Chapter 6 - Freefall Kinship
The wind off the Hudson was a physical wall, freezing and violent, tearing the tailored silk of my dress against my skin as Larkin dragged me onto the narrow, cantilevered ledge of the sixty-first-floor balcony. Sixty stories below, the flashing blue and red emergency lights of federal cruisers painted the Manhattan asphalt like bleeding neon. Shards of safety glass, still raining down from the shattered window, pinged against the metal railing around us.
Inside the penthouse, the unbadged tactical team had swarmed Arthur Vance, their silenced weapons spitting sharp, concussive pops that vibrated through the soles of my steel-tipped stilettos.
"Jump," Larkin yelled over the howling gale, his dark hair whipped across his forehead, his face stripped of every trace of corporate coldness. He was bleeding from a shallow gash on his temple where a stray fragment of glass had clipped him.
"Are you insane?" I screamed back, my fingers digging into his wrist where I still held the flash drive. "We're sixty floors up! There's nothing down there except pavement!"
"There's a maintenance gantry ten feet below us," Larkin shouted, pointing a gloved finger down into the vertical darkness. "A window-washer platform. It's our only way off this floor before Vance's clean-up crew clears the stairwell and executes every living soul in this building."
Before I could process the geometry of the drop, a heavy boot slammed against the remaining door frame inside the penthouse. A tactical operative, his face obscured by a matte-black ballistic helmet, leveled an assault rifle directly at the balcony opening.
Larkin didn't hesitate. He hooked his arm around my waist, lifting my feet entirely off the stone, and threw us both off the ledge.
The stomach-dropping sensation of freefall lasted less than a second before our bodies collided with a violent, metal-rattling crash against the rusted grating of the suspended window-washer gantry. My breath exploded from my lungs in a ragged gasp. Pain shot up my right shoulder, but Larkin’s body had taken the brunt of the impact, shielding me from the brutal iron frame.
"Get up," he panted, his weight pressing down on me for a fraction of a second before he rolled off, scrambling to the edge of the platform and grabbing the manual descent lever.
Above us, the tactical operative leaned over the broken balcony railing, his rifle tracking our position.
I didn't think. I reached into the hidden holster strapped to my thigh—a small, snub-nosed .38 revolver I had carried every day for six months and never fired—and brought it up with both hands, steadying my grip against the violent sway of the gantry.
The operative’s finger was tightening on the trigger when I squeezed mine.
The gunshot cracked like thunder in the enclosed canyon of glass and steel. The bullet missed his helmet by inches, but the sudden shock forced him to duck back inside.
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At that exact second, Larkin yanked the descent lever. With a screech of tortured steel cables, the gantry dropped twenty feet into the shadows, plunging us into the freezing mist below just as a burst of automatic gunfire chewed the metal railing right where my head had been a second before.
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