Because she had done this before. Not this exact street, not this exact gun. But she had stood frozen once, in a dark apartment on Ashland Avenue, and watched someone she loved fall to the floor while her own feet refused to move. She had lived every day since inside the wreckage of that one, unbearable silence. And when that little girl had screamed thirty seconds ago, it hadn’t sounded like a stranger’s child. It had sounded exactly like her sister.
The man’s finger tightened on the trigger. “You really willing to die for people you don’t even know?”
Brielle’s grip on the rod didn’t loosen. If anything, it tightened. She didn’t answer him with words. Her answer was already written across her face — in the blood drying on her jaw, in the eyes that refused to drop, in a body that had decided, somewhere in the last three minutes, that it would rather break than bend.