NIGHTFALL: THE BROKEN SON-IN-LAW'S LAST WAR

Chapter 2: Eight Minutes in the Dark

For one heartbeat the dining room was perfectly black and perfectly silent.

Then Vivian screamed, and the first gun went off.

Muzzle flashes lit the room in white bursts, like a camera going off again and again. Glass exploded behind me. The chandelier swung and rattled over our heads, and bullets chewed into the wall where Jason had been standing a second ago.

My body moved before my mind caught up.

I grabbed Natalie by the wrist and pulled her down off her chair, under the heavy oak table, and pressed her flat against the floor.

"Stay down," I said into her ear. "Don't move, don't scream, don't stand up for anything."

"Adam, what's happening? Who are..."

"Not now."

Harold was still sitting upright at the head of the table, frozen, his walking stick in his fist, his mouth open. Seventy-six years old and too proud to duck. I rolled out from under the table, hooked my arm around his chest, and dragged him sideways off his chair and behind the thick stone pillar by the fireplace. He was heavy, and he wheezed with every breath, but he didn't fight me.

"Stay here, Harold."

"You... you..."

"Stay here."

The shooting stopped. In the silence I heard boots, slow and careful, crunching on broken glass. Then a voice spoke low in a language I hadn't heard in two and a half years.

Tarkovan.

"Two by the windows. Check under the table. The cook first."

The cook.

So that was it. They weren't here for the Prescotts, or for Jason's money, or for Harold's company.

They were here for me.

My hand found the edge of the table above me and slid across the ruined tablecloth until it closed around something heavy with a wooden handle. The carving knife from the roast. My other hand found a dinner plate, thick white china, the kind Vivian bought because it looked expensive.

Fifteen years of training woke up all at once, and it was like stepping into cold water. Everything went sharp and clear and slow.

I counted the steps. One man near the windows, moving left. One man coming around the end of the table toward the spot where Natalie was hiding, his breath loud through his nose.

I threw the plate across the room. It smashed against the far wall, and the man by the windows spun toward the sound and fired into the dark.

The second man turned his head for half a second to look.

Half a second was all I needed.

For one terrible moment, the harbor tried to come back. The smoke, the radio, the voices of my brothers. My hand shook on the knife handle, and I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. Not now. Not here. Natalie was under that table, and the past could wait its turn.

I came up out of the dark beside him, and the carving knife did the rest. He made a wet, choking sound and folded onto the carpet. I caught his rifle before it hit the floor.

The man by the windows heard him fall. He turned, swinging his gun toward me, and I put two rounds into him from his dead partner's rifle before he finished turning. The flash lit up his face for a moment. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a shaved head and wide surprised eyes.

Then he was down, and the room was quiet again.

Someone was sobbing under the table. Tyler, I think.

"Everybody listen to me," I said, loud enough for all of them. "There are more of them in the house. If you want to live, you'll do exactly what I say."

"Who's talking?" Vivian's voice shook in the dark. "Is that... is that Adam?"

"Crawl toward my voice. All of you. Stay low."

They came, shaking and stumbling, Natalie first, then Tyler on his hands and knees with his phone screen glowing until I knocked it out of his hand, then Vivian, then Jason. I pulled Harold up from behind the pillar and pushed him toward the others.

"Your hands," he muttered, staring at the rifle as if it were a snake. "Your hands aren't shaking."

He was right. For two years they'd shaken over coffee cups and dinner plates, over nothing at all. Now, with a dead man's gun in them, they were perfectly steady.

I didn't have time to wonder what that said about me.

"The wine cellar," I said. "The door's off the back hallway. Ten steps to the left. Move."

"Are you crazy?" Tyler hissed. "There are people with guns out there!"

"That's why you're going down there, and I'm not."

"You?" His voice cracked. "You're the cook! You fell over from a confetti cannon five minutes ago!"

"Then you'll have a great video to post tomorrow," I said. "If you're alive to post it. Move."

He moved.

I led them along the wall in the dark, one hand on Natalie's shoulder, the rifle held low in the other. I knew this house; I'd fixed every leaking pipe and squeaking door in it for two years. We reached the cellar door, and I pulled it open and pushed them down the stone steps one by one.

Vivian grabbed my sleeve at the top.

"What are you doing? Who were those men? How do you even know how to..."

"Get down the stairs, Vivian."

She stared at me in the faint light from the cellar's little window, her pearls trembling at her throat, and for the first time in two years she didn't argue. She went.

Jason was the last one in. He paused on the top step and looked at me, and something about his face bothered me. Everyone else was shaking, crying, gasping, but Jason Whitlock was almost calm, like a man watching a business meeting go badly.

I filed it away for later, the way I used to file away a strange car parked twice on the same street.

Natalie stood two steps down, her face pale, her brown eyes huge.

"Adam," she whispered. "You're not coming?"

"Lock yourselves in from the inside if there's a bolt. If there isn't, stay quiet. Don't open this door for anyone but me."

"But..."

"Natalie." I looked at her, and I didn't hide anything in my eyes for once. "Trust me tonight. Only tonight."

She swallowed hard, and then she nodded.

I closed the door and turned the old iron key in the lock from the outside. Then I slipped the key into my pocket.

Nobody was getting in there unless they went through me first.

I stood in the dark hallway and listened to the house. Rain had started outside, ticking against the tall windows of the hallway. I could smell gun smoke, wet earth, and the expensive perfume Vivian always wore. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked. In the kitchen, someone was breathing hard and trying not to.

Two down, four left inside. And outside, by the sound of the engine idling past the garden wall, at least two more waiting in a van.

On the dead man's belt, the little black radio crackled to life.

"Team two, report." A woman's voice, cool and steady, speaking Tarkovan. "Team two, did you find the cook?"

Silence.

"Team two?"

I lifted the radio to my mouth, and I answered her in her own language.

"Team two is dead," I said. "Come and find me yourself."