AVERY’S POV
They came in twenty three minutes, not twenty.
And there were seven of them, not six.
The ground floor door went first and I was already moving.
“Positionsㅡ now!”
I grabbed Nadia’s arm and pulled her toward Derek, my voice dropping low.
“Upstairs. Both of you, right now. You don’t come down, you don’t make noise, you don’t move no matter what you hear. Yes?”
Nadia looked at me, hesitating, her wide eyes filled with fear.
“Nadia.” I hissed.
“Okay,” she nodded, her voice a slight squeak.
“Derek ㅡ”
“I heard you.” He already had her hand.
They went up the stairs and I turned back to the room.
Joel was at the stairwell door with the pipe in his hands.
Hannah was at the window, crowbar up, her breathing fast.
Declan was looking at the east window with an expression I didn’t like.
“How many on the fire escape?” I asked.
“Three.”
I looked at the east window and my stomach dropped.
I hadn’t fully covered it and he knew that and that was why he was telling me.
“Take it,” I said.
He moved instantly, just as the front door came in a second later.
The first one through had a rifle already raised and he swept the room fast and I had one second so I used it.
“Wait ㅡ” I stepped forward with my hands up.
“We don’t want trouble. We don’t have anything worth ㅡ”
The man with a buzz cut raised his gun and fired.
The shot punched through the wall two inches from my head and the sound of it inside the room was enormous and my ears rang immediately and that was the end of negotiating.
Oh fuck.
I got the gun up and fired back and he went sideways, clipping the doorframe, and then two more were through.
Hannah swung from the left and caught the nearest one hard across the shoulder and he hit the wall as she kept swinging.
“Gun ㅡ down ㅡ” Declan shouted from across the room.
I was already dropping, the shot going over my head, and I came back up and got behind the overturned table.
Oh shit.
After everything I had gone through, I was not going to die today!
The man with the rifle was back up.
Of course he was.
“Stay down!” someone shouted at me from across the room and I had no idea who and it didn’t matter because I was already moving.
I fired again and this time he went down properly and I barely had a second to breathe before something hit me from behind and I went into the edge of the table hard, the corner catching me across the ribs, and every bit of air left my body at once. Visit NovelPing for the full chapter.
I couldn’t breathe.
I just ㅡ couldn’t.
I was on my hands and knees on the floor trying to remember how to do the most basic thing while boots moved around me and someone was shouting and from the stairwell came a sound that didn’t stop ㅡ this horrible repeated sound ㅡ and after a moment I realised it was Joel.
Just Joel doing something with that pipe that I was very glad I couldn’t see clearly from the floor.
If I did — if I saw the entirety of what we’d been forced to become, I wouldn’t be able to hold it together.
I got up.
The man who hit me came back.
With a grunt, he drove me forward with a shove and we went into the wall together.
At some point his knife came out and caught my arm and I made a sound I didn’t mean to make, and my whole left arm went hot with pain and I switched the gun to my right hand without thinking, firing almost blindly.
“How many left?” I called out, my voice a shriek.
“Two on me!” Hannah’s voice, strained.
“Three down on the stairs!” Joel called back.
“Avery ㅡ left!” Declan.
I turned and fired as the man coming at me from the left stumbled back into the shelf unit and went down with it and the crash was so loud in the small room that Nadia probably heard it from the floor above and my ears were ringing so badly I could barely hear anything else.
Outside, something answered the noise.
That low shuffling sound.
Multiple sets of footsteps coming from the street.
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
“We’re drawing the Fractured in!” I shouted.
“I know!” Declan shouted back.
I dealt with the man in front of me and looked up to find Declan across the room with blood running down the side of his face from somewhere, moving toward the last two standing.
I moved too and we almost collided in the middle of the room.
I pulled up short, he went left and we went around each other without a word.
The second to last one looked between us and ran straight back out the front door, footsteps hammering down the stairs and gone.
The last one standing was young.
Younger than me, maybe.
He looked at his group on the floor and then at me and then at Declan, then he dropped his weapon and put his hands up and I noticed his hands were shaking badly.
I stood there breathing hard, my arm bleeding down into my palm, my ribs screaming, the shuffling outside getting louder and closer and meaning we had maybe three minutes before this problem became two problems.
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I said, “Go.”
He blinked.
“What?”
“Go. Right now. North, don’t stop, don’t come back.” Get faster updates on novelping.com.
He went and grabbed the one conscious man off the floor and they went, fast, out the front.
Declan looked at me.
“That was a mistake.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“They’ll regroup.”
“Not tonight.” I turned to face him properly.
“They’re heading north. So is everything outside that heard us. We just bought ourselves a window so don’t tell me it was a mistake.”
He held my gaze for a second and said nothing.
I looked away first.
“Joel.” I called toward the stairwell.
“Here.” He appeared in the doorway and I looked at him, checking for serious injuries.
“Hannah ㅡ”
“Here.” She came out with a cut above her eyebrow bleeding into her eyelashes, either not noticing or not caring.
The shuffling outside was close now.
Very close.
“Two minutes,” I said.
“Grab everything, anything useful off the floor, we go out the back and we go quiet.” I turned to the stairs.
“Derek, bring Nadia down, we’re ㅡ”
I stopped as I noticed Derek was at the bottom of the stairs.
He was just ㅡ standing there.
He wasn’t supposed to be standing there.
I had been very clear about not standing there.
He had a rifle in both hands ㅡ one of theirs, taken from one of the men on the floor ㅡ and at his feet was a body that hadn’t been there when the fight started.
And his hands were shaking enough that I could see it from across the room.
He was looking at me with an expression I recognised immediately ㅡ he needed me to tell him it was necessary.
That was all he needed.
Just say the word and mean it.
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I looked at the body.
Something in his face in that second before I spoke ㅡ something that wasn’t only relief and wasn’t only horror ㅡ settled in my chest in a way I didn’t have time to look at right now.
“Put it down,” I said quietly, “and go back up and get Nadia.”
He set the rifle against the wall and went back up the stairs without a word.
The room went quiet except for the sound outside getting closer.
I looked at the rifle leaning against the wall and I looked at the door.
“Move,” I said.
“Now.”