Chapter 57 FIRST ATTACK
Ava's POV
Adrian's hand was pressed to his side and blood was coming through his fingers steadily and I looked at it and then at his face and he was calm in the way people are calm when they've decided panicking won't help.
"How many," Dominic said, already pulling Adrian inside the suite.
"Six that I saw," Adrian said, letting himself be pulled, "possibly more in the stairwell, they came up from the basement, they bypassed the hotel security completely."
Dominic sat him on the couch and looked at the wound and whatever he saw made his jaw tighten but he didn't say anything alarming which I took as a good sign and I went to the bathroom and grabbed towels and came back and pressed one hard against Adrian's side.
"Hold that," I said and Adrian put his hand over mine and held it.
"We need to move," Dominic said, already going to the bedroom and I could hear drawers opening.
"To where," I called after him.
"Anywhere that isn't here," he came back out with his jacket and a bag and something else tucked at his back that I was going to ask about later, "they know this suite, they've been watching it, we can't stay."
"Adrian can't walk fast," I said.
"I can walk fine," Adrian said and stood up to prove it and went slightly grey but stayed upright so I let it go.
Dominic went to the suite door and looked through the peephole and then opened it and checked both ways and something about the way he moved was already different, faster and more certain than a normal person moved, like his body had made a decision his face hadn't announced yet.
"Stay close," he said, looking at me specifically, "and if I tell you to run, you run, you don't ask where, you don't look back, you just go."
"Okay," I said.
We went into the corridor and it was empty and quiet in the way that felt wrong, hotels had ambient noise, ice machines and distant doors and lifts chiming, and all of that was gone, just silence sitting heavy over everything.
We took the stairs and on the second landing down Adrian stopped and held up his fist and we all froze and I heard it then, footsteps below us, more than one person, moving up.
Dominic turned us back up without a word and we went to the next floor and pushed through the fire door into the corridor and he tried a room door and it was locked and he looked at it for half a second and then just pushed it open, not with force exactly, more like the lock decided not to argue, and we went inside and he closed it behind us.
It was a regular room, someone's luggage open on the bed, a half eaten room service tray on the table, and we stood in the middle of it in the dark and waited.
Footsteps in the corridor outside, slow and deliberate, stopping every few doors, and I held my breath and Adrian stood very still beside me with his hand still pressed to his side and Dominic was between us and the door and completely motionless.
The footsteps passed.
Nobody moved for another full minute and then Dominic went to the window and looked down and looked back at us.
"We go down the outside," he said.
I looked at the window and then at him. "We're on the thirty eighth floor."
"I know," he said.
"Dominic that will kill us."
"It won't," he said simply, and the way he said it, no hesitation, no attempt to explain further, made something cold move through me because I believed him and I didn't fully understand why I believed him and that was its own kind of frightening.
"Adrian can't," I said.
"Adrian goes first," Dominic said, "I'll manage the descent."
Adrian looked at the window and back at Dominic and something passed between them, some long history of trust that I wasn't part of, and then Adrian nodded.
Dominic opened the window and the London air came in cold and damp and he helped Adrian onto the ledge and I didn't watch what happened next because I couldn't, I just heard Adrian's quiet intake of breath and then nothing and when I made myself look he was moving down the outside of the building with Dominic's hand at his back, steady, controlled, like gravity was a suggestion rather than a rule.
They made it to a ledge two floors down and stopped and Dominic looked back up at me.
"Your turn," he said.
"I can't," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.
"Ava," he said quietly, "I will not let you fall, I need you to trust me."
I looked at him on that ledge in the London dark and thought about everything he'd told me tonight and everything he hadn't and decided that whatever he was and whatever was coming, this part was true, he would not let me fall.
I climbed out the window.
The cold hit me everywhere at once and the drop below was enormous and my hands gripped the window frame so hard my knuckles went white and then Dominic's hands were on me, certain and steady, and we moved down together and I kept my eyes on the building and not on the ground and he talked to me the whole way down, low and calm, just his voice and his hands and thirty eight floors becoming thirty seven and then thirty and then less.
We dropped the last few feet to the ground and I landed and my legs buckled and he caught me and held me up until they remembered how to work.
Adrian was already standing, pale but upright, and Dominic had us moving before I'd fully processed that we'd just descended a building with our bare hands.
We went through the back street and then another and I was still running on adrenaline and keeping up through sheer will when a figure stepped out of a doorway ahead and we all stopped hard.
It was Elias.
He looked at Adrian's side and then at me and then at Dominic and his face was tight.
"They found her faster than I expected," he said, and his voice was not surprised exactly, more like a man whose worst calculation had come true, "follow me, there's a safe house two streets over, you'll be secure there."
Dominic didn't move.
"Why should I follow you anywhere," he said and his voice had that quality again, the one with no human edges.
"Because you have an injured man and a marked woman and six hunters who know your face and you have about four minutes before they work out which direction you went," Elias said, and he looked at me when he said it, not Dominic, "and because I've been protecting her since before you knew she existed."
Dominic looked at me and I looked back at him and I thought about everything Dominic had told me tonight about Elias and about my mother and about bonds that didn't finish and I thought about the way Elias had kissed me and how I'd felt and what it actually meant, and I thought about the four minutes Elias had just mentioned and the footsteps in the hotel corridor.
"Go," I said to Dominic.
He held my gaze for one more second and then looked at Elias.
"Lead," he said.
Elias turned and we followed him into the London dark and I stayed close to Dominic's side and his hand found mine and held it and I held back and we ran.
The safe house was underground, a door in a wall that looked like nothing, steps going down into light and warmth, and when we got inside I stopped walking because the space was full of people and none of them looked entirely human and every single one of them turned to look at me when I came through the door.
Not at Dominic, not at Adrian, at me, like they'd been waiting and I was what they'd been waiting for, and I stood very still under all those eyes and felt the mark on my shoulder burn hot and bright.
And then from the back of the room, moving through the crowd toward me, came a man I had never seen before but whose face stopped my heart completely because I knew it, I knew it the way you know something you've seen in old photographs, the way you know a face that belongs to your family.
He stopped in front of me and looked at me for a long moment and his eyes were wet.
"You have her eyes," he said quietly, and his voice broke on the last word, "your grandmother's eyes, exactly.”