Page 175 of Mile High Ruin

When I look back, Camille is on the ground.

Sloane isn’t there.

“Sloane!”

There’s no answer.

I move toward the path immediately, scanning the garden as men rush in both directions around me, but there’s no dark hair, no pale dress, no glimpse of her between the hedges.

She was right there. I saw her. I saw the way she looked at me after I shot Camille.

That’s the part I can’t stop seeing.

Camille was running toward Sloane with a bloody knife in her hand.

Anton had already told me through the radio that Iosef had been attacked inside the house, and when I saw Camille coming out of the dark with that knife still in her hand, heading straight for Sloane, there had been nothing to consider. I aimed at her and fired.

I would make the same choice again.

What I didn’t expect was the look on Sloane’s face afterward.

She hadn’t known about Iosef. All she saw was Camille running toward her, saying something I couldn’t hear, and then me raising a gun and putting a bullet into her.

“Sloane!”

Still nothing.

Anton reaches me near the path. “East side is being contained.”

“I don’t care about the east side. Where is Sloane?”

He looks around. “I thought she was with you.”

Something inside me twists hard enough to hurt. “She was.” I turn toward the gate. “Get men on every exit.”

“They already are.”

“Then put more.”

“Vadim—”

“Do it.”

He doesn’t argue again.

I move farther into the garden, past Camille’s body and toward the line of trees where Sloane might have run. There are too many people outside now. Guards. Staff being moved toward the house. Men checking the hedges and outer wall. Every movement catches my eye because for half a second I think it might be her.

None of them are.

My house is under attack.

The thought comes almost separately from everything else, and when it finally settles properly in my head, the anger that follows is so complete that it blurs my vision for a second. But I have to think clearly.

The garden is full of more people now, which makes it worse rather than better, because every dark shape becomes her for half a second before resolving into one of my men or one of the household staff being moved toward the interior rooms. A security team crosses the lawn carrying one of the injured between them. Another man is shouting that the east service door has been forced. Somebody else reports movement near the outer wall.

None of it matters.

Not until I see her.