Page 61

She spent every one of those four minutes deciding, silently, viciously, that she wasn’t going to make this easy for a single one of them, dragged along a corridor she couldn’t see through canvas and adrenaline. She tracked exits she couldn’t see, counted footsteps, memorized the ache in her forearm like it was data instead of pain, because data was useful and pain, unmanaged, wasn’t. Four minutes. People have survived worse in far less time. Stay furious. Furious is doing more work than frightened right now, and frightened wasn’t about to start now either.

She counted the turns they took — left, then right, then a longer stretch that read like the service corridor running parallel to the atrium, which meant she was still somewhere in the building, which meant somebody was still coming, because somebody always came, because that was the arrangement now whether she’d formally agreed to it or not.

She tracked the number of hands on her — two, maybe three, moving fast but not panicked, professionals following a plan that had clearly accounted for resistance and simply hadn’t accounted for enough of it.

They stopped moving. A hand fisted in her hair through the hood, wrenching her head back, and she heard a voice close to her ear — low, irritated, the voice of a man whose plan had gone far worse than promised.

“She keeps fighting, cut her again. Somewhere she’ll feel it longer this time.”

A spike of real fear finally cracked through the fury, distant and cold underneath it.

Come on. Any time now would be excellent.

Cold steel found her throat through the hood’s thin fabric, testing, and she went utterly still, every instinct screaming at her not to swallow.

Then the world exploded.

The hands holding her disappeared at the same time, the blade gone from her throat before she’d processed anything but the sudden absence of it, replaced by the violence of a body meeting a wall at a speed that had nothing human left in it. The hood came off half a second later, yanked away by someone who clearly had no patience left for the fabric between them.

Norden had seen the blade. She understood that immediately, in the half-second before he moved again — he’d come through that door in time to watch a man press a knife to her throat, and every scrap of composure eight hundred years had built into him stopped existing the moment he saw it.

He was past her, already on the last two men, and it was over before she’d finished blinking.

He moved nothing like she’d seen before — not the contained precision of a man conserving effort, but faster, harder, uninterested in restraint of any kind. He took the knife from the first man’s hand and used it on nothing, simply crushed the wrist that had held it until the man screamed and the blade clattered uselessly against the concrete. One man hit the corridor wall hard enough to crack the drywall behind him, sliding down it boneless, done for the night. The other didn’t get the chance to hit anything; Norden had him in the throat before he’d finished turning around, lifted clean off his feet, any last words dying before they started. Blood — the man’s, from a split lip or worse — spattered across the wall in a line that told her how hard the impact had been.

The next several seconds happened too fast for her to track clearly, only the aftermath sinking in — two bodies on the ground, silence, Norden standing over them, breathing like a man who’d run much farther than the ten feet of corridor required, hands still curled like he hadn’t decided yet whether he was finished.

Somewhere behind him, farther down the hall, she could hear Victor’s team clearing the stairwell — professional, coordinated, and far too late to have mattered. Four minutes had been long enough for the entire question to resolve itself without their help, a fact that landed somewhere between comforting and mildly insulting, and she honestly couldn’t decide which side it fell on.

He turned. He saw the blood soaking through her sleeve, saw the thin fresh line at her throat where the blade had rested, and his face stopped being remotely human for a handful of seconds — ancient and unguarded all at once, a man watching, one second too late, exactly what he’d almost failed to prevent.

She was watching him when it happened. She understood, in that instant, exactly how much bigger the thing underneath the composed executive was, and how close it had come to being unleashed on this corridor in its entirety instead of the contained version she’d witnessed.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m fine and bleeding, those aren’t mutually exclu⁠—”

“They are a good deal closer to mutually exclusive than you’re currently willing to admit.”

He tore his shirt cuff into a field bandage before she finished the sentence, kneeling in front of her on a corridor floor still settling with drywall dust, hands moving with a precision that had nothing shaking left in it despite everything underneath clearly still catching up. He wrapped her forearm tightly, checked the pressure, checked it again, and didn’t stop checking the rest of her even after the bandage held.

“I had⁠—”

“I know.”

“Stop saying⁠—”

“You fought four professionals and you’re still arguing with me right now.” His attention stayed fixed on her hands, on the pulse he was tracking at her wrist like it might change its mind without warning. “I know exactly what you had.”

She stopped arguing. He kept checking — her shoulders, her collarbone, the side of her face where a hand had grabbed too hard — methodical, thorough, none of it performed. She let him, because for once, the checking wasn’t about his control. It was about the fear that had cracked open the second he’d seen blood on her sleeve and hadn’t finished settling yet, and she’d finally learned to tell the difference between the two.

“You went full corridor-demolition back there, you realize, in a way I’ve truly never seen from you before, not once, in six weeks of watching you be careful about absolutely everything.”

“I did.”

“Remind me never to make you angry.”