The Ends of the World (The Conspiracy of Us #3)(67)

We crept to the stairs, and I looked up to see them winding around and around. Down here the stairwell was nearly pitch-black, but it got lighter as they went higher. There was a wrongness to it I couldn't place. I saw a tremor go through Stellan, but we crept up the stairs. Three flights up, I saw where the light was coming from. Off the stairway landing, the building's front was normal and intact, but the back had been charred to nothing, letting the moonlight in.

I knew where Stellan had to be leading us. His family's apartment. There was more left of this floor-the hallway was still here, and some of the apartments still had their doors, and even parts of walls. Many of them, though, opened straight into the night, that ghostly silver light filtering in.



       
         
       
        

Stellan stopped in front of one with no door at all, glanced behind us, then tiptoed inside, his gun drawn.

The room was nothing more than a blackened box. The wall between it and the next apartment over was partially intact, but the outside wall was gone, and the top branches of a tree outside had woven their way in, its leaves snapping in the breeze.

Stellan stood frozen in the doorway. It was eerily quiet, but Lydia's voice echoed in my head. Always one step ahead. And to do that, she preyed on our weaknesses. She knew Stellan wouldn't risk Anya. Apparently she knew before I did that I wouldn't let him come alone.

She didn't know that she had a weakness, too, even now that Cole was dead. She didn't know we'd exploit it. We just had to get through this.

I rested my hand on Stellan's forearm. "She brought you here because she knew it would bother you," I murmured.

He nodded hard and kept going. The next room was slightly less burned. In the corner I could make out what looked like an armchair, facing a huge box of a TV on a dresser. Closer, a charred baby's crib, covered in bright green moss, half the wall between the rooms collapsed over it. The far half of the room was gone. It was like time had stopped the night of the fire, leaving everything in this building untouched.

Stellan whispered something in Russian that could have been a curse or a prayer. We picked our way over burned debris into a bathroom where inches of brackish water sat in an unburned claw-foot tub, and exposed electrical wires rained from the ceiling.

"She's not here," he said under his breath. "She has to be here." Then, "Lydia!" he shouted.

So much for trying to sneak up on her. I grabbed him, his face in my hands. He tried to push past me, and I shook him, like he'd done to me at the border crossing. "Stop," I ordered in a whisper. "She's doing this on purpose to make you panic so you'll make a mistake."

His eyes flicked from me, to the door, to me. "Okay, yes. I'm-"

Finally, there was a sound. But it wasn't my sister. It was his.

Stellan's whole body tensed. He shook my hands off. "Anya!" he yelled.

The scream came again, its echo bouncing against Stellan's voice.

Stellan took off running. "Lydia!" he bellowed.

I chased him until he came to a sudden halt in a dim vestibule. Another set of stairs led down in one direction and up in the other, where otherworldly light filtered inside. I could see Stellan shaking with the effort to hold himself back, but he waited for me and gestured: up or down? Anya screamed again, and both our heads shot up. 

Halfway up the stairs, everything went to hell.

There was a bang, and the wall next to me exploded. Stellan ducked, yanking me with him. I hit the filthy stairs on my hands and knees, looking up to see four shadows on the landing above us. We knew Lydia likely wouldn't have a huge security force with her.

Stellan plowed forward into them. He grabbed one, throwing him over the banister. He hit the ground two stories below with a thud, and didn't move. Stellan grappled with the second one, holding his body between himself and the third, who looked frantically for a clear shot, and a fourth, in a black baseball cap, who hung back. I hoped Stellan remembered the plan in his current state.

Anya's voice rang out again in frantic Russian.

"Lydia!" Stellan bellowed. "Let her go!"

I hunkered against the wall, waiting for an opening where I might be able to help, but Stellan didn't need it. He snapped the neck of the guy he was holding with a quick twist. As he yelled a string of something in Russian-calling to Anya or cursing at the men, I wasn't sure-he shoved the body into the third guy and, grabbing the barrel of his gun, wrenched it from his hands and smacked him in the head with the butt of it, felling him immediately.

I jumped up and grabbed the back of his shirt before he could attack the fourth guy. He was wearing a black baseball cap with a bandana under it, just like Rocco had said he would be.