Page 59 of Night of Shadows
Lex stops one step below me.
He turns. The gold eyes are level with mine because of the step. He puts his hand on the side of my face. He doesn’t say anything.
I lean my forehead against his for one second.
Then I straighten up.
"Let's go," I say.
? ? ?
We are halfway through the route.
Petrov has cleared a varied path through Beacon Hill. The motorcade is four vehicles. Lex and I are in the third. Declan is driving the second. Cormac is in the lead. Petrov is rear.
The route was chosen at 3:55 PM, run for clearance at 3:58 PM, and we are on it at 4:04 PM. At 4:11 PM, a black sedan rolls through a stop sign at the intersection of Mount Vernon and Walnut and slams broadside into Declan's SUV at thirty-five miles per hour.
The SUV pivots.
My head hits the inside of the door.
Lex is shouting something.
The shooters come out of the alley a half-second later.
Two of them. AR-pattern rifles. They are not aiming at the windows. They are aiming at the doors. They are not trying to kill us through the glass. They are trying to flush us out.
Lex has three seconds to make a choice.
"DOWN!” he roars.
He throws me to the floor of the SUV. His body comes down over mine. His sidearm is in his right hand, and his right hand has come up over my head to the window, and he’s returning fire through the bulletproof glass, which is rated for three rounds before it compromises, and he’s making each round count.
Glass cracks above me. Not breaks. Cracks.
I cannot see anything. My face is pressed into the floor mat. I can smell the rubber and the dust. This vehicle has been cleaned recently. I can hear gunfire. I can hear Declan shouting in a register I have not heard from him before. I can both hear and feel Lex's heart against my back through the layer of his coat, his shirt, and his vest.
The skirmish lasts ninety seconds.
It ends with three Reznikov soldiers dead in the street, a Konstantinos guard named Andros wounded in the shoulder, the shooters' bodies pulled off Mount Vernon by Petrov's team before BPD arrives, and the sedan that hit Declan abandoned with the driver dead behind the wheel from a round Cormac put through the windshield.
Lex is still over me.
"Maeve."
"I am here."
"Are you hit?"
“No.”
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure."
He gets off me and helps me sit up. The world is very loud and then very quiet. My ears are ringing. My hands are shaking. I am not crying, no time for that now. The motorcade is moving again.
"We are not going to the courthouse," Lex says.
