The sound system was still bragging for him, like the party hadn't noticed the night had kinked sideways.
"Height six point three-three feet—one-ninety-three centimeters—weight two-ten pounds, just twenty-five years old!"
"Five straight Super Bowl championships, five straight Super Bowl MVPs, six regular season MVPs!"
"Give it up for our Texan legend at quarterback, from the Dallas Cowboys… Gavin King!"
He'd heard that intro enough to hate it. Numbers used to light him up; tonight they varnished a cracked door. The applause track crackled somewhere in the suite while real sound rose under it—shouts down the hall, a glass exploding, someone yelling to kill the music.
Gavin killed the speakers. Silence brought the smell of tequila and chlorine. The exterior window smeared the backyard into light: pool blue, hedge black, threadbare reds from the dance lights. The bathroom's glass was a second pane inside the first. Between them, Gigi slammed into the world.
She bounced off the shower enclosure like a strobe—forehead, shoulder, cheekbone—again. Blood had turned her hair into ropes. Every hit left a fresh arc. The first knock he'd thought was a slip. The second was her face.
"Gigi," he said. "Look at me."
She looked: iris dark, pupil blown, lipstick on her teeth. Her lips pulled back. Then she hurled herself forward, forehead-first, as if bone could pass through tempered glass.
The pane shuddered. A hairline webbed out from the point.
Gavin backed until his calves touched the low sofa. Cold air slicked his ribs. What is this. What did you take. Downstairs had been bodies on bodies, a tuxedoed guy chewing the back of another guy's neck until people screamed because it wasn't a bit, and outside something that sounded like two panicked handgun shots.
Gigi dragged her hands down the glass; the squeal sang on tile. She spit a small red oval that crawled until gravity found it. "Open," she breathed. "Open. Open."
"No." Coach-calm, the way he called a hot route. "Stay where you are. You're bleeding. I'm calling an ambulance." He patted his shorts—no phone. Maybe under the glitter snow of the bar cart, or in the jacket he'd left downstairs, or in the pool. Something big ran in the hallway; the doorframe complained; a woman sobbed without words.
He needed a weapon. The room offered sculpture-furniture—great for photos, useless in a fight. Above the fireplace: the only edge in sight, a British-style saber in a brass scabbard, polished to movie shine.
He took it down, felt the cheapness in the weight. Decorative steel, dull. The blade rang with a thin embarrassment when he slid it free.
"Don't," he told the glass, because Gigi had angled her body to ram with a shoulder. "Gigi, stop."
She hit again. The crack hunted outward, then halted at the pane's edge like it had remembered a rule. She didn't blink. Blood ran past one eye and glued her lashes. She smiled—a wrong smile, not play, not drunk, not high. Predator with a one-word plan: closer.
He counted her breaths—two fast, one pause—and hated the pattern. Not normal.
The suite door rattled once. He'd locked it out of habit when they came upstairs to get air and laugh at billionaires dancing. Now the handle twitched; someone outside put a shoulder to it. The deadbolt held. Something farther down the hall hit a wall and slid. Words bent into a coyote sound.
Gigi kept time with "open," her fingers mouthing the sound on the glass. Her nails were too clean, painted a neutral that matched the diamond on her hand. The diamond felt like a practical joke on the idea of value. Diamonds weren't rare. Reason was.
"Listen to me," he said, stepping in with the saber, point up like a diagram. "Gigi."
She stopped. For a beat her face relaxed and he saw poster images—Met stairs, racing stripes—then the wrongness washed back in and she charged.
The crack unfurled in four more directions; the pane flexed. Steam fogged the inside glass so every print she left bloomed from contact to ghost. Her hair stuck, came away, left flags of itself.
If it goes, it goes at once, he thought. It'll fall like a page. He set his feet. If she came through: shoulder to redirect, then edge under the chin—ridiculous with a decorative blade. "Don't make me hurt you," he said, meaning it and not knowing which you he meant.
Down the hill sirens stenciled the night. One broke off mid-blare like the car had jumped the curb. Downstairs words surfaced—call nine-one-one, get back, he bit me—and shredded as furniture toppled. The exterior glass made it all sound like a polite zoo.
