Snowbound - Blake Crouch [65]
There was a knock, and his voice passed through the door.
“Gonna let me in, do this easy?”
Devlin looked at the wardrobe braced against the door, realized with a horrifying pressure between her eyes that this was it. End of the line.
“I will break it fucking down.”
The knock was explosive this time. She thought he’d destroyed his hand, until the second and third and fourth blows came and the door began to splinter. She squeezed back the hammer, pulled the trigger twice, shot a pair of holes through the wardrobe and the door, the gun nearly jumping out of her hands. After her ears quit ringing, it was quiet, and she thought for a moment she’d hit him.
Soon he started up again. The wardrobe began to shudder, the ceiling rained plaster dust and paint chips, and the chandelier was tinkling. Her legs quaked so violently, they barely kept her upright. Tears streamed down her face.
As he broke through the back of the wardrobe, she backpedaled toward the closet.
Now she could hear him thrashing around inside. The wardrobe doors were flung open. He stood amid the old dresses, and she could see his face only by the faint illumination of the lantern that he held. The ax thudded blade-first onto the hardwood floor and he climbed out, set the lantern by the ax. He drove his shoulder into the side of the wardrobe and inched it back into the corner. The ravaged door stood exposed, wrenched from its hinges and leaning back against the door frame.
He picked up the flashlight and the ax and came toward her, the dome of his bald head shining with sweat in the firelight. She recognized his blue jeans and boots—Ethan, from breakfast this morning.
He stopped when he saw the revolver in her hand, the weapon twitching with each heartbeat. Devlin put both fingers on the hammer, pulled it back, squeezed the trigger. Click.
He lunged forward, slapped the gun out of her hand. As it slid across the floor, he pressed her up against the window, their hearts heaving into each other. She could feel the cold of the storm through the glass, the cold of the ax blade against her leg. He gazed down at her, their breath pluming in the lantern light. His smelled of wine.
Thunder resounded, porcelain figurines rattling on a nearby bureau.
He ground his teeth together. “He was my brother, and now he’s dead.”
“He was going to—”
“He was my brother. Now he’s dead.”
He let go of the ax and his fingers glided through her black curls, his fist closing on a handful of hair.
“That hurts,” she cried.
“You have no idea.” And he dragged her screaming toward the smashed door, which he kicked aside. She clung to his arm as he hauled her out into the corridor and past the rooms on the fourth floor, the wolf trotting alongside, snapping at her face. It was just the two of them now, the others gone, firelight glinting off the brass numbers.
405.
407.
409.
Devlin screamed, dug her fingernails into his arm. He shrieked and she tore herself away, ran back down the corridor. On the fifth stride, she tripped, fell, glanced back toward the lantern and the shape of Ethan and the wolf, fast approaching.
The moment she regained her footing, he was upon her.
FIFTY-ONE
When she opened her eyes again, the first thing she saw was the blurry image of her feet sliding across the stone floor of the lobby and past the hulking tower of the freestanding hearth, its blaze burned down to the embers, the only light coming from Ethan’s lantern.
Devlin was being dragged by her hair. Her right eye throbbed and she could see only a slit of the world through it. The Texans who stood in their kimonos at the far end of the lobby resembled a collection of phantoms in the dark.
One of them yelled, “What you got there, Ethan?”
“Not your fucking concern!”
Ethan produced a knife from his pocket, grabbed her jacket, and sliced the