The sound of the metal hitting the hardwood is louder than the shots were. It echoes through the foyer, a final, hollow punctuation mark on Viktor’s life. Wendy stands over the mess of him, her arms still locked in that firing position, her fingers curled around an air that’s suddenly gone cold.
Then, the tremors start.
It begins in her hands—a violent, rhythmic shaking that travels up her arms until her entire frame is vibrating with the force of a thousand shattered nerves. The fire I saw in her eyes moments ago doesn’t go out; it just drowns.
“Peter,” she chokes out. It’s not the voice of the woman who just executed a monster. It’s the voice of a girl waking up in the middle of a nightmare, realising themonster’s blood is on her skin. “Peter, I… I did it. I felt the click. I felt him… stop.”
I don’t wait. I step over Viktor’s cooling corpse and pull her into me. I wrap my arms around her so tight I’m afraid I’ll break her ribs, but I need her to feel the solid, living heat of me. I need to be the anchor for the storm that’s currently ripping her apart from the inside.
She collapses against my chest, her legs turning to water. I sink to the floor with her, cradling her in the middle of the debris, the glass, and the blood. She buries her face in the crook of my neck, and the sob that tears out of her is the most violent thing I’ve heard all night. It’s a primal, guttural wail—the sound of every prayer she ever wasted on Felix finally being purged from her lungs.
“I’m here,” I whisper into her hair, my lips brushing the sweat-soaked strands. “I’ve got you, Wendy. You’re safe. He can’t touch you. No one can touch you.”
“He wouldn’t stop looking at me,” she gasps, her fingers clawing at the Kevlar on my chest, trying to get closer to my skin. “Even when the light went out, I could still see him. I can still see the booth, Peter. Why won’t it go away? I killed him, and it’s still there. The smell… the smell of the powder and the bleach… it’s everywhere.”
She’s hyperventilating, her chest hitching in short, terrified gasps. I can feel her tears soaking into my shirt, hot and frantic. This is the part Hook didn’t understand. The bullet didn’t fix her; it just cleared the path. Now comes the long, slow walk through the ashes.
“It’s going to fade,” I tell her, my voice a low, steady growl. I pull back just enough to cupping her face in my hands. I force her to look at me, to see the man whowould burn the world to ash just to keep her breathing. “The smell, the ghosts—they’re dying, Wendy. You killed the anchor. Now the rest of it just drifts away. Look at me. Only me.”
She looks. Her eyes are bloodshot, her pupils blown wide, mirroring the chaos outside. But slowly, the frantic rhythm of her heart begins to sync with mine. She reaches up, her trembling fingers tracing the line of my jaw, searching for the reality of me.
“You’re real,” she whispers, a fresh wave of tears tracking through the soot on her cheeks. “You’re the only real thing left.”
“I’m the only thing that matters,” I promise.
I kiss her then—a hard, desperate kiss that tastes of salt and copper. It’s a seal on the contract we just signed in Viktor’s blood. She clings to me, her sobs turning into long, shuddering breaths, her body finally going limp with the sheer exhaustion of being a survivor.
I hold her there in the ruins of our sanctuary, the distant pops of the Lost Boys’ rifles sounding like fading applause. We’re sitting in a pool of shadow and blood, fifty million dollars in the other room, and a trail of bodies behind us.
The girl I married is gone. The woman in my arms is something new, something forged in a fire I helped stoke. And as I hold her, I realise I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about the buyers. I just want to be the one who carries her through the smoke until the world forgets we ever existed.
“We have to go, darling,” I murmur against her temple. “The world is still looking for us.”
She nodsagainst my chest, her fingers tightening on my shirt. “Then let’s go where the world can’t follow.”
The heavy thud of a boot against the doorframe makes me tighten my grip on my rifle, my body shielding Wendy before my brain even registers the movement. But it’s not another suit.
It’s Hook.
He’s leaning against the shattered remains of the entrance, his tactical vest shredded at the shoulder and a dark, blooming stain spreading across his sleeve. He looks like he’s gone ten rounds with a meat grinder, but his eyes are as cold and sharp as the blade at his hip. He takes one look at Viktor’s cooling corpse, then at the two of us huddled on the floor in a mess of tears and gunpowder.
“Touching,” he rasps, his voice gravelly and strained. He spits a glob of blood onto the floorboards. “Really. It’s a fucking Renaissance painting. But unless you want to be part of a funeral pyre, we need to move. Now.”
I don’t let her go. I just look up, my jaw tight. “The Lost Boys?”
“Two down, three wounded. They’re holding the tree line, but the second wave just breached the gate. They aren’t coming in with handguns this time, Peter. They brought a goddamn technical with a .50 cal. They’re tired of playing tag. They’re going to level thehouse.”
Wendy shivers against me, her face still buried in my neck, but her hands have stopped clawing at my chest. She’s listening. The shock is being replaced by the cold, hard instinct to run.
“The money’s in the bedroom,” I say, my voice dropping into that flat, tactical tone that keeps the panic at bay.
“Already got it,” Hook says, nodding toward the hallway where two of his men—shadows in charcoal gear—are already hauling the heavy duffels toward the back exit. “But we’ve got a problem. The SUV is compromised. We’re going to have to cut through the north woods on foot to get to the secondary extraction. It’s a three-mile hike through brush in the dark with a squad of hunters on our tails.”
He looks at Wendy, his gaze flickering with a rare moment of genuine doubt. “Can she walk? Or are you carrying her while they turn us into swiss cheese?”
I look down at her. Her eyes are open now, staring at the blood on her own hands. She isn’t the woman she was ten minutes ago. She isn’t the doll in the booth. She looks up at me, then at Hook, and the way she pushes herself off the floor makes my heart skip a beat.
“I can walk,” she says, her voice low and serrated. She reaches down and picks up her gun from the floor, her movements stiff but certain. She doesn’t wipe the blood off her face. “I can run. I’m not staying in this house one more second.”
