“Don’t make me tell you again,” Izzy said, and this time she shifted into their path. “Drop your weapon. Put your hands in the air.”

She kept the directives steady, not letting any of the words slide toward panic. She wasn’t, anyway. Panicking. This part wasn’t new to her. Scumbags with more firepower than brains were a dime a dozen in vice.

A door opened upstairs; they could both hear it through the thin ceiling. And the distraction was a window of opportunity that the intruder immediately seized.

The person lunged, but not toward the door like Izzy had been expecting. The shift in direction surprised her enough that she was slow to follow, and the mistake cost her.

When the intruder whirled, the flashlight blinded Izzy, the white brightness slamming into her retinas so that she couldn’t make out anything other than a silhouette.

Mother fu—she threw her hand up, leaving her grip on her gun unsteady. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t shoot if she couldn’t fucking see.

Izzy ducked low, then shifted as if heading right. At the last second, she spun left, ditching the flashlight’s beam in the process. She tried to draw a bead on the intruder again, but her night vision was shot—the person nothing but a shape crouched over the table.

The reporter’s notebooks. She and Mia had left them there, out for anyone to find. Stupid.

At the sound of Mia’s footfalls on the stairs, the intruder grabbed one of the journals before knocking the rest to the floor, clearly headed toward the door now.

Izzy started moving, yelling, though she didn’t know what she was saying. Anything to get the person to stop just long enough for Mia to get there, so the odds would once again be in Izzy’s favor.

It wasn’t until Izzy reached out blindly, going for an arm as the intruder threw open the door, that she remembered the gun.

While it was true she couldn’t shoot without seeing properly, that didn’t mean the intruder couldn’t.

As the frigid air rushed into the kitchen, she stumbled forward, still determined.

There was a crack, and then hot pain slicing across her shoulder, her fingers still grasping for someone who was no longer there.

Izzy stuffed her knuckles in her mouth as Mia poured alcohol into the shallow wound just below Izzy’s shoulder cuff. Her teeth dug indents into the flesh of her fingers, but she didn’t flinch while the burn unfurled tendrils along her arm.

“Shit,” she hissed finally when she trusted herself with words again. Mia was slapping tape on the gauzy bandage, a thin line of rust-red blood running along its center.

“You were lucky,” Mia said softly, though there was no need to drop her voice. Edie was awake and standing by the sink, watching the scene with a narrowed gaze. “It barely grazed you.”