Chapter 5 - Water and Briars
The beam blinded them for a split second, catching Maya’s uplifted chin and the pale reflection of Julian’s teeth as he bared them. Julian didn't wait for the guards to orient their weapons; he vaulted upward, catching the metal edge of the hatch opening with both hands and driving his steel-toed boot straight into the face of the first guard leaning through the gap.
The man howled, falling backward onto the elevator roof with a dull thud.
""Out! Now!"" Julian barked, catching Maya by the belt of her trousers and hoisting her through the opening with effortless, violent leverage.
Maya rolled onto the grease-slicked roof of the elevator cab. The shaft was an immense concrete chimney stretching eighty feet upward into the gut of the hotel, crossed by thick black conduit lines and tension cables. Ten feet below them, through an open service grate in the concrete wall, rushed the dark, churning water of the city's overflow spillway.
Hauer was already recovering, swinging a telescoping baton toward Maya’s ribs. She ducked beneath the arc, planting her heel into the guard’s knee joint. The joint popped; Hauer stumbled, but his trailing arm caught her shoulder, ripping her mock-neck collar and exposing the small, silver birthmark shaped like a crescent moon at the base of her throat.
Julian saw it. His whole body locked for half a heartbeat. That mark was not in any file; it was not on any forged paper. It was the mark Arthur Vance had carved into the family crest above their summer estate fireplace.
Julian grabbed Hauer by the lapels of his charcoal suit, lifted the two-hundred-pound guard clear off the roof of the elevator, and slammed him against the concrete wall of the shaft. ""Who authorized lethal force in this building?"" Julian snarled into the man's face.
""Cross,"" Hauer gasped, blood trickling from his split lip. ""Not Julian. Evelyn Cross owns the contract tonight.""
""Good to know,"" Julian said, and dropped the man five feet down into the maintenance gantry.
Julian turned back to Maya, grabbing her hand. His grip was tight, desperate, and entirely different from the aloof man at the banquet table. ""The spillway drops into the lower basin near pier fourteen. Can you swim the undertow?""
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""I grew up on the southern docks,"" Maya said, breathing hard. ""I taught myself in worse water than this.""
A gunshot cracked from the landing three floors above them, the bullet sparking brightly off the steel suspension cable an inch from Julian's head. Without another word, Julian pulled Maya with him, and they plunged into the roaring black water of the spillway.
