Fearful Symmetry

Chapter I

John Wick is lost.

Well.

Not lost. Not exactly. Not physically, anyway - he knows where he is, but not why he's here, not what he's doing. A tiny desert town forty-five minutes from Vegas provides no more solutions to his predicament than the heart of New York City had, regardless of what the Bowery King had claimed.

It's been almost a month since they'd formed their shaky alliance. He would have expected the plan to have revealed itself, at least in part, by now.

He supposes the delay in tracking down his quarry is partially because he's distracted. Helen plagues him. Every new loss of her - the puppy, the house, the recordings on his phone, her pictures, his ring - is still as fresh as the moment she'd flatlined in that hospital. She haunts him, dogs his steps, but she's not at all accusatory - no, she'd always been too gentle, too kind for that. She'd loved him too much, and perhaps that's the plague of it. She whispers in his ear, flickers just outside his field of vision, calls him in his dreams. He feels the ache of her in his chest and in his slowly-mending bones and in the stub of his missing ring finger.

It's… difficult. He puts one foot in front of the other, follows the Bowery King's increasingly-incomprehensible plans, loads and reloads his weapons, and every movement, every thought, word, and breath, he drowns in memories of her. Because what else is the point?

What else does he have left?

The dog helps, somewhat. John has become adept at sneaking him into pet-free motel rooms - he seems to be enjoying the constant change of scenery, or at least adapting well to it.

He still doesn't have a name. Helen teases him about this too.

The past will come knocking, as John has discovered it always does and always will, and it will leave ruin in its wake, but for now he lingers, content to mill about in the backwater town of Indian Springs, Nevada. It's as good as anywhere else, even if he still has no idea what he's actually supposed to be doing here.

"I've got an ace in the hole there," the Bowery King had murmured two weeks ago, his voice uncharacteristically low as John recovered in what passed for the medical wing of his tunnels. "We're gonna need her for what comes next. All you have to do is find her."

"Who?" John had rasped on the bed, half out of his mind with pain and betrayal and the urge to kill kill kill thrumming through his blood.

But the King had only smirked and leaned back in his seat, the gold-tipped cane in his left hand spinning endlessly, endlessly. "You'll know her when you see her."

The town is tiny and he's been here for almost two weeks, and so far he's come up empty. He has no idea what this is really supposed to be about, because the Bowery King never shows his full hand. John had only gone along with it despite the lack of details because he'd agreed he needed to get out of the city to recuperate, especially if they were going to launch a full-frontal assault on the High Table and the New York Continental. His body has been beaten to its limits in the weeks since Helen died, and as much as it galls him he has to take the time to regain his full strength if he wants to exact his revenge, and this time, make it permanent. He'd been lucky - if one could really call it that - when he'd fallen from the rooftop of the hotel; his ribs and extremities had taken the worst of the damage, leaving him with several bad fractures and a nasty concussion, but very few actual broken bones. He's still in almost constant pain, of course, but it's pain he can push through, ignore, cast aside while he hunts for the Bowery King's quarry.

There's a park here where he can walk - limp, really - with the dog, and the isolation gives him time to think, to plan his next move if he's unable to find who he's supposed to be looking for. He does not, at this juncture, actually have anything worked out, beyond kill everyone involved, but he'll get there eventually.

Or he won't. He's always had excellent improvisation skills, or so Winston always said.

Not that Winston's opinion on anything matters much, anymore.

The sun is setting. He doesn't really have anywhere he needs to be, or to do, but he could probably use a shower and in any case he's out of food for the dog, so he decides to stop by the store on his way back to the motel.

A whistle brings the animal back to his side - he probably should have a name, although where a person like him is even supposed to start with a normal thing like that is beyond him - and they begin to walk in the direction of main street, where the city's single grocery store is located.

There's no way to sneak a dog inside, and in the interest of keeping his head down he doesn't try - he simply gives a command and his companion sits obediently in the shade of the building. The dog pants a little, even as cooler temperatures set in with the evening. It really is unpleasantly hot here compared to New York, even though it's already mid-October.

It would bother him, if anything did.

The grocery, however, is aggressively air-conditioned, which is a relief - even if it is slightly more crowded than usual given the time of day. He resolves to hurry, making a limping beeline for the dog food. Any brand and size will do, so long as he can carry it without impediment, and he selects a bag at random, grateful the dog isn't the picky type.

