id grumpily, stepping back through the door.
Tristan, thankfully, did not follow. She jogged downstairs and shoved open the side door of the apartments, emerging in the alley.
She was so irritated that she didn’t notice the gun. Not at first, and not quickly enough.
Peter Kruger took a step toward her, a revolver in each hand. His tan skin bore few wrinkles and no scars despite his age and experience, and his mud-brown hair fell to his shoulders. He wore black trousers, a sweater, and a cheap workborn peacoat, which fell to his hips. He seemed like a cross between a senator and militiaman and a slave. Perhaps he would have fit in all three worlds. Perhaps he fit into none.
Lila reached for her Colt.
“No.” Mr. Kruger aimed at her chest. “Hands up, or I will shoot the one on the roof after I’m done with you. I won’t use tranqs.”
Lila’s hands faltered. Even she couldn’t beat a loaded gun already pointed at her heart. She had messed up. She’d put a guard on Alex, she had increased security around the estate, but she hadn’t taken along a guard for herself. “I suppose Zephyr ordered this?”
“Zephyr?”
“Your boss.”
“I don’t know this Zephyr,” he said, his voice soft with disuse, never rising above her own.
Lila couldn’t tell if he was lying.
“Chairwoman Wilson commands you, then? Did she tell you to tranq me?”
“Only one of these guns holds tranqs, madam, but I’d do it that way if I could. I hear that a tranq overdose is more pleasant than a bullet in the brain, but I don’t know how to override the sensors. I’m sorry for that.”
“Working in the sewers prepared you for this?”
“I don’t just work in the sewers. I’m quite good with a knife. I can butcher a pig in less than forty-five minutes. They say there’s not much difference between a human and a pig. I guess I’ll find out. I’m sorry for that, too.”
Lila shifted her weight, ready to spring past the man, but he’d already fired.
A dart hit Lila’s neck.
She flinched at the bite and yanked it out as soon as it landed. She might have been pulling out a bee’s stinger.
“It already dosed you, madam, and you know it. Maybe not the full dose, but enough.”
Lila’s chest and back warmed suddenly, and the world spun around her. She lurched in place and grabbed the wall for support, then rested her cheek upon the cool, painted brick.
“I am sorry, for what it’s worth. You always smiled. You always gave me the courtesy of a title. You always told me ‘Good day, Mr. Kruger’ whenever you saw me, even when I stank of piss and shit. Not many people bothered. I wish it had been someone else.”
Lila slumped, crumpled onto the pavement, and landed on her shoulder. She struggled to flip onto her back so that she could see her death approach, so that she could know when it would happen.
Overhead, the sky rippled like the surface of a pond in a fresh rain.
Kruger bent over her, gun cocked in his hand.
Tranq darts did not fill the chamber.
“After you go missing and no one finds your body, you’ll live on as some sort of ghost story. The missing heir. People will claim to see you everywhere. They’ll tinker with your story, trying to prove what happened to you and why. Books will be written about you. You’ll live on far longer than you ever would have behind the walls of the Randolph compound. I promise you that.”
Kruger’s words made little sense to Lila. She didn’t want to be the ghost of an heir. She wanted to live. She wanted to eat Chef’s cookies, to spend another morning in the gym or at the gun range, to have her argument with Commander Sutton, to smoke another cigar with Alex, to hug her brothers and her father, to scowl once more at her mother and her sister. She wanted to see Shirley and the little ginger-headed boy. She had never even found out his name or why he wanted to help so much, and now it seemed so important for her to know.
She wanted to brag to Max that she had slipped into Liberté.
Twice.
She wanted to see Dixon again, to read his notebooks, to best him in a race over the city’s rooftops, to share another waltz and another bottle of Sangre.