It had been another long day, and they spent that evening in bed quietly pretending that nobody was trying to murder them, and trying not to put too much pressure on each other to take the quiet intimacy of an evening in a hotel room to an intimacy of a more directly physical kind. Because, actually, things had been … better? They’d still had multiple major rows, one of them about another woman, but fighting had been pretty normal for them over the past year or so. At least here there’d been moments in between of… something else. Of maybe being able to see a way back to how it had been or, perhaps more helpfully, forward to how they could be. Either way, pushing things seemed like a good way to make them worse again.

Besides, it was hard to get really in the mood when you were being constantly interrupted by—

There was a gunshot.

Liza wasn’t sure when her instinctive reaction to hearing the sound of a deadly projectile weapon being discharged in her vicinity had gone from “avoid at all costs” to “spring out of bed and run towards it,” but she sprang out of bed and ran towards it. Or at least as towards it as she could manage given the difficulty of following a single bang in an enclosed space. And it took her a moment to notice that this time, Hanna had come with her.

“You realise,” Hanna pointed out breathlessly as they rounded a corner towards one of the places the shot might have come from, “that we’re now dashing through a dark hotel full of scared people with guns?”

The thought had occurred. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“Fear and firearms, a famously safe combination.”

They moved down the next couple of corridors slightly less recklessly, which might possibly have saved their lives when they near-collided with Sir Richard coming the other way around a corner, holding his pistol in the air like he was re-enacting the title sequence of a James Bond movie.

“Freeze!” He was not, Liza noticed, obeying either the rules about only pointing guns at things you intended to shoot, or the rule about keeping his finger off the trigger.

“Sir Richard, chill.” Liza put her hands very slowly into the air. “It’s us. We don’t have any weapons; we aren’t going to hurt you.”

He looked unconvinced, but to Liza’s immense relief he lowered the gun, although he still had his finger on the trigger. “Sorry. Jumpy. I think it came from this direction.” He set off down the corridor, and, figuring it was best to keep the jumpy man with the gun where they could see him and, perhaps more to the point, where he could see them, Hanna and Liza followed.