He's on his way back towards the registers when… something catches his attention. He'll never be sure, later, what makes him look - an instinct, maybe, or Helen's playful voice in his ear again: look John, another ghost.

Whatever the reason, his head sweeps to the left, and in the same instant, he falters, stumbles to cover the aborted movement and surreptitiously feigns interest in an arrangement of discounted oven cleaner on an endcap.

There's a dead woman in the cereal aisle.

She's oblivious to his scrutiny as she inspects a box of corn flakes, her mouth drawn in a contemplative frown. The tattooed wings that sweep up either side of her neck, black ink stark against pale skin, are what had caught his attention - a part of him is always at least partially focused on scanning his surroundings for distinctive symbols like this one whenever he's in public. The last time he'd seen that particular mark had been in New York, about a year before he'd gotten out the first time.

They'd called her the Blackbird, he recalls after a moment, but her real name is... Moone, maybe? Her first name had been an M too, he's pretty sure. The last he'd heard, she'd run her car into the Hudson, whether by accident or on purpose, and they'd fished her body out two days later - or something resembling her body, apparently, given that she's currently comparing cereal brands fewer than ten feet away from him.

He knows immediately, with the same instincts that have kept him alive all these years, that this is who the Bowery King had sent him to find.

But why?

He hadn't known her well - or at all, really; the extent of his professional association with her can be narrowed down to a ninety-second interaction in the hallway of the Continental six years ago - because Moone wasn't - isn't - an assassin. She's a thief-for-hire, and there had been very little overlap in their work. Viggo had used her only once, if he recalls correctly; most of her contracts had been international, high-profile.

She'd been one of the best, once upon a time - but even that doesn't explain what use the Bowery King would have for a thief in this war he was preparing to wage.

John scowls down at the oven cleaner, wracking his brain for what he could remember about her supposed death. He'd already been out when it happened - the news had come about four months into his retirement, from Aurelio of all people, and mostly in passing. What had he said?

She'd gotten in over her head, that much he can recall - she'd stolen the wrong thing from the wrong person and a car chase gone south had, supposedly, ended her life. What had she taken, and from whom? He's missing something important, and he knows that because he remembers the news surprising him, remembers feeling a flicker of… not quite disgust, exactly, but something close.

If there had been any lingering doubts as to her identity, they disappear the moment she seems to decide on a brand of cereal she likes and makes her way back down the aisle towards him - the long, deep scars stamped in the shape of a perfect X across her mouth are unmistakable. The violent edges are softened with makeup as much as they can be, but short of a mask there's no outright hiding them. He remembers deliberately not looking at them, all those years ago in the hotel, remembers the way she'd curved a sardonic eyebrow like she'd known what he was doing.

Now, she breezes past him like he's not even there, and without so much as glancing in his direction; there's a measured urgency in her steps for someone who'd deliberated so long over whether or not to buy Raisin Bran.

He's careful to keep her in his sightline as he makes his way to a register at her back and pays for the kibble, lingering by the newspaper stand until she finishes her own transaction and passes through the front doors.

He keeps pace several steps behind her for as long as he can - at the very least he can see what kind of car she gets into, whether she's alone.

To his surprise, she'd apparently walked, and moves on foot through the parking lot and across the street to the row of houses on the other side, grocery bags in each hand. He follows her path with his eyes until she disappears down a sidewalk and around a corner, at which point he whistles for the dog and moves to pursue her.

He stays well back, never needing to pretend to turn or be occupied because she never once looks behind her, never once pauses. If she's really still in hiding, she apparently has a reason to believe she's safe - this isn't the paranoid behavior of a fugitive, and no one would know that better than him.

She continues walking for about ten minutes until she comes up on a salmon-colored house at the end of a cul-de-sac, at which point she turns up the driveway. John lingers at the other end of the street, casually kneeling down to pet his dog while still keeping an eye on Moone.

The house is tiny, but quaint, with bird-feeders and windchimes and gnome figurines in the front lawn. It's sickeningly cliche, right down to the white picket fence that rings the property.

There's a pang, somewhere, ringing hollowly in his chest - he resolutely does not think of New York or Helen or the ruin of his home or what he'd tried to build, once upon a time.

Moone disappears through the front door, causing the wreath of fake flowers hanging from the front to sway lazily. Several moments later a teenage girl walks out, her jaw working idly around a stick of bubblegum. She shoves a wad of money in the purse slung across her arm, and when she turns to wave back at the house, a tiny red-headed girl of around five pokes her head out the door, yelling something he can't make out from this distance.

