I didn’t hesitate.
I closed the distance in three long strides.
Time narrowed the way it always did—sound dulling, vision sharpening, the world funneling down to angles and openings.
The wedding dress became irrelevant. The shoes didn’t matter. Fear didn’t matter. What mattered was distance, balance, and the fragile human body standing in front of me.
I drove a tight, precise combination into the first man’s face.
A jab to the nose—sharp, snapping cartilage with a wet crunch.
A hook to the temple—short and vicious, aimed where the skull was thinnest.
An uppercut under the chin—perfectly timed, lifting his head just enough to shut the lights off.
Muscle memory from a decade ago roared awake.
I felt it in my shoulders, my hips, the torque of my spine—movements drilled into me until they lived deeper than thought.He never saw it coming. To him, I was a woman in white, a soft target, a civilian who should have screamed and frozen.
Instead, his head snapped back like it had been yanked on a string. His eyes rolled white. His knees buckled.
He went down hard.
Not dramatically. Not heroically. Just gravity doing its job—two hundred pounds of meat hitting concrete with a dull, final thud. He was unconscious before his shoulder even struck the sidewalk.
The second man shouted something—I didn’t catch the words, only the shape of his mouth twisting in shock.
He released the boy instinctively and reached for the holster at his hip.
Too slow.
I pivoted on the ball of my foot and snapped a high roundhouse kick toward his jaw. The hem of the dress flared uselessly around my legs, satin tearing with a sound like paper ripping. My foot connected solidly.
The impact rang up my leg, vibrating bone to bone.
His head whipped sideways. Spit and blood sprayed from his mouth. He staggered back two steps, boots scraping, but he didn’t fall.
He was trained. Or at least experienced.
He growled—an ugly, animal sound—and surged forward again.
I went for another strike, aiming for his face, but he blocked it with his forearm, absorbed the blow, and countered immediately. A heavy boot slammed into my chest.
The force lifted me clean off the ground.
For a weightless, surreal moment, I was airborne—white fabric billowing, sky spinning overhead. Then I crashed onto the pavement hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.
Air exploded out of me in a soundless gasp.
Pain bloomed everywhere at once—sharp across my ribs, burning down my spine, flaring in my elbows and knees as skin scraped raw against concrete.
The dress was ruined now, satin torn and smeared with grime and blood. My hearing aids rattled loose, one skittering across the sidewalk.
I rolled instinctively, coughed, and forced myself upright on shaking arms.
The man advanced calmly now, confidence restored.
The Glock was already in his hand.
