Chapter 6 - The Shattered Glass
The heavy brass lamp struck Marcus Kane with a sickening, metallic crunch, glancing off the hard bone behind his left ear.
He didn't collapse. The man was built like a reinforced concrete pillar, conditioned by twenty years of prison yards and back-alley turf wars. The blow split his scalp, sending a thick line of dark crimson leaking down his neck, but it only made him grunt in savage irritation.
Kane spun around with terrifying speed, his left arm lashing out like a piston.
The back of his forearm caught Nora squarely across the collarbone, throwing her off her feet. She crashed hard against the wooden bureau, sending an assortment of hairpins and picture frames shattering across the floorboards. Pain flared white-hot through her shoulder, knocking the air clean out of her lungs.
Kane dropped the lead pipe, shaking his bleeding head to clear the ringing. A slow, sickening grin spread across his face as he looked down at Nora gasping on the floor.
"Thomas raised a fighter," Kane rasped, wiping blood from his cheek with the back of his dirty sleeve. "Too bad he didn't teach you how to hit hard enough to kill."
He took a menacing step toward her, his heavy leather boot coming down right beside her hand.
From inside the closet, a desperate, shrill scream erupted.
"Get away from my mommy!"
Abby burst through the rack of coats, clutching a heavy iron fireplace poker she had dragged into the closet earlier that week to play make-believe. The seven-year-old girl charged forward, swinging the rusted iron rod with all her might, striking Kane across the shin.
The strike barely bruised him, but the shock of a child attacking him made Kane falter for a half-second. He looked down at Abby, his eyes widening in predatory realization as he caught sight of the birthmark shaped like an irregular crescent moon resting just below her collarbone—exposed where her sweater had snagged.
"Look at that," Kane whispered, his voice turning uncharacteristically soft and chilling. "The crescent mark. The Vance girl's bloodline is real. You're worth half a million to the syndicate in Detroit, kid."
Kane reached down with his massive hand to snatch Abby by the neck of her sweater.
Nora didn't think. Driven by pure, primal maternal fury, she lunged upward from the floor, grabbing a jagged, six-inch shard of mirror that had broken from the bureau frame. She drove the thick glass straight into the meat of Kane’s thigh.
Kane roared in agony, stumbling backward into the doorway, clutching his bleeding leg. Blood poured through his fingers, soaking into his jeans.
"Run, Abby!" Nora screamed, scrambling to her feet and shoving her daughter behind her toward the open bedroom window. "Out the window! Run to the lake!"
Abby scrambled onto the sill, tumbling out onto the soft, melting snow outside.
Kane snarled, pulling the bloody glass shard from his leg and tossing it aside. He lunged toward Nora with bare hands, his face twisted into an expression of murderous rage.
A deafening crack shattered the silence of the cottage.
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The bedroom window facing the front porch disintegrated in an explosion of glass and wood splinters. A high-caliber rifle slug tore clean through Kane’s right shoulder, spinning him halfway around and slamming him into the bedroom wall.
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