It all happened in the space of a heartbeat.
Russell's pupils shrank, and his body reacted a step ahead of his mind.
He released his grip on Pilsen almost without thinking and threw himself to one side.
Crash!
The wine bottle struck the floor and shattered.
Dark red wine and shards of glass sprayed everywhere, catching the dim yellow lamplight in a blur of glinting fragments.
Some of the wine and glass splashed across Russell, and he shut his eyes on reflex to keep it out of them.
The air filled with the scent of aged wine, heady and sweet.
"Are you insane?" Charlotte stared at Emily, who was the last person she'd expected to snap.
"Run!"
Emily paid Charlotte no attention at all. She screamed it at Pilsen, her voice shrill enough to scrape the ear.
Pilsen had seized his chance the instant Russell's hands came off him.
He didn't spare Emily so much as a glance. He scrambled upright and bolted for the wide-open doorway.
He moved fast, faster than any man who had just been pinned to the floor had a right to move.
Survival flooded him with adrenaline. It burned away the pain, burned away everything, and left him with one thought:
Run.
Run for the door.
Run outside.
Run anywhere he could stay alive.
Emily stumbled after him like a faithful hound.
"Stop right there!"
Charlotte snatched the cane off the floor and hurled it at Pilsen.
It whistled past, grazing his body, and missed anything that mattered.
"Damn it."
Charlotte swore. At the same moment, Russell had already found his feet again.
He wiped the wine from his face, then broke into a run after them.
Pilsen was quick, but Russell was no slouch either.
The gap between them shrank by the second.
But just as Russell gathered himself for the final burst that would put his hands on the man, Pilsen stopped dead in the doorway.
He turned back and grabbed Emily, who was still staggering along behind him.
"Pilsen, what are you—"
Emily froze. Before she could even work out what was happening, a powerful shove sent her hurtling backward.
Her body toppled out of her own control, straight into the path Russell was charging down.
Russell hauled himself to a stop, and that brief hitch bought Pilsen all the time he needed.
He never once looked back at the woman who had just bought him those precious seconds. He might have been discarding a piece of dead weight. He tore out of the cellar without turning his head, making for the stairs.
Emily Collins fell toward Russell like a puppet with its strings cut.
He caught her on instinct, or rather, he had to put his arms out to keep her from slamming into him.
He looked down at the woman in his arms. Emily's hands were clawing wildly at the air, groping for anything to steady herself.
Her eyes were wide with terror, her lips parted, but no sound came out, only a series of choked whimpers, as though a hand were closed around her throat.
Once she realized she hadn't hit the ground, her thrashing began to settle.
She glanced at Russell, then her eyes went to the doorway.
In the next moment, the light in them went out.
The doorway was empty. So empty it was as if no one had ever stood there at all.
Pilsen was gone.
She could never have imagined that the man she'd been willing to give up everything for would use her as a shield without a moment's hesitation.
Emily Collins closed her eyes against the pain of it.
Then a voice reached her, cold and thoroughly unimpressed.
"Stop playing dead. Get up."
She opened her eyes and found a young face above her.
It was a handsome face, all the more so at this distance.
Except that everything written on it just then was ice and impatience.
He looked at her the way a man looks at a piece of rubbish left in his path.
Emily Collins couldn't bear such naked disgust and moved to pull free of his arms.
Before she could, the man let go first and left her to drop.
To his credit, he eased the force of it at the last instant, setting her down lightly enough that her head didn't greet the floor with any real enthusiasm.
"You—"
"She'll live."
Charlotte cut off the polite show of concern before Russell could finish it.
The girl wouldn't waste a single glance on the woman sprawled on the ground. She simply walked past her, toward the door.
"Get Pilsen first. Leave her."
"Right."
Emily Collins sat there in a daze, watching the two figures disappear one after the other, despair filling her eyes.
They took the stairs all the way up to the main hall on the ground floor.
Pilsen wasn't there.
"Upstairs." Charlotte was breathing hard, pointing at the ceiling. "The front door's sealed and locked. He can't have gone that way."
So they ran for the second floor.
The second floor was far messier than the first. Rooms everywhere, corridors branching off, corner after corner.
"We split up," Charlotte decided at once, keeping her voice low.
"You sure about that?" Russell frowned, uneasy.
Charlotte didn't answer. She just handed him the cane she'd retrieved.
"Take it. You know how to use one?"
"Well enough, but what about you?" Russell looked at her.
"I'll use this."
Charlotte lifted the hem of her coat and showed him her weapon.
The revolver Pilsen had dropped.
"You mean to kill him?" Russell asked. "What about our leads?"
"If it comes to that," Charlotte said. "No lead is worth more than a life."
Russell said nothing more after that. He only tightened his grip on the cane.
They went left and right, splitting toward opposite ends of the corridor.
The hallway was silent. Only their deliberately muffled footsteps echoed through the empty space.
Moonlight slanted in through the windows along one side, sliced into blocks by the bars, laying the path ahead out like a chessboard of light and dark.
Russell held the cane and set each foot down lightly, so lightly it made almost no sound at all.
[Listening] and [Stealth] were both working at full stretch.
He kept his whole attention on the air, catching every faint sound in it.
A heartbeat. Breathing. And, not far off, the click of a pistol hammer being drawn back.
That would be Charlotte. Had she found Pilsen already?
Russell frowned and started to move toward her without thinking.
And then, as he passed a corner hung with an oil painting—
A black shape burst out of the shadows.
"Pilsen?!"
Russell's pupils contracted and his body answered before the thought had formed.
He threw the cane up, and the shriek of metal on metal exploded down the empty corridor.
Clang!
Pilsen had an iron pipe in his hands, scavenged from somewhere, and it came down squarely on the cane Russell had braced crosswise.
The shock ran up through the web of Russell's hand and left his arm numb to the elbow.
The first blow had missed, and Pilsen didn't pause for even a breath before the second came sweeping in.
There was nothing elegant about it, but it carried the vicious finality of something honed on a battlefield.
Every strike went for something vital. Every strike was thrown to kill.
The pipe tore through the air with a shrill whistle.
Russell twisted aside and it grazed past his chest, dragging a hard gust of wind with it.
He could feel the cold breath of the metal as it scraped across the fabric.
"Charlotte!" he shouted. "Over here!"
The words were barely out before Pilsen's third strike arrived.
This one was a thrust, the end of the pipe driving straight at Russell's stomach.
Russell took the cane in both hands, turned the blow aside on the shaft, and used the momentum to spin, sweeping the butt of the cane at the side of Pilsen's face.
Pilsen jerked his head clear and gave half a step of ground, eyes fixed on Russell like a beast backed into a corner.
Moonlight slanted through the window and lit that sweat-streaked, filthy face into something savage.
His eyes were webbed with blood. His breathing rasped like a bellows, his chest heaving.
That desperate flurry of attacks had clearly cost him a great deal.
"Get out of the way," Pilsen said hoarsely. "I don't want to kill anyone."
"You've killed plenty already," Russell said, raising his weapon.
"Turn yourself in like a sensible man and you might keep your neck."
Pilsen's mouth twisted at that into something ugly, something that resembled a smile.
"Then I'll start with you."
And he charged again.
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