Another shot from the far end. I felt it whip the air near my cheek and slammed flatter against the wall.
The woman fired again, aiming lower this time. The man jerked, shouted, stumbled. His gun skittered for a second like he was losing his grip, then he clutched it again and lunged for the intersecting corridor.
“Coward!” she shouted.
She took two more quick steps and fired a parting shot. The bullet caught him somewhere in the side or hip. He barked in pain, then vanished around the corner. A second later the ding of an elevator drifted down the hall, or maybe it was the crash bar of the stairwell door. Hard to tell through the adrenaline buzz.
Silence dropped like a curtain, broken only by the alarm and distant chaos on other floors.
I pushed myself up to one knee.
“That who I think it was?” I asked, breathing hard.
She spared me a brief, irritated glance. “If you think that was a very bad man with a very real gun, then yeah,” she said. “Congratulations. You’re not completely stupid.”
Her eyes flicked to my shredded phone on the floor, then to the backpack strap over my shoulder. She noticed everything. Fast.
Heavy footsteps pounded at the far end of the hall. Not the smooth measured ones of our shooter. Closer to a jog. Security or a cop, I didn’t know which.
The speakers repeated their mantra. Code Silver. Lockdown.
The woman swore quietly.
“We have to move,” she said.
“I’m not leaving him,” I said, jerking my chin toward Miami.
She closed the distance between usin three strides and grabbed a fistful of my cut at the chest, hauling me up enough that we were eye to eye. For someone her size, she was strong as fuck.
“You leave him or you both end up dead,” she said, low and fierce. “Those shots weren’t for practice. That was a clean-up. They’ll send another if this one bled out in the stairwell. You want to keep him alive, you bring the fire away from his door.”
Her breath smelled of winterfresh and a cleanliness that only arctic air could achieve. Her scent, that of jasmine, vanilla, and a lingering aroma of leather and motor oil hung like a noose around my senses.Fuck. It was poetic, pragmatic, and intentional. Her pupils were blown wide with adrenaline, but her hands didn’t tremble.
“What about security?” I asked. “Cops? We’re on the cameras.”
“Security will ask the wrong questions and file the wrong reports,” she said. “Cops will take one look at your patch and make you the problem. We don’t have time to babysit their learning curve.”
She released my cut long enough to yank the door the rest of the way shut. The little window offered no clear view of Miami’s bed now. Just white.
“He won’t be alone,” she said, softer. “We have a girl on the inside here. We’ll make the call. She’ll keep an eye on him until we can get someone on him full time. She’ll scream bloody murder if anyone so much as looks at his chart funny. As for the cameras, we’ll get someone on that to wipe them. We have someone inthe station.”
“You do?” I asked.
“We take care of our own,” she said. “And right now, like it or not, your dumb ass and your half-dead friend in there are under our umbrella while you stand in my hospital.”
Another set of steps joined the first, closer now. Radios crackled. Someone shouted “Fourth floor?” from the stairwell.
She grabbed my wrist and tugged. “Move.Now.”
We cut away from the main elevators and into a narrower side corridor. She clearly knew the layout. I followed, the backpack bumping between my shoulders, every nerve screaming not to turn my back on the direction the shooter had gone.
We slipped through a fire door into a stairwell. It smelled like dust and metal and institutional paint. She took the steps two at a time, boots sure on the concrete.
“So, Jersey Boy,” she said without looking back. “That’s your name according to the patch on your cut.”
I nodded, then realized she couldn’t have seen that. “Yes,” I confirmed. “What’s yours?” I asked, realizing I never took a second to even glance at hers.
“Valkyrie,” she said.
