What had I been thinking? Lan had a knife.

There were three nylon ropes tied parallel for safety reasons, but Lan would see which one held me. Would he have time to slice through it?

The descent had looked instantaneous as I’d watched the SmART exercise. Now, as I neared the midway point, I felt as if I was traversing the sky in slow motion. My legs dangled. I bit my tongue to avoid shrieking in terror.

With Zoey and the other dogs barking, no one would hear me anyway.

Something was suddenly different. The line holding the pulley—and me—seemed to go slack. I did scream then . . . just as my feet hit the ground. Nowhere near as skilled as the SmART members, I started to fall over—only to feel two hands grab me.

“Lauren, are you okay?” Brooke steadied me, her voice nearly inaudible over the cacophony of dogs nearby, and sirens in the distance.

“Absolutely.” I gave my security director a big, trembling hug. Only for a second, though.

“Then what the hell were you doing? That guy Lan—what did he . . . ?” Her voice tapered off as the other end of the rope slapped down near us. She looked toward the balcony, as did I.

Lan stared over the side, backlighted from the faint illumination that emerged from the room behind him, his face set in a rictus of anger.

“That’s Lan?” Brooke demanded. “Did he disconnect the line while you were on it?”

“He cut it with the knife he threatened to use on me. He’s Darya’s husband. Now, security expert, we need to try to keep him inside the building till the cops get here and arrest him.”

“No problem.”

I thought there were a lot of problems, but I determined to follow her lead. She was the expert, after all.

“The guy could be suicidal,” I called to her as she ran toward the gate between the two properties. “But even so, he’s armed and dangerous. Let’s not do anything foolish.”

“We won’t.” She opened the gate just long enough for Cheyenne to slip through onto the unpaved surface. She shut it in Zoey’s face, though my dog pounded at it to get through.

“Cheyenne could get hurt,” I yelled. “He’s not an attack dog.”

“You haven’t seen him since Gavin gave him lessons.”

No, I hadn’t. Nor had I believed a golden retriever mix would excel in security work. The breed is too sweet. But Brooke had told me that Cheyenne had really gotten into it.

I hoped now that she was right.

There were only two doors in the building, at the front and back. Multiple windows looked out onto the grounds, though. Lan could break one and dash out. I doubted that Brooke was armed. That wasn’t in her job description.

Nor mine.

If Lan did emerge, we’d have to let him go—although the sirens did sound as if the cops were closing in. Lan would probably not get far.

With Cheyenne at her side, Brooke paced the uneven ground at the side of the building, dashing between the front and the rear, where the only security lights were located—and they were dim. I decided to do the same thing on the other side, hoping I’d be able to see well enough to figure out what to do.

“Don’t try to stop him if he does come out,” I yelled to remind Brooke. “That knife of his is wicked.”

“I figured,” she returned. “I saw your rope.”

I did again, too, as I reached the other side of the building. I couldn’t see it well in the darkness, but it was mostly white, with blue stripes swirled around it. It lay on the ground in an uneven snake of lines and coils, still attached a short distance away, at ground level, to another of those tripods the SmART folks had erected, and anchored to stakes screwed into the ground. The other two ropes still hung above.

I saw Lan then—no longer upstairs. He was on the bottom floor, right inside the farthest window. With a crash, he broke it open. I wasn’t sure what he’d used to smash it, but I didn’t want to find out. Like Brooke, I wasn’t armed. Unlike Brooke, I’d seen his knife.

I also had an idea. This side of the building was around the corner from the one I’d zipped down. I grabbed the end of the severed rope as I saw Lan beating away some of the sharp glass shards protruding around the window frame.

He saw me then, too, as he climbed out. He brandished his knife again. “I’ll get you now,” he shouted. If he’d had a mustache, I’d have expected him to curl it in his fingers like one of those old-fashioned caricature villains—Snidely Whiplash, maybe, on the aging reruns of Dudley Do-Right cartoons that had sometimes been on TV when my kids were little.

But caricature or not, he was dangerous with that knife.

I saw Brooke come running. Cheyenne was in front of her. The dog could get stabbed before we humans could protect him.

That couldn’t happen. I took my end of the rope and ran not toward Lan, but away. The tripod held, and in moments I had used the length of the severed rope to shove Lan back toward the building and the open window. The contact and movement startled him—long enough to let Cheyenne get near. Exactly what I didn’t want.

But the dog didn’t attack. Neither did he approach while wagging his tail and attempting to make friends, as goldens were apt to do.

Instead, he stood there growling. Teeth bared, as if he was a vicious pit bull awaiting the chance to jump at Lan’s neck.

So Gavin really had trained him to growl on command.

“Get him away, or I’ll stab him,” Lan yelled.

At the same time, half a dozen police officers ran into the yard through the gate, guns drawn.

“Drop your weapon,” one called. “On the ground. Facedown.”

I’d gathered that Lan didn’t care whether he survived or not. Would he decide to end this now by failing to cooperate—or worse, attacking until they had no choice but to shoot him?

He looked around, from the uniformed cops aiming guns at him, to Cheyenne, to me. The knife was in his hand, stabbing at the air, toward the dog . . .

Then he knelt, putting the weapon onto the dirt. He petted Cheyenne once. “I didn’t really want to hurt you, guy,” he said, so softly that I could barely hear him.

Lan lay facedown on the ground as the cops dashed toward him.

There was barely time for Cheyenne to give Lan’s empty hand a lick. And then the angry, vicious, murderous human—who obviously loved dogs—was in custody.