EVENT SUMMARY & YOUR CHOICE:
At the end of Chapter 32, gunfire erupted around the old man's villa in the middle of the night. A stray bullet loosened the lock on Maya's door, and she had mere seconds to decide between escaping alone through the servants' stairwell, or hiding with Mark and waiting to see who came through the door.
You chose [BRANCH 2]: Pull Mark into the wardrobe, hide with him, and wait for the footsteps to reach the door.
Maya did not stand up to run.
She sat there on the carpet, with the whole house roaring around her, and looked down at the small shaking boy in her lap, and knew that she was not going anywhere without him.
It was not a decision. It was simply the truth, arriving all at once and perfectly clear, the way the answer to a sum arrives after you have stopped trying to work it out.
"Mark, listen." She scooped him up, one arm under his knees, and he wrapped his legs around her waist. "We're going to play a game. The quietest game in the world. Whoever makes a sound loses. Okay?"
His face was a pale smudge in the dark. "Okay."
She reached the wardrobe in four strides.
It was built for a lady's gowns, as big as a small room, with carved dolphin doors that groaned when she dragged them open. Inside, the air smelled of cedar and mothballs. A rack of long coats hung from a brass rail. Maya pushed through them, pulling Mark behind her, and crouched in the back corner against the wood, where the shadows were thickest.
She eased the doors shut.
The latch caught with the faintest click.
Darkness closed over them like water.
Maya folded Mark into her lap and wrapped both arms around him, her chin resting on top of his head. She pressed one hand over his mouth, very lightly, the way you cover a candle flame, and put her lips to his ear.
"Breathe through your nose. Slow. In... and out. That's perfect. You're doing so well."
His chest rose against her forearm. Fell. Rose.
One star, she thought. Two.
BANG!
The house shook. A shower of plaster pattered down on the roof of the wardrobe. Mark flinched, a hard, full-body shudder, and Maya tightened her arms around him and rocked, very slightly, side to side, the way she used to rock the smallest children at nap time.
Outside, the world was ending.
Glass broke. Men shouted. Boots pounded, close then far then close again, and between the bursts of gunfire she heard strange small domestic sounds, a cup rolling across a floor, a door banging in the wind, the long creak of a beam giving way somewhere above. The smell of smoke grew stronger. It seeped through the keyhole and the cracks between the doors, thin and bitter, and Mark began to cough, a small dry cough that he swallowed into her palm.
"I know," she breathed. "I know, sweetheart. Almost done."
She did not know how long they stayed like that. Ten minutes. Thirty. Time had been smashed into pieces, and each piece was an eternity.
Then the gunfire stopped.
The silence that fell was far worse.
Thud.
A footstep, right outside the bedroom door.
Maya stopped breathing.
Thud. Thud.
The door, the half-open door with its broken lock, swung wide with a long wooden groan. Light flickered through the dolphin carvings: the wavering orange of a burning curtain somewhere, laying bars of fire across the inside of the wardrobe. A shadow stretched across the floor.
Someone had entered the room.
Maya sank her teeth into her lower lip.
The footsteps crossed the carpet slowly, heavily, like a man walking under water. Something scraped. A chair was shoved aside. A drawer pulled out and flung down. The bed creaked as the mattress was lifted and dropped. A man's breathing, hoarse and ragged, filled the room.
He's searching.
He's looking for us.
Please. Please. Please.
The footsteps halted. She could feel him standing, a tall, dark shape on the other side of a few inches of old oak. She could hear him breathing. She could smell blood.
"Mark."
The voice was low, torn, and wrecked.
"Mark. Son. Are you in here?"
Mark went rigid in her arms.
Maya's heart stopped, and then it started again so violently that it hurt.
I know that voice.
"Mark," the man whispered, and the sound was a naked, pleading thing, the voice of someone who has run through a burning house and does not know what he will find at the end of it. "Please. It's Dad. It's Dad, buddy. Say something. Anything."
She felt Mark's lips move against her palm. She slid her hand away.
"Dad?" The word was a breath.
The dolphin doors flew open.
The light was blinding, orange and flickering. Maya threw up an arm to shield her eyes, and when she lowered it, a tall figure was kneeling in the opening with a pistol hanging forgotten at his side.
