Page 138 of The Ashes of Summer

There's a woman standing beside him.

Dark hair. Mid-fifties, maybe. Her fingers are locked around his arm hard enough that her knuckles have gone white.

For a split-second, I think she's trying to stop him.

Then she shoves a fresh magazine into his hand.

She's helping him.

"Shoot!" she screams. "Vince, get them!"

Constance comes out of a doorway before I can react. One second the woman's standing beside him, and the next she's going backward by a fistful of hair, screaming, clawing at Constance's wrist, kicking, trying to throw herself back toward Vince.

Constance doesn't break stride.

Vince swings the weapon toward her and I fire, and the shot smashes into the wall beside his head.

He ducks behind a doorway and returns fire, plaster blowing out of the wall a foot from my shoulder. One of Black's men pushes forward to cover the corridor while the rest of us move up.

And the woman keeps screaming his name while Constance drags her along the floor. Desperate. Panicked. Like losing him is the worst thing that could happen to her tonight.

Something about it snags. There's a piece of this I'm not seeing.

Then Vince runs.

The coward launches himself out of cover and bolts for the staircase at the far end. One of Black's guys nearly gets a hand on him before he throws himself through the stairwell entrance, and by the time we reach the top he's already halfway down.

His eyes find mine.

Recognition. Then hatred.

Then something worse.

Because his gaze drops past us. Past the staircase. Down onto the warehouse floor, to where Summer's moving between the mattresses getting women toward the door.

My blood turns to ice, because I know that look. I've seen it across an interrogation table more times than I want to count.

It lands a fraction of a second before he raises the gun.

Not at us.

At her.

"SUMMER!"

The shout tears out of me. Below us women scream as he levels the weapon at the warehouse floor—at the woman he helped put in this building, at the woman he'd rather see dead on that concrete than walking out of here free.

Everything slows down.

I can't get a clean shot. Neither can Black. One wrong round and it goes straight through him into her.

Then the woman in Constance's grip starts screaming again. Not at us this time.

At him.

"No! Vince!"

And he hesitates. Only a second. Only long enough to glance back over his shoulder.