I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathing slow, and I feel the exact moment she falls asleep because her grip goes soft but doesn't let go entirely, her fingers still loosely wound through mine like she knows where I am, even in sleep.
I don't sleep for a long time.
I just lie there in the dark and hold her hand and try not to think about how easy this feels, how wrong it is that it feels this easy, how much trouble I'm in.
The silence wakes me.
Not a sound. The absence of one. The cabin had been making its usual noises all night and then it simply stopped, and that cessation is what pulls me out of sleep like a hand around my collar, sharp and immediate.
I'm on my feet before I'm fully conscious, the gun already in my hand, moving to the door with the automatic muscle memory of a man who has been woken by danger enough times that his body handles the first ten seconds without him.
I ease the bedroom door open an inch.
The hallway is dark and still.
I slip through and move toward the stairs, keeping to the wall, and that's when I hear it below me, the specific quiet of someone trying very hard to make no sound. Almost succeeding.
Almost.
I take the stairs fast and low, keeping to the edges where the wood doesn't creak, and I hit the bottom and sweep left—clear—sweep right?—
The first man comes from the kitchen doorway.
Fast and trained. He goes for my gun hand first, clamping around my wrist and driving it down and sideways, trying to force the barrel toward the floor. I let him because I'm already moving in the opposite direction, turning my whole body into the grab, my elbow finding his jaw in the same motion with everything behind it.
He drops.
The second man comes from behind the couch.
Bigger. Broader. He doesn't go for the gun, he just drives straight into me with his full body weight and we hit the bookshelf hard enough that the whole wall shakes and books rain down around us. I lose the gun in the impact, hear it skitter across the hardwood somewhere to my left.
His hands find my throat.
I bring both arms up inside his grip and break it outward, then drive my forehead into his nose. The sound it makes is immediate and wet and he staggers back with blood streaming down his face and I follow him, putting three hard strikes into his ribs before he can reset, feeling things give under my hands.
He swings and catches my cheekbone.
The room tilts hard.
I hit the wall and stay upright through nothing but stubbornness and the third man is already on me, the one who came through the front door while I was dealing with the other two, the one I missed on the perimeter sweep, and he has a knife and he knows how to use it.
He keeps it close and controlled, not swinging wide, working short precise thrusts that I have to move my entire body to stay out of. I catch his knife arm on the third thrust, rotate his wrist hard, force the blade away from my body, and use the leverage to drive him sideways into the coffee table. He goes down hard and the table goes with him.
The first man is back up.
He gets his arm across my throat from behind and his other hand on the back of my head to increase the choke, and I grab his head with both hands and pull forward and drop my whole weight down, bending fast at the waist, and he goes over my back and into the floor and stays there.
The big man swings a lamp.
It catches me across the shoulder and I go down on one knee and my vision goes white and I stay there one second too longbecause the third man is back with his knife and the big man is raising the lamp again and have no good options left.
The vase comes from the stairs.
I don't see it. I only hear it. The tremendous crack of ceramic connecting with the back of the third man's skull and he drops like something vital was simply switched off, the knife skittering away across the hardwood.
Isabella is at the bottom of the stairs with her chest heaving and her hands still raised from the throw.
The big man turns toward her.
