The distance from the doorway to the bed was eight feet. I covered it in three steps that were silent and fast and driven by something that went past training into the territory of instinct—the deep, wordless imperative of a body that had identified a threat to something it considered its own.
I didn't question the word. There wasn't time.
My left hand caught the back of his jacket collar. My right shoved the Beretta into its holster in a single motion because a gun in a grapple was a liability, not an asset—too many angles, too many things that could go wrong when two bodies were tangled and the muzzle didn't know the difference between target and bystander.
I drove him sideways off the bed and into the wall.
His shoulder hit the plaster first, then his head, and the wall gave a satisfying crack where the drywall cratered under the force. He was good—I felt it immediately, the way his body absorbed the impact and redirected, his legs bracing, his center of gravity dropping, the automatic response of someone who'd been thrown before and knew how to turn a collision into a recovery.
He got an arm free. Swung. Caught me in the jaw—a short hook, no windup, technically clean. My head snapped right. Stars. The taste of copper. My vision blurred and I drove through it the way I drove through everything, which was forward, always forward, because backward was where people died.
My knee went into his solar plexus. The air left him in a single hard rush and his body folded around the impact. Before he could straighten I brought my elbow down across his jaw—the full weight of my arm and shoulder behind it, the kind of strike that ended conversations permanently. His head turned with the force. His eyes went blank. He dropped.
His skull hit the hardwood with a sound like a book falling off a shelf, and he went slack.
I stood over him. Breathing hard. My jaw throbbed where he'd hit me. My side—the wound, always the wound—had its own dispatch: hot, wet, the familiar warmth of stitches that had beentested and were filing their complaint. My hands shook. Not with fear. With the excess. The surplus of force that hadn't found a target, still circling in my bloodstream like a current with nowhere to go.
The man was unconscious. His chest moved. Alive. For now.
I turned to the bed.
Empty.
The sheets were thrown back. Midge was gone.
Footsteps. Fast, light, already at the bottom of the stairs—the particular rhythm of someone moving with purpose and without hesitation, someone who knew the layout, who'd mapped the exits, who'd been waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity since the moment I locked her in. While I was busy driving a man into a wall, she'd grabbed her dog and run.
Smart. It was smart. I'd have done the same.
I moved.
Down the hall.
Down the stairs.
Through the door. Into the yard.
She was twenty feet ahead of me.
Running. Not jogging, not fleeing in the scattered, panicked way that people run when they don't know where they're going—running with intention, with the long, ground-eating stride of someone who'd done a lot of running in her life and had gotten efficient about it. Her boots hit the frozen ground and her arms pumped and her body moved with a focus that was almost beautiful in its desperation. Midge was inside her jacket, the small shape of the dog visible as a bulge against her chest, tucked there with the practiced precision of a woman who'd been carrying her animal like armor for so long the geometry was automatic.
"Stop."
My voice came out harder than I intended. She didn't slow down. Didn't turn her head. Didn't give me the courtesy of acknowledging that she'd heard me, though she must have, because I'd practically shouted it and the yard was silent except for our footsteps and my blood in my ears.
I closed the distance.
She was fast. I was faster.
Five feet from the wall she feinted left.
Good instinct. Bad execution. The feint was clean—a sharp lateral cut that would have worked on someone slower, someone whose eyes were tracking her body rather than her weight. But I was watching her center of gravity, the way you watched a fighter's hips in the ring, and when her weight didn't shift with the feint I knew the real move was right, and I cut right before she did.
I caught her around the waist. Both arms. Full contact, my chest against her back, my forearms crossing over her midsection, and I pulled—not a tackle, not a slam, but a gathering, the way you gathered something you didn't want to break. She came off her feet for a half-second, her boots leaving the ground, and then I set her down and held on.
She fought.
Elbows. Both of them, driving backward into my ribs—and she found the wound again, because of course she did, because this woman had a targeting instinct that belonged on a battlefield. The pain detonated and my arms loosened and she used the gap to twist, her heel coming down hard on my instep, her skull snapping backward toward my nose. I turned my head just enough to take the hit on my cheekbone instead—a burst of white behind my eyes, my teeth clicking togethe—and I tightened my grip and held.