His white shirt was soaked through with something dark. There was a cut above his brow, and soot streaked his cheek, and one sleeve had been torn from the shoulder. His ash-grey eyes were wild and bloodshot and wet. He looked like a man who had been dragged through hell by the hair.
He looked at his son.
The pistol fell from his hand.
"Mark."
"DADDY!"
Mark tore out of her arms and hurled himself at his father, and the big man caught him, caught him so hard that Maya heard the breath go out of him. He crushed the child against his chest. His shoulders shook. He buried his face in the little boy's hair, and a sound came out of him that she'd never heard from any grown man, not a sob, not a word, just a long raw tearing of air.
"I've got you. I've got you. I've got you."
His hands were trembling. Maya watched the huge, scarred, bloody hands pat Mark's hair, his back, his arms, checking him all over, the way you check a precious thing that you cannot believe has survived. "Are you hurt? Did anyone hurt you? Are you hurt anywhere?"
"No, Daddy. Ms. Maya hid me. We played the quiet game. I didn't lose."
Travis lifted his head.
For the first time since he had entered the room, his eyes found her.
She was still crouched in the wardrobe, her nightgown torn, her hair a wild tangle, her lip bleeding where she had bitten it. He looked at her for what seemed a very long time. She saw something move across his face, so fast she almost missed it: a flash of disbelief, then a wave of something so deep that it seemed to take his breath away.
He reached out one hand.
She took it.
His fingers closed around hers, and they were shaking. The hand of the man who had just walked through a hail of bullets for his child, who had stormed a fortress with an army at his back, was trembling in hers like a leaf.
"You stayed," Travis said hoarsely.
"I couldn't leave him."
"No." The corner of his mouth moved. "No, I don't suppose you could."
He pulled her to her feet, and with a motion that seemed to cost him everything, he wrapped his free arm around both of them, mother and child, teacher and student, and held them against his chest, as though he were afraid the world would take them back.
…
The corridor was a battlefield.
Travis walked ahead with Mark on his arm and a hand clamped around Maya's wrist, never letting go, never once. His men fell in around them: tall men in black with rifles slung, grim and silent. Their faces were streaked with smoke. One of them, a broad-shouldered fellow with a scar running down the side of his neck, took point.
Bodies lay in the passage. Some wore leather jackets; one wore the dark suit of a servant. Maya kept her eyes on the floor and then, when she couldn't bear the floor, on the back of Travis's shirt.
"Don't look," he said, without turning. "Look at me."
She looked at the bloodstains on his shoulder blades.
"Boss," said the scarred man, in a low voice. "The old man's gone. We found the cellar door open and a tunnel behind it. Rourke's boys are following it now, but it runs for half a mile. By the time they reach the end..."
"He's long gone." Travis's voice was flat. "He always was."
"Shall we torch the place?"
"There's nothing in it I want."
"Sir?"
"We take the child, the woman, and we go. Leave the rest to burn."
They went out through the great hall, past the dry fountain, into a courtyard full of smoke and shouting. The rain had turned to a cold drizzle, and it fell on Maya's face like a blessing. A row of black cars waited with their engines running. Travis lifted her bodily into the back of the first one and slid in beside her with Mark between them.
The door slammed. The car pulled out through the broken gates.
Maya turned in her seat and looked back through the rear window.
The villa burned against the night like a torch. Its tall chimneys wore crowns of flame. The stone she had walked on, the nursery where Mark had learned his alphabet, the room where she had counted stars: all of it was going up in a single blazing pillar that stretched into the low black clouds.
She watched it until the road turned.
Mark had fallen asleep against her arm, his thumb halfway to his mouth. Travis sat on the other side of him with his head tipped back against the seat and his eyes closed. His fingers were still wound through hers. She could feel his pulse in his wrist, slowing, slowly, gradually, the way a frightened horse's gait slows once it reaches the stable.
"I thought I'd lost him," he said, very quietly, in the dark.
"I know."
"I thought I'd lost both of you."
Maya looked at him. In the passing glow of the streetlights she could see the grime on his face, the cut over his eyebrow, the muscle jumping in his jaw.
He had said both.
She didn't answer. She only tightened her hand around his, and rested her head against the cool glass of the window, and watched the dark pines slide past on their way home.
