of everything that was so blurry—and finally her vision cleared. It was then that she saw the attacker’s face, even if she couldn’t tell much about his body or his limbs.
It was a formally dressed male, with salt-and-pepper-streaked hair that was brushed back from his forehead. He had a murderous expression on what was otherwise an evenly featured face, and his lips were moving as he spoke. Helania fell back on old habits as she read them.
. . . should have killed you instead of those other two. More efficient that way, but I thought there would be talk. My master did not deserve his bloodline to be sullied by that broken arrangement. And I know what you were doing with that female. I saw you, I watched you.
Helania tried to lift her head, lift her arm, shift her body, cry out. Your friend asked for it. She dared to threaten me with exposure. Somehow she found out it was me and—Isobel. Mai.
This was the killer!
Adrenaline surged through Helania’s body as her instincts fired and aggression flooded into her veins. Forcing her head up, she looked for a weapon. For anything. The male was crazed and dangerous—
The knife that came up over his shoulder was viciously sharp, and the light from the chandelier overhead gleamed on its polished steel blade.
Shoving herself off the floor, Helania—
Boone’s leather jacket was lying on a chair right beside where she’d landed, and she remembered it back in her apartment, falling to the floor from the weight of the guns in it.
She moved faster than she had ever before in her life, some vast reserve of inner power mobilizing her body. Lunging for the jacket, she grabbed hold of the folds just as the lights went out again.
Dagger hand, she thought as she flipped the leather around, her hands shaking. He was right-handed—
Plunging into the deep pocket on the right side, she palmed Boone’s gun and freed the safety. She knew it was loaded by the heaviness of it, and what do you know, the weapon was the same make and model she used.
When the lights came back on, she had the barrel up in position and she pulled the trigger just as the attacker started the downward arc of his stabbing motion.
The bullet went right into the head at the temple. Exactly where she had aimed.
One kill shot was all it took.
In a horrible montage she knew she was never going to forget, a fine spray of blood and splatter of brain matter hit the heavy front door in a daisy pattern and the male crumpled down to the floor.
Her whole body shook. But the gun was steady as a stone in her palms as she kept it on him.
“Get behind me Rochelle,” she ordered.
The other female scrambled and tripped, coming around and taking cover as Helania kept Boone’s muzzle trained on the male.
“Go get Boone now—”
“I’m here!” his voice shouted. “I’m right here.”
Helania nodded as his thundering footfalls came down to the drama, his attention no doubt caught by the sound of shot. But she did not move. The attacker’s body was twitching in random places, and she wasn’t sure whether he was going to get back up.
Dimly, she heard Boone talking on his phone. And then, in her peripheral vision, she was aware of other people coming into the foyer, staff members, given their uniforms.
Abruptly, Boone was very close to her, standing just off to the side of her straight-out, stiff-as-a-board forearms. “Helania, you can lower the gun now—”
“I don’t know if he’s dead,” she choked out. “How do I know he’s dead.”
“You got him,” came his gentle voice. “You saved Rochelle’s life and you got him. But I need you to put the gun down. The Brothers are on their way and we don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
She focused on the red stain on that door . . . and the little hole she could see in the center of it where the bullet had ended its journey through living matter inside of the wood.
“I wanted to be there when Isobel’s killer died,” she said hoarsely. “I needed to be there.”
“Well, you did one better. You ahvenged your sister in the proper way. You took his life as he took hers.”
That was what unlocked her. All of a sudden her hands and her arms were shaking and weak, and just as she was about to drop the gun from her hold, Boone scooped the weapon out of her palms and