The memory returns like a cartoon light bulb switching on.

That's what Moone had been "killed" for stealing - not money or artwork or information. A child. And not just any child, he recalls, but Henry Kincaid's child, who had supposedly drowned when she did. The Bloody Banker's trademark red hair, now framing the pale, freckled face of the girl at the door, is unmistakable.

"The whole thing's messed up, man," he recalls Aurelio saying when he'd relayed the story over beer one night, shaking his head. "Kincaid's a bastard, don't get me wrong, but to lose a kid like that… it's just messed up."

According to Aurelio, no one knew who'd contracted Moone to take the kid, or if they did, no one ever said anything. Kincaid himself had been remarkably tight-lipped about the whole affair, and hadn't gone on a warpath to find answers, which meant he'd likely already had them and whoever had hired Moone had probably been dealt with swiftly and mercilessly.

But Moone herself had, apparently, escaped unscathed. Her reasoning behind keeping the baby even after the job went south is a mystery, certainly, but not one that concerns him.

There's that not-quite-disgust he'd all but forgotten, rising in his throat and curling his lip. He doesn't need to see anything else. The kid appears happy and healthy and whole, at least, and Moone is alone and apparently quite content in her own version of retirement. She'd succeeded where he had failed.

Whether she'd deserved to or not apparently doesn't factor in to the equation.

Again, the question of what the Bowery King could possibly want with her rises slowly in his mind. The Marker in his pocket takes on a new weight, laden with possibilities, each of them darker and more bewildering than the last.

John has never been the schemer or the strategist, at least not outside the bounds of a contract. He's not designed for the long game, only for action and reaction, taking a hit and swinging back. It's why he's formed this hesitant alliance with the Bowery King in the first place even though he doesn't trust him as far as he can throw him - the King is the person best suited to cut him a clear path to where he needs to be to get his vengeance, and he's always been in favor of the direct approach.

He doesn't know how Moone fits into this plan of theirs, and he's not entirely sure he cares. Ultimately, there is nothing she can do to truly get in the way of his revenge, short of outright killing him, and she's not capable of that.

No one is.

"Come on, boy," he rasps down to his companion, who wags his tail up at him cheerfully, oblivious to his master's sudden dour mood.

Together, the pair of them walk back down the street and towards the motel. Now that he knows where she is, he can work out how best to approach her without being spotted. He can tail her to a neutral location tomorrow, sometime when she's not with the kid - there's no sense in involving her if it can be avoided.

Sofia's snarling, seething hatred in the firelight of her hotel springs to mind, the way she'd practically spat at him for cashing in on his Marker at the risk of her daughter. He'd remembered Santino, then, and hated himself for handling her with the same indifferent desperation.

At least he hadn't firebombed her hotel. But then, he concedes, she didn't refuse.

He shakes his head to clear it. He'll keep clear of the kid, or try, anyway, when he recruits Moone for whatever scheme the Bowery King has up his sleeve.

Hopefully she won't shoot him on sight - this suit isn't bulletproof.

In his distraction, John doesn't notice the car idling at the end of the road, or catch the way the three men inside of it are watching his every move - or that they're covered head to toe in tattoos branding them for the Russian Mafia.

Not until it's too late, anyway.


Madilyn has a bad feeling. She gets them sometimes and they're usually false alarms, especially now that she's well and truly retired, but that knowledge doesn't make it any easier for her to settle down.

The whisper in the back of her brain repeatedly telling her you missed something isn't helping matters.

Across the table from her, Winifred babbles about her day and the craft projects the babysitter had brought over; pink glitter still sparkles between her freckles whenever she tilts her head a certain way. It's too endearing for her to be annoyed about the mess, and Natalie had put wax paper down in a - perhaps futile, considering - attempt to catch the stray bits before they hit the carpet.

Oh well. The living room can do with some livening up, and anyway it's not as though they ever have guests over.

"Did you like my drawing, Mommy?" Winnie asks for what is approximately the eighth time in the hour since she's been home, and for the eighth time Madilyn nods solemnly.

"It's beautiful. Mr. Carroll would like the way your Jabberwock twinkles."

Delighted, Winnie grins widely enough to nearly split her face and goes back to her mac-and-cheese. "I'm gonna do a Jub-Jub Bird next," she says.

