Chapter 112 One Shop

Chapter 112 One Shop
Lara's POV

Everything after that happened in less than three seconds.

I know because I counted them afterward, sitting in the kitchen with a blanket around my shoulders that someone had put there without asking, trying to make the sequence make sense in my head the way you tried to make sense of things that had moved too fast to fully process while they were happening.

One.

Lucas raised the gun.

Not slowly. Not dramatically. Just raised it the way you raised something you had been holding for a long time and had finally decided to use.

It was pointed at me.

I did not move.

I don't know why I didn't move. Later I would try to explain it and the only thing I could come up with was that my body simply didn't receive the instruction in time, that the gap between seeing the gun come up and understanding what it meant was just wide enough that I was still standing there, hand on my stomach, looking at him, when everything else happened.

Two.

Damien moved.

I didn't see him move because he came from behind me and he moved fast, faster than I had ever seen him move, and there was a sound, one sound, sharp and contained and final in the way that certain sounds were final.

Three.

Lucas fell.

Not dramatically. Not the way things fell in films. Just a man who had been standing and was no longer standing, sliding down the wall slowly, and then the wall, and then the floor, and the gun leaving his hand somewhere in that movement and coming to rest apart from him, separate, done.

Then the hallway was full of people.

Detective Ade's team came up the stairs so fast it felt like they had been right there the whole time, waiting for exactly this sound, and maybe they had been, and they flooded the upper floor in the organised way of people who had trained for exactly this and were doing their jobs and doing them well.

Someone moved me back.

I let them.

I was looking at Lucas on the floor. At Bode's men already beside him. At the blood that I wasn't going to describe because some things didn't need describing and some things you simply filed away in the part of your mind reserved for things you had survived.

Damien appeared in front of me.

His face was the thing I focused on. Not what was happening behind him. Not the sound of radios and voices and people doing the necessary things that needed to be done after something like this. Just his face, which was very still in the way it got when he was processing something at a depth he wasn't ready to show yet.

His hands were shaking.

I had never seen Damien's hands shake before.

I took them in mine.

He looked down at our hands and then up at my face.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Are you?"

He shook his head.

We stood there in the hallway holding each other's hands while everything moved around us, and I felt his hands shaking against mine and I held them tighter because that was the only thing I could do right then and it was enough.

Ethan appeared from somewhere behind me.

I turned and looked at him and he looked back at me and neither of us said anything for a moment.

Then I pulled him in and held him, my arms around him, his arms around me, and I felt him exhale against my shoulder in a way that told me he had been holding that breath for a very long time.

"You're okay," he said against my shoulder. Not a question.

"I'm okay," I said.

"And the baby?"

"Fine," I said. "We're fine."

He held on for another moment.

Then he stepped back and straightened himself the way he did when he had allowed himself a moment of something and was now returning to being fifteen and composed.

"Richie," I said suddenly, realising.

"Still in his room," Ethan said immediately. "I locked it from the outside when I came out of the safe room. He slept through everything. I checked the camera."

God.

This boy.

I put my hand on the side of his face for a moment and he let me.

Detective Ade came to find me twenty minutes later. The house had settled into a different kind of noise by then, organised and purposeful, people doing their jobs, someone taking photographs of the hallway, someone else on a phone in the study.

Lucas had been taken out on a stretcher.

Alive. Critical but alive. Damien's shot had hit him in the shoulder and the blood loss was significant but he had been breathing when they carried him out and the paramedics had been moving with the particular urgent competence of people who believed they could keep someone alive if they worked fast enough.

I didn't know how I felt about that.

I sat with it for a while and decided I didn't need to know right now.

"You should have stayed in the room," Detective Ade said, sitting across from me at the kitchen table, his voice tired rather than angry.

"I know," I said.

"If he had fired before you said what you said—"

"But he didn't," I said. "Not then."

He looked at me for a moment.

"What you said to him in that hallway," he said slowly. "What did you say? My people heard some of it."

"The truth," I said. "Just the truth."

He nodded slowly, like that was both the simplest and the most complicated answer I could have given him.

Damien came and sat beside me at the kitchen table and put a mug of tea in front of me, hot and strong the way I liked it, made without asking because he never needed to ask.

I wrapped my hands around it.

The kitchen was our kitchen again. Not a scene, not a location, just the room where my family ate breakfast and Ethan made instant noodles with eggs and Richie explained his dreams about dinosaurs. Just a kitchen.

"His hands stopped shaking," Ethan said from across the table, nodding at Damien.

Damien looked at his hands.

"Good," he said.

"They were shaking a lot," Ethan said.

"Ethan," I said.

"I'm just noting it," Ethan said. "It's fine to have shaking hands after something like that. It's a normal physiological response."

Damien looked at his son.

"Thank you," he said. "For the medical context."

"Marcus would agree with me," Ethan said.

And somehow, impossibly, in the kitchen of our house on the morning that Lucas Ward had finally come and gone and taken everything he was going to take, all three of us laughed.

Not loudly. Not for long.

But genuinely.

The way you laughed when the alternative was something you didn't want to do in front of your children.

I reached for Damien's hand on the table.

He turned it palm up and held mine.

Outside, in the city, ordinary things were happening. People going to work. Children going to school. Markets opening. The day doing what days did.

And in here, in this kitchen, we were still here.

All of us.

Still here.