Chapter 134: The Way They Actually Die

Chapter 134: Chapter 134: The Way They Actually Die

Silver laid Dahlia gently across her bed, smoothing the blanket over her with hands that hadn’t shaken like this in decades, and pressed his lips briefly to her forehead before straightening.

"I’ll be right back," he told her, though she gave no sign of hearing him. "Don’t go anywhere."

The joke landed hollow even to his own ears. He pulled the door shut behind him anyway, some old instinct insisting on the small courtesy of privacy even now, even with the house in ruins around them, and made his way back down the hallway toward the study.

The gun cabinet was exactly where he’d left it, mercifully untouched, and Silver keyed the combination with fingers that had gone steady again, the earlier tremor burned off by purpose. He pulled a pistol free, checked the magazine out of habit rather than doubt, and tucked a second into his waistband before closing the cabinet again.

His forearm still ached faintly, a low, unfamiliar hum beneath the skin where the tattoo had settled itself back into stillness. He didn’t have time to think about it. He’d think about it later, once his daughters were both accounted for and the house had stopped producing things that used to be people.

He descended the main staircase again, more carefully this time, weapon raised, eyes sweeping every shadow the way three decades of dangerous business had trained him to. The body of his security guard still lay crumpled at the base of the stairs, head separated cleanly from the shoulders, and Silver stepped around it without breaking stride.

A groan echoed from the direction of the kitchen.

He moved toward it, pistol steady, and found another one of his staff — a housekeeper, judging by the remains of her uniform — stumbling through the wreckage of the pantry with the same clouded, hungry eyes as the first.

Silver didn’t hesitate. He’d hesitated once already tonight, and it had cost him nothing but a torn shirt sleeve and a still-unexplained miracle. He wasn’t inclined to test his luck twice.

He fired twice into her chest.

The rounds struck true, center mass, the kind of shot that would have dropped any ordinary threat instantly. The creature staggered back a step, black fluid spattering across the ruined cabinetry behind her.

She kept coming.

"What the—" Silver backed up a step, recalibrating faster than the shock should have allowed, firing twice more as she closed the distance. Both rounds landed. Neither slowed her enough.

He retreated further, putting the kitchen island between them, mind racing through everything he thought he understood about how a body responded to being shot and finding none of it applying here. She wasn’t flinching from the wounds. She wasn’t bleeding the way a person bled. She was simply coming, relentless, mindless, entirely unbothered by the holes now visible in her torso.

His back hit the edge of the counter. She lunged.

Silver’s arm came up on pure instinct, the pistol barrel rising faster than conscious thought could direct it, and he fired one final round point-blank as she closed the last of the distance between them.

The bullet took her directly between the eyes.

She dropped instantly, all at once, the sudden absence of motion so complete it startled him more than the fight itself had. Silver stood frozen for a long moment, chest heaving, staring down at the body now slumped against the overturned kitchen island.

He looked at the pistol in his hand. Then at the two other wounds visible on her chest, dark and unmoving now, wounds that had done nothing at all while she was still upright.

"The head," he said quietly, testing the words out loud like they might make more sense spoken than thought. "It’s the head."

He filed that away with the same iron discipline he’d used on everything else tonight — useful information, catalogued, ready to be acted on the next time it mattered, which he suspected would be soon and often. He checked his remaining ammunition. Two rounds left in the first magazine, a full second one still tucked in his waistband. Not enough to feel comfortable. Enough to keep moving.

He swept the rest of the ground floor methodically, room by room, the way he’d once swept buildings during years he didn’t discuss with anyone still living. The dining room, empty. The east sitting room, empty, though a shattered window suggested something had come through it recently and moved on. The security office, its monitors all dark, the backup generator apparently having failed sometime after whatever had happened here began.

He was rounding back toward the main hall, still cataloguing, still counting rounds, when the front doors slammed open hard enough to crack against the interior wall.

Silver spun, weapon raised, finger already tightening against the trigger—

"Don’t shoot!" The voice was rough, breathless, a man silhouetted in the doorway with a pistol of his own raised and a face streaked with blood that clearly wasn’t all his own. "It’s me — it’s Victor, don’t—"

Silver’s finger eased off the trigger, recognition landing a half-second behind the voice. "Victor?"

"Sir." Victor lowered his weapon slightly, chest heaving, eyes wild with the particular desperation of a man who’d clearly expected to find something far worse than a living father-in-law standing in the wreckage of his own front hall. His gaze swept past Silver, frantic, searching. "Dahlia. Where’s Dahlia, is she—"

"Alive," Silver said quickly, watching something in Victor’s face crack open with relief before the tension returned just as fast. "Upstairs. She won’t wake up."

"Won’t—" Victor’s jaw tightened, already moving past him toward the staircase before Silver had finished the sentence. "Show me."

Silver fell into step beside him, weapon still raised, eyes still sweeping every doorway they passed, and felt something in his chest ease by a fraction — not relief, not yet, not with Persephone still unaccounted for and the house still full of unanswered questions — but something adjacent to it, the particular steadying comfort of no longer being the only person standing between his family and whatever this world had become.

"Tell me what you know," Silver said, taking the stairs two at a time. "All of it. Now." ℴ

Victor didn’t slow down. "It’s going to take longer than the walk to her room."

"Then talk fast."