Cam still held his gun, his aim wavering as his hands shook. He was fighting the order. But he couldn’t last.

“In there!” I hauled Ruben off his wife and pointed at the open billiard room across the hall. Meika shoved Anne aside and dove into the dark room just as a third figure stepped into sight around the corner ahead, bringing yet another gun to the party. We were officially outgunned, and I recognized Jake Tower in spite of the indignity of addressing his nemesis in nothing but a pair of pajama pants.

“Shoot Liang in the leg,” he ordered, and Cam’s face was a violent collision of guilt, remorse and bitter obligation. But that order was too specific and direct to fight. He hesitated for one long moment, then roared with frustration as he squeezed the trigger.

Anne screamed and collapsed to the floor, blood pouring between her fingers from the hole in her thigh. Hadley’s sobs became wrenching gasps for air between tear-strangled cries, and she backed away from us all.

“Hadley,” Tower called across the chaos of guns drawn and blood spilled, and she watched him through her tears. “Your mom’s hurt, but if you come to me now, I’ll call for a doctor. She’ll be fine. You can save your mother. You want to be a hero, don’t you?”

Hadley glanced at her mother, then back at Tower, and she started to step forward. “No!” Anne shouted through her own pain, and I put a hand on the child’s shoulder to stop her, my own gun aimed at Tower’s head now. But I couldn’t pull the trigger, even if I’d been sure I could hit him from that distance with almost no light. I didn’t know what his default, preprogrammed orders might be upon his death.

And I didn’t know who his successor was.

Cavazos was also aiming at Tower, and the only thing keeping him from shooting—as far as I could tell—was the reluctance to subject his daughter to any more bloodshed than necessary.

So instead of shooting, I glanced into the billiard room where I could barely see Meika watching us in the dark, her arms tense at her sides, eyes wide with fear. “Take her!” I snapped, nodding at Anne, who sat just inches from the doorway, but wouldn’t crawl out of the line of fire without her daughter.

“No!” Anne screamed again, when Meika grabbed her arms from behind and hauled her into the dark. A bullet shot past where her head had been an instant earlier. Hadley screamed, but she was too scared to move.

“Bust up the grid and get her out of here!” I shouted to Meika, and after a second to process what I’d said, her dark silhouette climbed onto the pool table with a pool cue in hand. She jammed the thick end into the ceiling, and glass shattered, then fell all around her, reflecting the little available visible light.

“Shoot them, now!” Tower ordered, when he realized what Meika was doing.

Obviously reluctant to shoot me as long as they had a choice, Cam and Kori both fired on Cavazos, who returned two shots as he lunged toward Hadley and hauled her into the unlit billiard room. I was right behind them, and more bullets thunked into the door-jamb as I passed it.

Peppered with glinting broken glass, Meika’s silhouette had Anne’s limping silhouette around the waist, presumably standing in an infrared shadow she could feel much better than I could see. “Go!” I shouted, and Meika stepped into oblivion, dragging Anne with her in spite of sobbing protests.

I pulled Hadley away from the door as footsteps pounded down the hall toward us. But they stopped just out of sight. “Don’t shoot, you can’t see in there!” Kori yelled, and I could feel the blood she was still dripping—I could practically smell it. “You might hit the girl.”

“e don’t even know if she’s still in there,” Tower pointed out. “Caballero?”

“She’s there,” he said, and I could hear the reluctance in his voice as he tracked her from only feet away.

“The others?” Tower asked.

“Just Cavazos and Warren.”

“Shit!” Tower shouted, and I spared a moment to thoroughly enjoy his anger.

A moment later, the air changed and I turned to see Meika’s dark form in the spot she’d disappeared from a minute earlier. I pushed Hadley toward her and Cavazos glanced at them both, then returned his attention and aim to the doorway, even as he whispered to his wife, “Take her to our house and lock the place down.”

“But then how will you…?” Meika began, but her husband cut her off.

“Go! And don’t come back!”

Because without Hadley there, they would open fire on us. Plain and simple.

An instant later, Meika and Hadley were gone, and that time Tower must have felt the shift in air pressure. “Caballero?” he said, still just out of sight, and I ran for the window farthest from the open doorway.

“Hadley’s gone.”

I pounded on the glass, but it didn’t even rattle. It was thicker than my thumb and probably bulletproof.

“Motherfucker!” Tower shouted, ripping the word right out of my own mouth. We were trapped. “Open fire.”

“I can’t,” Kori insisted, her words half sobs of obvious agony. “I might hit Liv.”

Tower swore again. “Caballero, kill them.”

Cam thundered a wordless sound of rage and pain. I held my breath, gun aimed, heart pounding fiercely. Cam opened fire.

Cavazos glanced at me as the first bullets punched through the air, inches away, and thunked into the walls at my back. I raced farther into the room, away from the door. Anne was no longer in danger, which meant I couldn’t shoot Cam. I wouldn’t. Not even to save myself. But Cavazos wouldn’t hold his fire—he wasn’t willing to die for me.