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"Hansen."

"Hansen." She tries the sound of it. "First name or last name?"

"Both, depending on who's asking."

She tilts her head. "Which is it for me?"

"Jury's still out," I say. "Give me ten minutes."

She laughs, short and unguarded.

"Ten minutes," she repeats. "That's generous. Most people need five."

"I take my time with things that matter."

She looks at me. The amusement is still there in her expression but something else has joined it, something more direct, and I am aware of every inch of space between us. "Do you?"

"I do."

"Hm." She picks up her glass. "Then I suppose I should stay for the full ten minutes and see what you conclude."

"You were staying anyway."

She raises an eyebrow. "Pretty sure of yourself."

"You haven't moved," I point out.

She opens her mouth to answer, and whatever she was about to say — I would have liked to hear it — is interrupted.

Glass blows inward in a brutal spray, winter air hitting the warm room, and the first shots are already tearing through wood before anyone has finished processing the sound.

I am off the stool, my hand is around her arm, pulling her down and behind the bar in one movement that does not pause to explain itself, and she goes, dropping her weight and moving with me in the trained, instinctive way of someone who has learned that in a crisis you move first.

My weapon is already in my hand.

Three masked men, two through the window, one through the door, moving with coordination. Two of mine return fire from their positions before the echo of the first shots has died. Miller's voice cuts through the noise. The man at the door takes a round and goes down hard, crashing backward through a table, and the sound is swallowed whole by everything happening around it.

I press Leah lower with one hand flat between her shoulder blades. "Stay."

She presses against the cabinet behind the bar, both hands flat on the floor, head turned toward me, watching, eyes moving from my face to the space above the bar and back.

I rise above the counter and fire twice. The second masked figure catches both rounds and goes back through the destroyed window frame. I drop below the edge again as return fire splinters the wood above my head.

Luke has come from somewhere in the chaos, he is fast in a way that surprises people who underestimate him, which most people only do once.

He takes the third shooter from behind in the dark far corner of the room with an efficiency that is not pleasant to witness and is absolutely the right decision.

The fighting in the alley beyond the window is still going, prospects working in the cold, and it ends with the kind of sounds that do not require commentary.

Then it is quiet.

The bar is destroyed across the front third. Glass scattered under the low lights. Two tables reduced to splinters. The jukebox has a hole in it that sparks faintly in the dark, song cut off mid-bar. Cold pouring through the ruined window and reclaiming the warmth in stages.

I look down.

Leah is exactly where I left her. Hair loose from its knot, one knee against the cabinet, hands still flat on the floor. She looks up at me with that same steadiness she has had since the moment I first walked over to her.

Her gaze drops to my arm and I follow it.