Gianna moved.
She drove the knife into his back, right under the ribs, all her weight behind it.
At first, he gasped. Then a scream escaped him.
The sound tore through the night.
His pistol arm jerked away from Roman’s wife on instinct, hand clawing for the wound. Blood soaked his shirt almost immediately.
Roman’s wife stumbled forward out of his grip, falling to her knees on the boards.
Gianna yanked the blade free and kicked the back of his knee at the same time.
He dropped.
He went down hard, one leg buckling, his weight slamming into the railing post. The gun flew out of his grip, skidding across the planks toward me.
I didn’t think.
I fired.
The first shot took him in the right shoulder. The second chewed through his thigh, high enough to ruin his chances of sprinting anywhere anytime soon.
He collapsed fully, spine hitting the boards.
Priest was already moving for the mother, med kit out. Valkyrie lunged forward to cover Gianna, her body interposing between the girl and the rest of the building.
Blackjack strode out onto the boards from the lobby, gun still trained on Vladimir.
Liberty swungoff her bike and came up from the other side.
Vladimir coughed. He stared up at Gianna, betrayal cutting deeper than the injuries.
“You—” he rasped. “You little—”
She stared down at him.
Her chest heaved like she’d been running. I knew it to be adrenaline.
Tears streaked her face, but there was an icy clarity under them that made the hair on my arms lift.
“After all my family has made you. I thought of you as an uncle. Congratulations, Vladimir. You rat.”
Anyone else hearing it would think it was just a furious, traumatized daughter casting blame on the man who’d held a gun to her mother.
I heard something else coiled in it.
Intention.
Narrative.
She’d just written his role for history.
He realized it too.
“You have… no idea… what you are doing,” he coughed, hand scrabbling weakly at the boards. “Tesauro… will… have… his… rev—”
Blackjack stepped in and slammed his boot down on Vlad’s wounded thigh.
