Take the woman in the yellow scarf.

Someone, somewhere pressed a button, and the alarm died, though it still echoed deep inside my head.

“Why don’t you put the gun down, and we can work this out,” the woman in the scarf said, slowly walking toward me. She looked scared, but calm. Determined.

“Sera...” Lynn Tower backed away as the woman in the scarf approached.

Sera. The woman in the yellow scarf.

“It’s okay,” Sera said, and I backed away from her in shock, one step for each of hers, my gun aimed right at her. But I wouldn’t shoot her. I couldn’t. I needed her, though I wasn’t sure why. Was she supposed to help me get Kenley back? Was she a hostage? An informant? A lieutenant in the Tower army?

Was that even possible for someone so young?

“Freeze!” someone shouted, and I looked up to find three of Tower’s guards aiming large guns at me from the center of the foyer.

My guts twisted into knots while I waited for gunfire, and there was nothing for me to do but hold my aim. This was a fool’s errand from the beginning, but I wasn’t fool enough to let go of my gun.

“Stop!” Sera yelled, and the men hesitated, confused. “He’s looking for someone. There’s no reason for this to get any bloodier.”

I recognized her tone. Gentle and patronizing. That was the voice you’d use to talk a man down from a ledge. A crazy man.

“Shoot him!” Julia yelled from inside her office, heedless of the fact that I was still aiming at Sera, and the men raised their weapons.

“No!” Sera turned on Julia. “Tell them to drop their weapons. Please!”

Julia scowled, and her anger was like black clouds rolling over the sun—I felt like I should duck before I got struck by lightning. Julia Tower didn’t take orders—she gave them.

But then she spoke, clearly enough for everyone to hear. “Put down your guns!”

The men obeyed instantly—so fast it was almost comical—squatting to set M16s on the ground at their feet, their faces fixed in identical masks of confusion.

Sera turned back to me. “Give me your gun, and you can go home.”

Surely she lacked the authority to back up a promise like that. Julia held all the power in Tower’s territory. But if that was true, why had Julia ordered her men to stand down at the request of a woman little more than half her age?

The girl in the scarf had guts—I had to give her that.

Or maybe she was just trying to disarm me, so I couldn’t shoot her when they shot me.

Sera held out her hand for my gun.

I glanced at the disarmed guards. Then I glanced at Julia and Lynn Tower, watching us both from inside the office, one nervous, one furious. Then I glanced to my right, and saw the open storage closet a few feet away, where a housekeeper had been digging for supplies when I’d come down the stairs waving my gun.

Instead of giving Sera my pistol, I grabbed her hand and pulled her with me into the closet.

She screamed, and I threw the door shut.

“Kill him!” Julia shouted.

“No!” Lynn screeched.

I fired twice into the ceiling, killing both the visible and the infrared lights at once. Then, as the first bullets ripped through the closet door, I pulled Sera into the shadows with me.

I took the woman in the yellow scarf.

Three

Sera

His eyes were a pale bluish gray. They were the first things I noticed after Lynn Tower opened the office door over my aunt’s protest.

The next thing I noticed was his weapon, and the two men bleeding on the marble tile in the foyer. Bile rose to my throat at the sight of so much blood pooling on the floor, and brutal memories tried to surface, but I shook them off. None of the bystanders were hurt. He’d only shot people who’d aimed guns at him.

This man may have been a killer, but he was no murderer. The distinction was small, but important.

The man aiming his gun at me looked furious, pale brows furrowed, jaw clenched, aim unwavering. He was looking for someone—I’d missed the specifics, thanks to the alarm—and was obviously willing to do whatever it took to find...whomever. He looked desperate.

But not crazy.

Those blue-gray eyes seemed to see everything all at once—every guard aiming a gun at him, every witness watching, and every possible escape route. He was too calm to be crazy. And if he was sane, he could be reasoned with.

He had to be reasoned with, because if Julia had him shot and his finger twitched on his own trigger, he’d blow a hole right through me, and no one other than Gwendolyn Tower seemed particularly concerned by that possibility.

My heart thudding in my ears, I held my hand out for his weapon, demanding focus and calm from myself as I mentally counted the shots I’d heard. But I couldn’t be sure of the number, thanks to the alarm.

He glanced at my scarf, then at my hand, and for a moment I thought he was actually going to give me his gun.

Instead, he grabbed my hand and dragged me into a supply closet, nearly hauling me off my feet. Startled, I screamed when he kicked the door shut, but then he raised his gun and shot into the ceiling, once, twice.

The closet went dark and glass rained down on us from the broken fixtures. Too shocked to speak, I tried to jerk my hand from his grip, but he pulled me again, and I stumbled after him, one step, then two.

The last thing I heard was gunfire coming from the foyer. They shot at us. They knew I was with him, and they’d fired anyway! On Julia’s command!

That bitch!