness. Dark clothes. No hesitation in the way they crossed the atrium floor, like they’d walked this exact path before, on paper if nowhere else.
Well. That’s new.
She had approximately four seconds to decide what to do about it, and she spent all four of them doing math instead of panicking, because panicking had never solved anything and she wasn’t planning to start tonight. Thirty feet of scaffolding between her and the ground. A wrench cart within reach. Two men below, moving toward the base of the rigging like they already knew exactly where she’d have to come down.
Options. Stay up here and wait for backup that may or may not be coming. Climb down somewhere they don’t expect. Or make an entrance nobody’s currently prepared for.
She picked the third option, because it was the only one that came with a wrench attached.
She didn’t wait to find out what they wanted. She unclipped from the safety line, dropping the last eight feet instead of taking the ladder, because every second on that ladder was a second she couldn’t afford to spend. She hit the ground in a crouch, came up swinging a wrench she’d grabbed off the rigging cart without fully deciding to, and caught the first man across the jaw hard enough to feel the crack travel clean up her own wrist.
He went down in a heap, blood dark across his mouth, and didn’t get back up.
The second one didn’t slow. He came in low, and she barely got the wrench up in time to catch the strike meant for her ribs, metal ringing off metal, the impact jarring all the way to her shoulder. She answered with a knee to his gut that doubled him over, followed it with the wrench across the back of his skull, and didn’t wait to see if he stayed down before pivoting to face the third man crowding in behind him.
Two down. Considerably more where they came from, apparently.
She fought the way that self-defense class from four years back had actually prepared her to — not gracefully, not with any real skill worth bragging about, but fast and scrappy and mean, using her elbows and her voice and every ugly trick a retired cop with a mustache had ever drilled into a room full of terrified strangers.
She got a knee into someone’s ribs, felt a give under the impact that probably wasn’t supposed to give, and used the half-second it bought her to look for an exit that didn’t exist. Another man came through the door behind the first two, and the math that had briefly looked survivable stopped looking survivable at all, the odds sliding from bad to seriously alarming in the space of about two seconds.
Four against one. Fantastic odds. Very sporting of you gentlemen.
She swung the wrench again, caught nothing but air, and hands closed around her from behind before she could reset her stance. She drove an elbow back hard, connected with the solid weight of a jaw, heard the satisfying crunch, and the grip loosened long enough for her to twist free and put three more feet of distance between herself and the nearest of them. Blood — hers or his, she honestly couldn’t tell — slicked her palm where it gripped the wrench, making the metal want to slide.
A blade meant for her shoulder caught her forearm instead when she twisted away from it, a line of fire opening up from elbow to wrist, deep enough that she knew it was bad before the sting even arrived, blood welling immediate and dark and far more of it than she’d expected from a cut that shallow-looking.
The pain barely touched her over the adrenaline. If anything it made her furious, incandescent, a rage that burned cleaner than fear ever managed — she drove her good elbow into someone’s throat and heard real satisfaction in the choked sound it produced, the wrench connecting with a kneecap hard enough that the man’s leg buckled sideways at an angle knees weren’t built for.
That’s going to need stitches. Add it to the list. Right after “explain this to Norden” and directly before “quit this job altogether and take up something safer, like alligator wrestling.”
It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough, four trained men against one bleeding woman with a wrench, and she knew it even while she kept fighting, because stopping had never been an option she’d chosen and she wasn’t about to start now, not with blood running warm down to her fingers and her whole arm screaming every time she moved it.
A hand closed around her uninjured arm. Another around her waist, hauling her off her feet. She was lifted, dragged, a hood coming down over her head before she’d finished the sentence she’d been screaming, several words in it her mother wouldn’t have approved of.
Four minutes. That was how long it took, later, for anyone to reconstruct — four minutes between the alarm on her harness triggering and the moment everything stopped.