"Not a Bandersnatch?" Madilyn asks with some amusement, getting to her feet to clear her own plate. Her daughter has… not quite a fear of the Bandersnatch exactly, but perhaps a healthy wariness of it, which is probably her own fault since she always deepens her voice and makes her fingers into claws whenever she recites that part of the poem.

"No," Winnie says with no small amount of insistence, huffing like her own mother has betrayed her by asking.

Madilyn grins and turns back to the sink to finish washing up. The Jabberwock isn't her daughter's favorite poem, but it's close - the made-up creatures and nonsense words delight her.

The sun has set fully now, and she idly lets her gaze settle on the window over the sink, giving her a view into the darkened backyard. The size of this backwater town is, frankly, abhorrent to her, but she can appreciate the quiet, and there are so many more stars to see all the way out here in the desert than there had been in New York. It has other benefits too, she knows, thinking of the little girl at her back - there's no reason for her past to come calling so far out in the middle of nowhere, no reason that it would try.

Indian Springs may be tiny and dusty and hot, constantly, but it's also safe and charming and idyllic and everything Madilyn never had - or wanted, really - but wants Winnie to have.

Madilyn, for her part, spends her free time sketching and working out and keeping the house and… not quite spoiling Winnie, perhaps, but doting on her, certainly. She doesn't work, and she doesn't need to - the nest egg from her former occupation is enough to have set them both up for life, so long as they live quietly and within their means, which suits Madilyn fine.

Now if only she could get that creeping sense of foreboding to go away.

As though she can sense her mother's anxiety, Winifred has a difficult time settling down for bed that evening. This isn't wholly unusual; she's a bright, exuberant child by nature who tends to try to delay her bedtime as much as possible on a nightly basis - by whatever means necessary. Impromptu games of hide-and-seek, pillow fights, dance parties, monster searches that span the whole house, and even the occasional temper tantrum are all in her arsenal. This is normally fine by Madilyn, whose childhood can be described in many different ways but never with words like gentle or patient or loved, but the day's thrumming unease makes her eager to see her daughter safely to sleep so she can spend the next several hours patrolling her house with a knife clenched in her fist, hunting the ghosts that dance in the corners of her vision.

This is probably not a healthy mentality - she'd acknowledged that sometime around adding the sixth deadbolt to the front door - but she doesn't know how to change it, doesn't know that she wants to.

Once Winnie is completely ready for bed, bathed and brushed and tucked snug beneath layers of sugar-pink blankets and various stuffed animals, and her constellation nightlight throws dancing images of Orion and Scorpius and the Pleiades and a dozen others on the ceiling, Madilyn opens the worn collection of poetry she keeps in a place of reverence on the nightstand in her own bedroom. The tattered, yellowed book is over six-hundred pages long and filled with the greats, Dickinson and Poe and Shakespeare and Wordsworth. She has memorized every line on every page - the presence of the book is, by now, largely ritualistic.

They're working their way through Byron at the moment, and even though Winnie can't understand all the words yet, she listens with rapt attention, entranced by the rhythm of her voice.

They end with Winnie's favorite poem, as always - William Blake's The Lamb. Madilyn kneels down beside the bed for this part, running her fingers through her daughter's red curls and whispering the words into her hairline like a prayer. Little lamb, God bless thee.

When she finally withdraws to leave, the jumpy, anxious feeling that had been plaguing her ever since she'd left the grocery store earlier is gone, leaving only a sensation of something like contentment in its place.

She grabs the knife anyway, just to be safe.


Madilyn is deeply engrossed in a nature documentary about Bengal tigers when something makes her head snap towards the back door. She can't say what it is, because she's sure there hadn't been a noise, but all of her instincts suddenly come alive at once, a prickle up her spine screaming danger-danger-danger.

Her eyes flick back to the screen in front of her. A tiger has just caught a gazelle in its jaws, and is tearing into its flesh - her hand flies to the pendant on her neck without her permission. She looks back to the door again, feeling goosebumps erupt on her arms.

Hardly daring to breathe, she feels for the Bowie knife she'd wedged between the couch cushions. Her fingers close around the hilt, but she does not otherwise move. There's nothing there, she thinks, then quirks her mouth in a sardonic smile, 'tis the wind and nothing more.

