Chapter 4 - The Pink Rabbit EarsGraham’s eyes narrowed as he aimed the silver pistol at the stack of old wooden crates.
“Show yourself,” Graham ordered, his voice echoing off the damp brick walls. “Or I start shooting through the wood.”
Before Silas could shout a warning, a small, indignant voice piped up from the shadows.
“You’re being very loud,” Poppy announced, stepping out from behind the crates with her stuffed rabbit dragging on the floor. “And you’re ruining the dark.”
Graham blinked, genuinely stunned. He lowered the gun by a fraction of an inch, staring down at the three-year-old child as if she were an alien life form.
“A child?” Graham muttered, looking back at Silas with an incredulous sneer. “You kept a maid’s brat in your own mansion during a hostile takeover? What kind of sentimental fool have you become?”
“Step away from her, Graham,” Silas growled, straining against the blue industrial cord so violently that the metal legs of the chair screeched against the concrete.
“Or what? You’ll bleed on my shoes?” Graham laughed, a harsh, grating sound. He pivoted his body, turning the gun away from Silas’s head and aiming it directly at the space between Poppy and the crates. “Well, this solves a multitude of problems. Loose ends are so messy. But a tragic accident during a break-in? The Chicago underworld will mourn for days.”
Poppy tilted her head, completely unimpressed by the firearm pointed at her. She looked down at the floor, spotted something shiny, and bent over.
It was the broken pink plastic scissor.
The one shaped like rabbit ears.
One blade was bent at a grotesque angle; the other was smeared with dried blood from where Silas had tried to use it to pry open a locked handcuff link earlier.
“You dropped your ears,” Poppy said helpfully, walking right past Graham’s shiny shoes and holding out the broken toy toward him.
Graham stared down at her, disgusted. “Get away from me, you little—'
He raised his foot to shove her back.
In that fraction of a second—when Graham’s weight shifted entirely to his left leg—Silas didn't think. He didn't plan. He used every ounce of his remaining strength, lunged forward with his entire body weight, and slammed his heavy iron chair directly into the back of Graham’s knees.
Crack.
Graham shrieked as his legs buckled. The silver pistol flew from his hand, clattering across the concrete floor and sliding into the dark shadows near the drain.
Graham hit the floor hard, his breath leaving his lungs in a ragged gasp.
Silas’s chair tipped over sideways, crashing down onto the stone floor with a deafening thud, trapping Silas beneath it, but his right hand—freed by a fraction of an inch from the snapping industrial cord—managed to reach out.
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His fingers brushed against something small and sharp lying right beside his shoe.
The broken pink plastic scissor.
