Choices. Everyone had to make them. Some were uglier than others.

When she heard footsteps in the hall – heavy-booted ones – she saw her solution. She retreated into the waiting room, measured the distance between her and those footfalls. When they drew close, she counted to three, swung out and fired.

Hope got off two shots – the first a guess, the second aimed. Both hit the guy in the legs. He looked at her, blinking stupidly, then crashed to the floor.

The chair in the office squeaked. Hope flung herself against the wall and listened. Another squeak. Just her luck to drop the guy at a break between songs.

"Hello?"

No heel clicking accompanied the cautious greeting, and Hope pictured the woman standing beside her desk. She eased along the wall and dropped beside the Cabal guy. One hand checked his pulse while the other trained her gun on the office doorway.

A tentative click. Then another.

The man's pulse beat, thready, as if that second tranquilizer dart had been overkill. He'd be down for a while, but he'd recover.

"Hello?"

Three clicks. A shadow darkened the office doorway. The woman's hand appeared on the door. The shadow of her head moved forward, to peek.

"Hey!" Hope called.

Startled, the woman jumped back, her hands flying up, arms appearing. Hope's dart hit the back of her wrist. Hope dove through the nearest door before the woman saw her. A few seconds passed, then the boom of her body hitting the floor.

Hope was stepping out when the tramp of boots sent her scurrying back. Muted voices came from the stairwell.

Then, "He'll take her to the roof."

Karl's voice, slurred like he was drunk… not that she'd ever seen Karl drunk. The relief of hearing his voice lasted two seconds before she saw the advance guard sprawled across the hall, and heard those steps tramping closer to the landing.

She ran to the woman. A quick pulse check, then she pushed her back into the office and closed the door. She grabbed one of the guard's legs and heaved. His gun skidded across the floor. She froze. The footsteps continued, that same unhurried tramp.

She barely managed to drag the guard six inches before those footfalls thankfully passed the landing and continued up. She snatched his gun, put it in the office, then hauled the guard inside.

She was back in the hall – her own gun in hand – when footsteps pattered down the stairs.

"Take him up. I'll grab Rogers."

Irving Nast. Her breath stopped in her throat.

"Sir?" one of the team said.

Call him back. Tell him you'll get Rogers. Please, please -

"He was scouting the third floor," the man continued.

Irving thanked him and his footsteps continued. Hope shot into the office with the unconscious team member. The stairwell door creaked open before she had time to close hers. Her heel thumped the guard's arm. She carefully stepped over it and retreated into the shadows.

It was useless, of course. Nast was hunting for this missing guard. He'd see the body through the open doorway. He'd turn on the light and then…

Then what?

Did she have a choice?

Her heart battered her ribs, keeping double time with Irving's brisk, purposeful strides.

She gripped the tranq gun. A hair tickled her cheek, caught in an air current. It tickled back and forth, back and forth, making every inch of skin creep, every muscle tense, like a guitar tuner, cranking her nerves tighter and tighter.

Irving Nast's shadow passed the open door first. He strode past, eyes straight ahead, confident that his employee would come to him.

Hope watched him, her gaze fixed on his shoulder blade, gun trained on his upper arm. A perfect shot. Just pull the trigger.

She wasn't ready. Let him get past, while she took a moment to catch her breath, make a decision, yank that damn tickling hair out -

She fired.

Unprepared for the recoil, Hope was knocked back and, for a second, she thought she'd been shot. It was only as Nast faltered that she realized she'd pulled the trigger.

As he fell, she shuddered so hard she nearly dropped the gun. It wasn't chaos bliss but relief, so sweet it felt as good as chaos.

In pulling the trigger, she'd set her course. She'd shot him so now she had to follow through, had to kill him, as if in "accidentally" pulling that trigger, she'd absolved herself of responsibility for the rest. She had to go with the choice that she'd wanted to pick: their safety over the council.

To protect herself and Karl, Irving Nast had to die. That wasn't the demon talking. It was her, because all this talk of her and the demon was an artificial distinction that she knew in her heart was bullshit. There was no Hope and the demon. There was just Hope, and she wanted the threat of Irving Nast eliminated.

Then, as she pulled out the garrote wire, the zip of it slicing through the silence, she realized what she was about to do.

Rhys blamed the council for her reluctance to kill Irving, which proved that he understood Expisco demons as superficially as he did werewolves. It had nothing to do with laws. It was more than conscience, too.

Hope knew that taking a life was wrong. She felt that more deeply than Karl ever could. If she'd asked him why, when they needed to kill, he did it for them, he'd use that as an excuse: because he didn't mind and she did. The truth, as they both knew, was that the taking of a life was the one experience she'd denied the demon. Death was the demon's purest joy. A high like no other. If she took that life, would she find a new high? If so, could she live with that?

Enjoying death didn't have Hope wandering palliative care wards or racing to accident scenes. Her addiction was fed by serendipity – she took sustenance where she found it and never sought it out.

And yet…

Here was where Hope's drive to find her limits ended. Here she looked down from the precipice and saw the rest of her life consumed by a blaze of temptation and self-loathing.

She crouched beside Irving, garrote wire stretched between her hands. She knew she had to do it. Whatever the cost. Kill or be killed.

She pressed the wire against his throat. His skin whitened along it. She imagined that furrow filling with blood. Would he wake up at the last second, his windpipe severed, life-blood pumping out, gasping for breath, seeing her sitting there, patiently waiting for him to die?

Her bile rose. She swallowed it, burning down to her gut, adding to the roiling pit.

She couldn't do it. She couldn't. Not like this. Why a garrote? Why not a gun or a syringe of poison?

Was that what she wanted? A clean, quiet way to murder someone?

No, if she had to kill, it should be like this, messy and raw and undeniable.

She pushed down on the wire. A single spot of blood welled, then seeped along the wire.

Make it quick. If it's quick he won't wake -

Yes! If he didn't wake up, there wouldn't be any chaos.

Hope picked up the gun, ready to give Irving a second shot of the tranquilizer. Make sure he was out cold and then -

Her gorge rose again, bringing a fresh surge of bile. Sweat stung her eye; she swiped it back with a trembling hand.

She couldn't, couldn't, couldn't. Had to. Had to. Had to.

A crash from the stairwell sent Hope jetting to her feet. A thump, then another, the rapid bump-bump-bump of a body tumbling down stairs. A shout answered by a roar.

Another crash. Another bump-bump-bump. A vision flash came. Karl had turned on his captors, sending them flying into the stairwell walls and tumbling down. Hope grabbed the gun and the wire, the thread zipping back into its case as she flew down the hall.

She could say she was going to his aid, but she knew she wasn't. She was running, running as fast as she could. Running from Irving Nast to Karl, from the problem to the solution. Every pound of her feet drove a dagger of shame into her heart. But she kept running.