Clementine coldly eyed her daughter. After a moment, she drew back her fist. Opal shuddered, waiting for the blow—but it never came.

Instead, Clementine slammed her hand into the wall beside Opal’s head. The sharp, stinging crack reverberated down the hallway, seeming almost as loud as the bomb blast. But the giant didn’t stop with just one punch. Again and again, Clementine rammed her fist into the marble inches away from her daughter’s head. Opal stood there and watched her. Mouth open, nostrils flared, eyes wide. Her expression a far more terrified version of her mother’s murderous one.

Finally, Clementine stopped her assault on the wall and glared at her daughter once more.

“I don’t care about the damn bomb,” Clementine said, every word as sharp and clipped as the punches she’d just plowed into the wall. “What I do care about is the fact that someone used it to lure us away from Grayson and the vault. Something that is your fault, my darling girl, since you assured me that everyone was corralled inside the rotunda.”

“Yeah, Opal.” Dixon sneered, sidling up to Clementine’s side. “That was your job. Looks like you’re the screw-up tonight. How does it feel, cuz?”

Clementine immediately turned on her nephew, grabbed him by the throat, and lifted him off the ground. She slammed him back into the wall and kept him there.

I eyed Dixon’s feet, which were dangling six inches above the floor. Dixon was no lightweight, but Clementine was holding him up with one hand like he didn’t weigh any more than a wet kitten. My gaze flicked to the basketball-size dent she’d punched into the marble wall. Impressive, indeed.

“And you, you little weasel,” Clementine growled. “You can’t do anything without half-assing it or fucking it up completely. Where do you think our surprise guest got the bomb from? My guess is the bridge or one of the moving trucks. Which means that whoever it is has probably been following you around for who knows how long, watching you check the charges with your phone, and you were too stupid to even notice.”

Dixon’s mouth opened and closed, and opened and closed again, but the only sound that came out was a faint, pitiful squeak, the kind a rabbit might make before a wolf snapped its jaws around the rabbit’s throat. Clementine shook him once, then dropped her hand and stepped back. Dixon landed in a heap on the floor, a perfect red handprint ringing his throat like a rash.

“We’ll fix it, Mama,” Opal said, her voice a little higher and more desperate than before. “We’ll find whoever’s responsible for this and make them pay.”

“You’d better hope so,” Clementine growled. “You’d both damn well better hope so.”

Opal vigorously nodded, trembling as badly as a bobblehead doll someone had set to bouncing.