Her forehead met the pane again. The web whitened. The bathroom lights flickered. She backed up for runway, feet leaving red commas on tile. She showed her teeth. He thought of the pre-game tunnel and how fear slowed the world when he welcomed it. This was that with no rules. His mouth forgot water existed. His stomach remembered tequila.
"Don't," he tried again—and felt the burn at his jaw hinge that meant puke.
She sprinted. For a model she moved ugly and efficient, arms low, chin tucked—as if something had coached her for impact alone. The pane bowed. The crack multiplied into lace. Sound finally got through in a noise he felt in teeth and eyes.
He lunged. The saber's point met the glass the moment it failed. The pane fell in a rush of square-edged pieces—safe for contractors, not safe for people. The tip skittered; his hands bounced. Gigi spilled through, rebounding off the frame on her hip and catching herself with one hand and half of the other. The nails on that hand ripped backward. She didn't scream.
Drugs. Shock. Adrenaline. His brain tried to file it and failed. She kept clawing. The war in his head lasted one beat: help her versus put her down.
He offered the point; she flinched toward it like light. Move wrong and he'd cut her throat with a department-store antique. Move slow and she'd be at his legs. He changed angles, drove his shoulder into her collarbone, and bounced her against the shower curb. Her breath stopped, then her mouth opened in that wrong grin and she tried to bite above his knee through the fabric.
He swore without hearing the word. He yanked his leg and chopped across with the saber. The dull blade left a bright whiplash on her cheek and no cut. She didn't register pain. Her hands kept coming.
The room tilted. He made it three steps to the sink; his stomach revolted—long, humiliating heave that painted the tile. Tequila, citrus, acid, cigar aftertaste. He heard it hit. It spread to her feet.
"—oh—" he said, and laughed once because laughing was a hinge away from screaming. "Oh, hell. Too much. Way too much."
She didn't glance at the mess. The only thing that registered was him. She crawled through safety glass like a lizard over salt. Blood wasn't leaving her so much as moving around. She put her left hand flat; he watched the remaining nails wrench and held still and felt the careful version of himself—the rookie taught to respect injuries—be overruled by the person who had learned to make choices at speed.
He wiped his mouth and found the saber with a sticky palm. The deadbolt thumped; something hit the door again. "Stop it," he told the door. "Stop it," he told Gigi.
She levered to her feet in a single awful motion. The wrong smile widened. If she could stand on those toes after what the glass had done, normal had retired.
"Gigi," he said. "Hey. It's me."
"Open," she answered, automatic as a finger tap. "Open. Open."
The blade wavered; he stilled it. Feet, read, plant, deliver, the coach in him said. Next hit, the quarterback insisted. No field here—only bodies and a dead plan.
She came again. He drove the point into the notch above her collarbone to interrupt, not kill. She jerked back, then forward harder. Teeth scraped cloth. He pivoted and shoved instead of cut, taking her across the shoulders and turning her into the shower corner and the marble ledge that used to hold shampoo when this was a house and not a kill box. Impact made a bright sound. She slumped, then coiled.
"Don't," he said. "Please don't." He wasn't sure who he asked.
Her eyes rolled. For a blink she looked past him and fear flickered. Then purpose returned in one syllable. "Open." She launched.
He didn't do the heroic thing. He did math. If she breaks my leg, I die here. If she gets her teeth into the femoral, I die faster. He struck low across the shin with the flat, then put all his weight into the shove. She pinwheeled, collided shoulder-first with the ragged edge, and fell. Her head struck tile with a sound he'd heard in practice when a helmet broke a face mask.
She stopped moving.
He didn't. He waited for the counter a good defender always had. It didn't come. Her chest moved a little. Then it didn't. Then it did again, once, then not at all.
Sirens moaned outside. The suite sounded scooped of air. He slid down the wall until the saber point bumped the floor. The smell of sick and bleach gave him another small convulsion. He stared at her feet because they were easiest to count, and after a long time he understood the number.
Gigi was dead.
He wished that were the end of it.
It wasn't. She had died like a zombie—ugly, relentless to the last push. And the pounding on the suite door started up again.