BANG!
Maya was out of bed before she knew she'd woken.
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
The shots came in bursts, loud and flat, like furniture being broken in a distant room. Glass shattered somewhere below. A man screamed, high and cut off. Then the villa's old wooden bones began to shudder, as if a giant hand were shaking it by the roof, and every light in the house died at once.
Darkness fell like a lid.
"Maya!" The connecting door between the two rooms burst open, and a small shape hurled itself across the floor and into her arms. "Ms. Maya, Ms. Maya, Ms. Maya—"
"I've got you. I've got you, Mark. Shh. I'm here."
She dropped to her knees on the carpet and wrapped herself around him. The boy was shaking so hard his teeth rattled. His pajamas were soaked through with cold sweat, and his heart drummed against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Outside, the chaos swelled.
Boots pounded down the corridors, and men shouted over each other in harsh, clipped voices. "East gate! They're through the east gate!" "How many?" "I can't see, I can't—" Something heavy exploded in the courtyard, a flat, thundering whump that rattled the iron ivy over the window, and for one white instant the room flared up in orange light. She saw the carpet, the dresser, the vase of lilies, her own shadow thrown huge against the wall, and Mark's pale face tilted up, mouth open.
Then dark again.
"Who is it?" Mark whispered. "Is it the bad people?"
"I don't know."
"Is it... is it Dad?"
Maya's lips parted. She did not answer.
It's Travis.
The certainty arrived without a sound, like a stone dropping into deep water. Only one man in the world would throw himself against a fortress like this at midnight. Only one man had the army, and the rage, and the reason.
He's come for his son.
And in the same breath, a second thought, colder and smaller: He doesn't know I'm in here. He doesn't know I exist.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Footsteps in the corridor.
They were not the running boots of the guards. They were slower, heavier, deliberate. One step at a time. A man walking through a house he did not fear.
Maya's whole body locked. She pulled Mark's face into her shoulder.
The steps stopped outside her door.
For three seconds, nothing. She could hear her own pulse hammering in her ears. She could smell gun smoke seeping under the doorframe, bitter and sharp, and under it something else, a coppery tang.
Then, from the far end of the corridor, a burst of automatic fire raked the paneling. A stray bullet struck the old lock with a bright metallic clang, and the footsteps broke into a run and thundered away. A thin sliver of grey light opened along the doorframe, and Maya understood, with a slow lurch of the heart, that the bolt had been shattered.
The door had come open an inch.
Run.
The word rose in her mind with a wholly unreasonable clarity.
She had never been so close to freedom in all the days she'd lived in this house. The corridor outside was dark and full of smoke, but at its far end there was a narrow servants' stair she had noticed on her first morning, a plain wooden stairway that descended to the kitchens, and beyond the kitchens a scullery door that opened on the walled vegetable garden. She had counted the steps and the corners the way a prisoner counts the cracks in the wall. Twenty-two paces to the stair. Forty down. A door. A garden. A broken wall at the back, half hidden under ivy, which the maids used when they sneaked out to meet their sweethearts on Sunday nights.
She could make it.
She could make it alone.
Mark's breath stirred against her neck. "Ms. Maya?"
Alone.
A bullet screamed past the window with a noise like tearing silk. Somewhere the old man's voice rose over the din, calm, commanding, impossibly steady: "Fall back to the cellars! Bring me the boy!"
Bring me the boy.
Maya went rigid.
The old man's men would come for Mark. That was an absolute certainty. If they arrived first, he would vanish into the bowels of this house with a dozen rifles around him, and Travis could burn the villa to its foundation and never find him. But if Travis's men arrived first...
If I take him, and we run for the stair, I may be killed. Or I may be seen, and the old man's men will chase us, and the child will be in the middle of the bullets. If I stay here, and they come for him, I am a bone between two dogs.
But if I go...
The thought was horrible and it was reasonable, and she hated it for being both.
If I go alone, they'll have no reason to search the house for me. Mark will be in the middle of his father's war, and whoever wins, he's the one thing both sides want alive. Nobody wants me alive.
Mark's small fingers closed around her wrist.
"Don't go," he whispered.
Maya froze. She had not spoken. She hadn't moved. How did he—
"You're thinking about going," the boy said, very softly, with that terrible, grave clarity that sometimes came into his voice. "I can feel it. You went all stiff, like Daddy does when he's about to leave."
Her eyes burned.
"Mark..."
"It's okay if you go." His voice wobbled. "Grandfather says people always leave. I won't be mad."
The footsteps were coming back.
She heard them now, a different set: lighter, quicker, fast and low and rapidly approaching along the burning corridor. A door slammed. Another. A voice, a man's voice, deep and cracked and strange, called something she could not make out. A name? Mark. Was it Mark?
Closer. Closer.
Maya had perhaps ten seconds.
Behind her, the dark closet stood against the wall, a tall oak wardrobe built for the long ballgowns of a lady who had died before Maya was born. Its doors were carved with dolphins. It had a deep floor, and a thick rack of coats, and, if she squeezed, room for two.
In front of her, through the open sliver, the corridor smoldered, and at its end, the narrow stair waited.
Her heart was pounding so hard she felt it in her teeth.
She had ten seconds. Whoever came through that door would be either a man who would take Mark back, or a man who would keep him from her forever, or a man who would put a bullet through them both without looking.
Or he might be Travis.
Or he might not.
