"I'm ten minutes away. Garrett's closer—I'm calling him from the truck. Stay on the phone."
"Okay."
"Are you somewhere safe?"
"I'm sitting on the floor next to a Honda Civic."
"Can anyone see you?"
"I don't—I don't think so."
"Good. Stay down. Stay on the phone. I'm coming."
I stay down. I stay on the phone.
I listen to the sound of his truck engine and his breathing and the click of him dialing Garrett on another line, and I press my phone against my ear like a lifeline because right now it is one.
Garrett gets there first.
Six minutes.
He comes around the corner of the third level at a dead run—six-two, leather, fury—and when he sees me on the ground, something in his face goes past anger into a place I've never seen before.
A place I don't have a name for.
The place where Bloodhound lives, the part of him that killed Virgil in a basement and didn't apologize for it.
"Leah." He's on his knees beside me. His hands on my face, checking me over the way I check patients—clinically, thoroughly, looking for damage. "Where are you hurt?"
"Collarbone. He pinned me with his forearm. It's not broken. I can tell. Just bruised."
"What did they look like?"
"One tall, shaved head, neck tattoos. The other shorter, stocky."
He pulls me to my feet and wraps his arm around me.
I let him.
My knees aren't going to hold, and he's my brother, and right now that's the only thing in the world that matters.
He smells the same as he always has.
For a second I'm four years old and he's pulling me out of the fire and nothing can hurt me.
"I'm going to kill them," he says. Not loud. Not angry. Just a statement of fact, the way you'd say the sky is blue or water is wet. "I'm going to find them and I'm going to kill them."
"Garrett."
"They put their hands on my sister."
"I know. I was there."
Coin arrives four minutes later.
I hear his truck before I see it—tires squealing on the concrete ramp, engine echoing off the garage walls.
He parks at an angle that blocks the lane and he's out the door before the engine fully dies.
