Chapter 15 — The Ambush
1191 Words
The white ball sat in the black slot.
Varek's hands drove into the back of my chair so hard the wood splintered. Not looking at the sealed doors. Not looking at the men with rifles moving around the edges of the room.
Still staring at the snake on my glass.
Across the table the burned man let his hand drop below the felt very slowly.
The whole room went quiet.
Not the nice kind. The kind that had weight to it. The kind felt in your back teeth.
Varek moved.
Not for his gun. Grabbed the back of my jacket and ripped me out of the chair and drove me down to the floor just as the room came completely apart.
No warning. No countdown. Just silence and then everything at once.
The lights above didn't just break. They Exploded. Glass came down like rain. The warm golden room is gone and in its place smoke and noise and the strobing muzzle flash of guns going off from every direction.
Varek dragged me by my collar behind the big brass base of the roulette table. Bullets hit the wood above and hot splinters came down on my face and hands.
The men in gray... the ones who were supposed to be neutral... were down in seconds. Not slowly. All at once. Syris's people came through the service doors at the back and moved across the room in a line, firing as they went, not caring what was in the way.
Ears covered. Mouth open. The noise was so big it stopped being sound and became something physical. Something that pushed against the chest from the inside.
A body hit the floor next to me.
The woman with the gold toothpick. I looked away fast. Pressed flat. Breathed through the nose and counted. One. Two. Three. Something to hold onto and numbers were what there was.
"Look at me."
Varek's voice. Low and right next to my ear.
Pressed beside me against the brass base. Not untouched. A bullet had opened his coat along his upper arm and dark red was coming through his shirt. Breathing in hard sharp pulls. Looking at me the way he always looked when checking... fast, moving over my face and hands and sides looking for something wrong.
A fresh magazine pushed into his gun while he looked.
"Stay flat," he said. "Count three after I move."
Didn't stand up. Rolled out from behind the base and stayed low and moved through the smoke using the tables and the bodies and the chaos of people running as cover. Fast. No wasted movement. Like the room was a problem being solved as he went.
Watching him through the smoke.
A version of him had been built in my head without meaning to. The man who couldn't be touched. The man the violence bent around. What was happening now was something less than that and more frightening. Not untouchable. Just faster and colder than everything trying to stop him. Two quiet shots into a man on the upper level without breaking stride. When a man came with a shotgun he didn't step back... went forward, grabbed the barrel, pointed it at the ceiling, drove his elbow into the man's throat.
Not untouchable.
Just Never Stopping.
And the thing about that... the thing I hadn't understood until I was crouching behind a brass roulette base in a burning room watching it happen... was that never stopping wasn't the same as never breaking. It just meant that whatever broke in him kept moving anyway. That was somehow worse to watch than if he'd been untouchable. Because it meant he was doing this the hard way. The human way. And still winning.
Past the woman on the floor.
A rifle. Lying in a puddle of dark red next to a man in gray who wasn't moving. Bolt closed. Hands moving before the decision finished.
One more look at the room.
Varek was pinned. Three men at the bar were firing at the table he was behind. Working the problem... visible in the way he moved... but the fourth one hadn't been seen.
The fourth man was moving along the wall. Slow and patient. Not looking at the crossfire. Looking at Varek's back. Rifled up, taking his time, the red dot from it settled between Varek's shoulder blades and out from behind the brass base before the thought finished.
Hit the wet floor on hands and knees and grabbed the rifle. Heavy and slick. No time to stand and no cover. Stayed on both knees and drove the back of it hard into the armpit to hold it and switched to single shots.
The fourth man heard the boots on the floor.
My head came around.
His finger moved.
Mine moved first.
Loud. Much louder than Varek's. The kick punched hard into the collarbone and held on and kept eyes open and fired three times as fast as the trigger could pull.
The first two hit his chest and threw him back. The third went where the momentum took him.
Over a table and taking everything on it with him.
Bolt locked open. Empty.
Smoke hung in the air.
Varek spun around.
The last two men at the bar were already down. A look at me kneeling on the floor with the smoking rifle. A look at the man draped over the table.
A look at the shots.
Where they had gone. How fast. The pattern of them.
The gun lowered slowly.
The fury on his face didn't go anywhere. But something changed in it. Shifted. Like a door opening in a wall you thought was solid all the way through.
Not looking at a problem anymore.
Not looking at a liability.
No word for how he was looking at me.
No word on his side either. Visible in his face. Still finding it. The two of us in the smoke and the broken glass, both holding weapons, both breathing hard, and something passing between us that hadn't existed an hour ago and had no name yet and wasn't going to get one in this room.
Some things arrived before the language for them did.
This was one of those things.
Holding the empty rifle and looking back at him through the smoke and the broken glass and the slow spinning of a roulette wheel that hadn't stopped yet.
Nobody moved.
Then his hand came out.
"Up," he said.
I took it.
Pulled to both feet and the hand didn't let go straight away. Stayed around mine for a second. Warm and solid and still faintly shaking in a way he probably didn't know about.
Then gone. Turned toward the exit.
"With me," he said.
Through the smoke behind him.
The roulette wheel made one last slow turn and stopped.
Outside the cold hit like a wall. Rain on hot skin. The alley was dark and empty and the sounds from inside the Vault were already muffled and distant like something happening to someone else in another life.
Keep walking.
The hand that had held mine was still warm.
Filed it. Kept moving.
- Writer
