His answer is clipped and operational, clearly already on top of the situation:
“There’s a sniper, northwest rooftop. It’s thirty seconds to Dmitri’s vehicle in the alley.”
I grab a shirt and shorts, barely managing to shove my limbs through the appropriate holes by the time I get to the bedroom doorway.
Harper’s wearing a robe, crouched in the opposite hallway entrance across the dark living room. She’s got a scared-looking Bruiser pressed against her chest with an arm around his shoulders.
She’s barefoot and her wet hair is plastered to her face. She looks at me across the expanse of the living room and I think: she’s known he was my son for days and didn’t tell me. She was locked in a closet for most of that. Fuck. I shake the thought out of my head and whisper across the space what Isaak told me over the phone.
“Which way is the alley?” she hisses back.
But before I can answer, another round of gunshots has us all flinching back into our respective hallways.
I count without meaning to. One, two, three, four. The tiles on the kitchen floor. One, two, three, four. The seconds between shots. One, two?—
It doesn’t hold. The pattern keeps slipping, numbers scattering before I can pin them down. My brain is running two programs at once and they’re incompatible. I can feel it the way I used to feel it at eighteen when Mom got sick again and I was trying to hold everything together with arithmetic and rules—that specific grinding sensation of a mind that has hit the limit of what control can actually accomplish.
“When I say run,” I tell Harper, and my voice comes out steady, which surprises me. “Go straight through the back door and to the left. Don’t stop. Dmitri’s in the alley.”
She nods once. Sharp. She doesn’t waste a single movement when the stakes are this high. I’ve noticed the way all her softness goes somewhere interior when she needs to move fast.
Nine years,something in my head says while the rest of me is calculating angles.She’s been doing thisalonefor nine years.
“NOW.”
It’s six strides across the living room. I reach them at their hallway and scoop Bruiser out of Harper’s arms in one motion because I have to do something with my hands and because he is—He is?—
He’s sosmall.
I knew that intellectually. I’ve watched him all day.
But holding him is different. The actual weight of him and how his arms go around my neck without thinking, like something in him has already decided I’m safe to hold on—the animal reality of this small person clinging to me in the dark while someone is trying to kill us?—
One, two, three, four, fi?—
The numbers keep scattering. But my feet are moving, so fuck it. I sprint toward the back of the house while shots explode behind us.
Harper shoves the back door open. Apparently Dmitri gave up on waiting in the alley, because the Hummer is crashing through the backyard fence, pulling up in front of the door right as more gunshots ring out against the huge car’s frame.
I pull the front and back passenger doors open, setting Bruiser down in the back as Dimitri shifts the big car into park.
“I don’t know how they found you, but they sent half the fucking MC,” Dimitri shouts. “I’m gonna stay back to draw fire. Go, go!”
He army crawls out of the front seat and Harper’s immediately leaping up to take his place as he starts firing rounds back into the darkness.
Harper lands in the driver’s seat without missing a beat, looking over her shoulder to get eyes on her son. She was born for chaos. It’s not just ten years with Z that made her like this—she was the same on the first day I met her. She’s always been someone who can assess a situation at velocity.
“Get in!” she shouts.
I fold myself into the back seat with my son against my chest.
My son, holy shit.
Dmitri fires back down toward the alley. Harper stomps the gas pedal before his second burst, and we lurch forward across the back lawn, bursting through the back fence and onto a little suburban road in an explosion of purple sage bushes on the other side.
I keep my arm around Bruiser as Harper guns the engine. Three motorcycles appear at the far end of the street.
“Get him down,” Harper says.