We make it to the stairs before the first explosion hits.
I don't hear it. Not at first. My body registers it before my brain does. A pressure wave that starts in my chest and pushes outward through my limbs, and then the sound catches up, so loud it stops being sound and becomes something physical, something that gets inside my teeth and my bones and shakes them—the floor tilts. My hand finds the banister and misses and finds Raven's arm instead. She's grabbing for me at the same time, and we collide with the wall, my shoulder blade hitting the plaster hard enough that pain flares white behind my eyes. Dust falls from somewhere above us. Fine and grey, settling on my skin, in my hair, coating my tongue with chalk.
Not three hours. Not even one.
He's already here.
The second explosion is closer. I feel the house move. The wall at my back shudders like something alive, and then the windows at the front of the corridor blow inward. All of them. At once. The glass doesn't just break. It lifts off the frames in a single sheet and then shatters midair, and for a fraction of a second, the pieces hang there, suspended, catching the hallway light like something thrown at a celebration. Then they come for us. I drag Raven down. My knees hit the floor, and I fold myself over her and the glass rains across my back, my arms, the exposed skin at the nape of my neck. Tiny biting stings, dozens of them, and then the larger pieces hit the tiles around us and shatter again into smaller fragments that skitter and spin across the floor.
Gunfire. Outside. Rapid bursts that overlap each other in patterns I can't separate. Return fire from Aidan's security, Ithink, but I can't be sure because my ears are ringing from the explosions and everything sounds like it's underwater.
"Move!" Someone is shouting from below. William or Aidan. "Get them out! Get them out now!"
Hands on my arms. One of the security team, a man I don't know, pulls me up from the floor. Another has Raven. They're steering us away from the front of the house, down the corridor toward the back staircase.
The lights go out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Aoife
EVERYTHING GOES DARK, and then emergency lighting kicks in along the baseboards, casting a dim orange glow that makes the corridor look like something from out of a nightmare. Smoke is drifting through the broken windows. Not thick yet, but present, carrying the chemical smell of whatever they hit us with.
"Keep moving. Don't stop." The security man's hand is firm on my back.
We reach the back staircase. Start down. Raven is ahead of me, her feet quick on the steps, her hand white-knuckled on the rail. I'm right behind her. The security men bracket us, one ahead and one behind, and I can see their guns drawn, held low and ready.
We hit the ground floor. The back of the house opens into a kitchen corridor that leads to a service entrance. The security man in front pushes through the door and checks left and right.
"Clear. To the cars. Go."
We step outside.
The night is on fire.
The front of Aidan's house is lit up in orange. One of the outbuildings is burning, flames climbing the stone walls and reaching for the roof. Across the grounds, figures are moving—dozens of them. Dark shapes against the firelight, advancing in groups through the hedges and across the garden I admired this morning.
Men on foot. More than I can count. They pour through the broken perimeter fence like water through a crack, spreading out across the property in a way that looks rehearsed. Coordinated.
The security man grabs my arm and pulls me toward the row of vehicles parked along the service road. We're halfway there when a shape detaches from the shadows to our left.
I don't see his face. Just the silhouette. A man. Big. Moving fast. Something raised in his hand.
The security man in front turns. Raises his weapon. Too slow.
The attacker is on us. He hits the security man with something heavy, and the sound is wet and final, and the man goes down. Raven screams. I grab her and pull her back, and the second security man is firing, but he's behind us, the angle is wrong, and the attacker is between us now, close enough that I can smell sweat and cordite on him.
He reaches for me.
His hand closes around my arm, and the grip is crushing, pulling me off balance, and I'm fighting, twisting, trying to tearfree, but he's so much bigger and so much stronger, and I can't get leverage on the gravel.
Then something moves behind him. Fast. Silent. A shape that seems to materialise from the dark, like it was always there, just waiting.
Matty.
He doesn't hesitate. Doesn't call out or announce himself or give a warning. His arm comes up in one fluid motion and the blade goes into the base of the man's skull with a sound that I will never be able to unhear. It's a crunch. Wet. Like stepping on something that shouldn't be stepped on. The blade punches through bone and the man's grip on my arm releases instantly. His body doesn't drop so much as shut down, every muscle going slack at once, his knees folding and his weight collapsing forward.
I stagger back.
