Chapter 18
Hanna did not account for the possibility of Isabelle walking through that door. She should have budgeted for that, not that any plan would really give her a way to react to it. Isabelle was a wild card, even if they had a contingency plan it would have gone out the window. But this version of Isabelle was young, the true child beneath the twenty-one year old coming through. There was a real, primal fear in her eyes and it gave Hanna hope that she could get out of this.
Isabelle was caught off guard, which meant she could bleed, she was vulnerable. She wasn’t some omnipotent super villain. She was a girl who orchestrated the actions so far and got lucky everywhere else. But Hanna would have preferred this moment of the mental and emotional upper hand if she didn’t have a gun pressed into her head and her knees on the ground. The physical upper hand was all that mattered right now, and she had no leverage. Roarke may be nearby, or he could be not in the house at all. He’d enter to find her with a massive hole in her head, her brains scattered all over the floor.
The door opened again, and the situation got worse.
Isaiah Clark was standing there, leather jacket, heavy boots, and a gun on his hip. He took one look at the scene with a dangerous, steady gaze.
“What in the hell?” he asked, calmly stepping forward.
“These two are idiots,” Isabelle said. “Shoot her; we can throw her body at my brother’s bar.”
This was it, oblivion. She knew she would die one day, no one got through life without that inescapable ending. She also knew there was a very real chance it would be a violent death. She took her job knowing that may come to pass, that her death would not be quick or comfortable, that it may be painful and it may be brutal on her body. Pain never scared her. Death was a looming, fearful unknown, but she never shied away from that truth. Now she was sitting there with a real fear for what was going to happen to those she left behind. Roarke would be devastated, her uncle would blame himself, her child would never live.
She had a strange sort of peace with it. She wasn’t going to fight back, she wasn’t going to make it worse. She would move gently into that goodnight. She would not rage. She would not try to take on the universe and all its plans. She would let it happen. She was ready, she could take it.
And then there was a crash upstairs.
Isabelle and Isaiah drew their eyes up the stairs like sling shots or snipers searching for the enemy. They looked up with the snap of their necks and Hanna jumped at the sound, feeling her heart rate spike. She might die of a heart attack before the bullet ever got close to entering her brain.
Without a word, both Isabelle and Isaiah rushed up the stairs. Nothing was more powerful than the fear for one’s child, even in the most disgusting human beings.