Page 53 of Consort of the Crime Queen

CHAPTER 26

Aurora

We slip through the trees, Hadria moving with grace despite her injury, her hand a steadying pressure on my lower back. I match her silent footsteps, hyperaware of our synced breathing, our shared focus. The sounds of combat grow louder, but still muted by the patter of rain on leaves.

Hadria pauses, head cocked. She glances at me and presses one finger to her lips. Eyes wide, I nod. In the distance, a man shouts orders. Hadria's eyes gleam, hungry. We move forward silently.

The fight at the gates is over, now, as far as Nero's men are concerned. We find three of them clustered by an idling van at the gate, guarding the vehicle while fires still burn in the remnants of the gatehouse. That must have been the explosion, I realize, as I spot the mangled iron gates several feet away on the grass. They blew open the gates.

Hadria glances between them, assessing. She makes a hand gesture, telling me to stay here and stay down.

Then, wordlessly, she draws her gun and stalks forward as I wait and watch.

I hear her pistol crack twice. The closest two men drop boneless to the mud. Before the final man can react, she's splayed him up against the van with a gun to his head. "Where is my brother?" she asks.

"I—I don't know, he went looking for you. I can help y?—"

A shot from her gun finishes the sentence for him, and she lets him fall to the ground dismissively, returning to where I'm crouching in the bushes. "If Nero is looking for me," she says softly, "we don't want to disappoint him, do we, Sunshine?"

"No we do not," I agree firmly.

Hadria's bloodied knuckles caress my cheek with unexpected tenderness. For a suspended moment, her stern mask cracks, a glimpse of the woman within peeking through.

"Then let's go greet our visitor."

The mansion looms in from the darkness, a hulking shadow lit up occasionally inside by gunfire and flashlights. The air tastes of iron and gunpowder. The Syndicate—those who are still with Hadria, anyway—are battling savagely to repel Nero's black-clad men still swarming the grounds.

The rain has stopped and the clouds have cleared, letting the half-moon shine down on the grounds. Hadria slows, eyes scanning the chaotic melee, landing on a cluster of men converging on a lone woman in silhouette. Hadria raises her pistol without hesitation. With a trio of shots, all three men collapse lifeless. The woman—oh, God, it's Lyssa, thank God!—looks over her shoulder and gives a little salute before running fast to help out another overpowered Syndicate member.

"I can't see Nero," Hadria mutters.

"He'll be inside," I say with conviction. "He'll be looking for me. And he'll think you bundled me up safe somewhere inside."

"Well," Hadria says grimly, "I suppose I did try."

"I'm sorry," I say. "I couldn't just sit there and…wait. If we're dying tonight, I'd rather die together."

She gives a wry smile. "Me, too. Well, come on, Sunshine. Let's go hunting."

The house has lost all power, either through deliberate vandalism or from the thunderstorm. But it's perfect for us, as we make our way around and into the house via the kitchen door again, and head slowly through the dark hallways toward my room. I've never felt so alert, so attuned to every creak and murmur around us. Hadria moves silently ahead of me. I try to mimic her slinky creeping, since one misstep could betray our presence.

And every now and then, we come across Nero's men, or a Syndicate member who has turned—easy to spot by the way they immediately attack Hadria. And each time, Hadria unerringly shoots them clean through the head, then strips their bodies for useful ammunition, leaving behind the heavier assault rifles many of them are carrying.

They came prepared for war, these men.

And I feel less and less prepared as we go. This is nothing like training with Lyssa. Each second stretches out, saturated with raw adrenaline.

I duck around a corner after Hadria, gripping my hand tight around the gun, and almost cry out as three figures burst out of a room nearby. I stumble back, but Hadria is a whirlwind, dispatching the first two attackers with brutal efficiency, and the last with a bullet in the back as he turns to run.

And then she's back at my side. "This is getting tedious," she sighs, looking down the next corridor. "Nero is probably upstairs by now, and who knows how many others he has with him." She glances back at me. "I don't suppose you'd let me take you to the war room? My study can also function as a panic room, so you could be safe there until?—"

"No," I insist. "You have to let me do this Hadria. You have to let me…let me help."

I'm not much help, obviously. But I can't bear to let her out of my sight again. When Tony told me she was dead, I really did think she was, just for a short time.

I can't ever feel that way again. Not without dying myself.

We head upstairs, taking the back stairs, and instead of traversing the hallways, Hadria leads me through the rooms themselves. Upstairs, there are at least five rooms that connect to each other, and I can see what she's thinking: the rooms offer a lot more opportunity to hide than the blank hallways.

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