Chapter 2 - THREE SECONDS
She pushed off the marble.
Her rubber-soled work shoes gripped the wet stone just well enough to launch her forward, and she did not shout, because shouting wasted oxygen and oxygen was the only thing she had that the rifle did not.
Ten feet. She covered it in under two seconds.
Daniel caught the motion in his peripheral vision. His head began to turn.
The red dot slid from his temple to his cheekbone.
He’s too heavy. The thought fired through her with the clarity of panic. You weigh a hundred and thirty pounds. He’s solid. You can’t tackle him — you’ll bounce off. If you shove his chest, his head barely moves. You have to move the target. You have to move his skull.
She planted her left foot hard, ignoring the spike of pain that shot up through her ankle, and twisted her hips and channeled every ounce of momentum she had — momentum made of fear and exhaustion and a lifetime of being the person who could not afford to fail — down through her shoulder, down through her arm.
She did not know how to make a proper boxer’s fist. Nobody had ever taught her. She just curled her fingers as tight as they would go, locked her wrist, and swung.
Her knuckles connected with the side of Daniel Russo’s jaw.
The impact was sickening. It felt like punching a block of granite wrapped in leather. A bright electric crack shot up her forearm, followed instantly by a white flash of pain that exploded in her hand, and she felt two knuckles split at the same moment she heard them.
It was enough.
Daniel’s head snapped violently to the left. His eyes went wide — a flash of pure, undiluted shock breaking through the stoic mask he wore like a uniform. His balance shattered at the exact microsecond his skull left the space it had occupied.
The window behind them disintegrated.
It was not a boom. It was a sharp, suppressed thwip — a sound you would not turn around for — followed by the catastrophic crack of thick reinforced glass webbing and raining down like icy shrapnel. The round, a high-velocity thing designed to turn a skull into mist, tore through the empty air where Daniel’s head had been a fraction of a second earlier and slammed into the plaster wall near the staircase. It blew a crater the size of a dinner plate and showered the foyer in white dust and chunks of drywall.
Daniel went down hard. He hit the marble with a heavy, final thud, his body limp for one terrifying second from the concussive force of her punch.
Norah went down with him. Her momentum carried her over, and she hit the floor and slid across the wet marble and knocked over her bucket, and a wave of dirty, freezing ammonia-water washed over her legs.
Chaos erupted.
“Sniper! Down, down!” Carmine screamed, diving behind the thick oak console table, his hand already yanking a heavy pistol from his shoulder holster. The front doors crashed open. Four armed guards flooded the foyer, boots crushing glass and drywall, rifles up and sweeping the room, sweeping the windows. The air filled with the smell of pulverized plaster and cold wind and spilled ammonia.
“Boss!” one of them yelled, sliding into cover near the stairs.
Daniel was already moving. The disorientation lasted only a heartbeat — survival instincts honed across decades of blood and betrayal kicked in before the pain did. He rolled onto his stomach and spat a mouthful of blood onto the white marble and scrambled behind the thick load-bearing pillar at the base of the stairs, one hand clamped to his jaw.
Norah lay curled on her side in the puddle of dirty water. Her right hand throbbed with an agony so total it made her nauseous; she could not breathe, the wind knocked clean out of her.
Heavy boots approached fast.
Before she could gasp, a knee slammed into the center of her spine, pinning her flat against the freezing floor.
“Don’t move. Don’t twitch.” A voice barked it right by her ear, and then cold steel pressed against the back of her neck — a gun barrel, unarguable, the temperature of it a shock even through her soaked collar.
“Clear the yard! Find the shooter!” Carmine roared from somewhere to her left. “Get the perimeter locked down. I’ve got the maid.”
“The maid?” The guard on her back sounded almost amused. “She went for him. She hit him.”
“She went for him,” Carmine repeated, and the words were a sentence.
The guard grabbed her wrists and yanked her arms violently behind her back. The pain in her broken knuckles flared white, and a sharp, ragged sound came out of her that she did not recognize as her own voice. Thick plastic zip ties ratcheted tight around her wrists, cutting off the circulation in seconds.
“Drag her to the basement.” Daniel’s voice cut across the shouting. It was slurred, distorted by the swelling already closing his mouth, but it carried the same lethal authority it always carried, and every man in the room went still to hear it.
Norah turned her head, cheek pressed to the wet, gritty floor.
She saw him. He was leaning against the pillar. He was looking right at her. His dark eyes were wide and calculating and entirely cold, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and when he looked at his hand it came away smeared with red.
The guard hauled her up by the collar of her uniform. She did not fight. Her legs were water. She watched the foyer recede behind her — the shattered window, the crater in the wall, her overturned bucket bleeding gray water across the marble she had spent two years keeping clean.
May you like
She had just punched the most dangerous man in the city.
And they were dragging her into the dark.