The wind doesn't rattle door knobs, though, and hers is now definitely rattling. She moves before she even consciously decides to, leaping over the end of the couch and snapping the TV off with the remote in the same movement.

Instinct takes over - there's a bookcase just beside the entrance to the darkened hallway that leads to the bedrooms and she lunges for it, scaling the shelves in a half-instant. She wedges herself between the top of it and the ceiling, disregarding the dust that tickles her nose. It's solid oak, a worn but sturdy thing she'd bought secondhand when she was trying to figure out how to furnish a house of her own, and it doesn't so much as wobble under her weight.

The room is once again still and dark and silent save for the continued rattling at the door. She waits.

She can't say how long she remains there, perched in the blackness. A shroud has fallen over her awareness, a peculiar thrumming through her blood. All of her senses are alive, her breath steady, her mind clear. An awakening, like a beast lifting its head, scenting the air.

She hasn't felt this way since she crashed her car into the river, since she dragged her half-drowned baby out of the backseat, since she pricked her thumb on a Marker and said please, please help us.

She'd have done anything, then, to save her daughter - and that resolve has not faded or diminished with time. It has solidified, water into ice, magma into rock, coal into diamond.

By the pricking of my thumbs, she thinks as the glass shatters, inevitably, in the doorframe, something wicked this way comes.

It sounds, to her ears, like a bomb going off. She doesn't jump, doesn't so much as bat an eyelash. Predictably, the locks click open, one after the other as the intruder reaches in to undo them - she curses herself for only putting three on the back door, for not getting a security system, a guard dog, reinforced glass. From this angle, she can't see the entryway, only the shadows cast by the security lights on the back porch, spilling on the floor through the windows like blood from an artery.

The door creaks open and the silhouette of a man slouches in. He's a mouth-breather, she notices immediately - she's never heard such panting from anyone who wasn't in death throes. Not a very good home invader then, whoever he is. The idea makes her nervous. Professionals are one thing; jumpy, desperate amateurs are quite another.

Her entire body tenses, coiled to spring.

Will you walk into my parlor? she, or something inside her, the Thing she thought she left at the bottom of the Hudson, sneers, baring its teeth.

The figure almost seems to sway a moment, or at least the shadow does, then it grows, warps as it moves closer, passing into the living room. There's an odd gait to his steps - he almost looks like he's limping.

Whoever it is comes to an unsteady stop directly before her, and in the poor light leaking in from the covered windows and the open door behind him, he looks like a wraith. There's something familiar about him, about what little she can see of his profile when he turns to survey the room, but she can't quite put her finger on what it is.

That doesn't make it less unnerving; she adjusts her grip on the knife in response. He doesn't spot her and she knows he won't - men who break into women's houses for nefarious purposes never think to look up.

He might be an amateur. She is not.

He takes another step forward then, towards the hallway at her side that leads directly to her sleeping daughter. She waits until he's crossed the threshold of the hallway, and pounces.

Swinging down from the top of the bookcase, she uses the momentum to twist around and plant her feet in the small of his back, sending him sprawling. She gives him no time to recover, landing like a cat over his prone form and snarling, her knife flashing in the dark.

She's not a killer by trade, but that doesn't mean she's incapable of taking life - or even particularly unskilled at it.

He's already rolled to his back by the time she lands, and knocks the weapon away with the flat of his forearm just as she brings it down - there's a slippery snik as the blade slices through skin, a thunk as it buries itself in the floor by his head. Blood sprays in an arc on the tattered white carpet, splashes on the wall. His other fist flashes up in the same movement, connecting with her face - the blow jerks her head to the side but doesn't dislodge her. She recovers, drives her knee into his torso once, twice, driving his breath from him, bringing her free hand down at the same time on his nose to make sure he can't regain it. He turns again, rolling her beneath him, but the corridor isn't designed for grappling and the back of her head cracks against a baseboard.

She sees stars and her ears ring. The knife comes up again, trying to sink into his chest - he catches her wrist just in time and slams it down so hard it jars her arm to the shoulder.

"Stop," her assailant growls, and there it is again, that twinge of familiarity. She ignores it and claws at his eyes instead with the hand that isn't caught, lifting her hips once, twice to get the leverage to buck him off. It's like trying to flip an anvil. Or a bus.

"Moone, stop." He grabs her other arm, pins them both together with one hand and braces the other against her throat - she goes still, but not because of the hold he's got her in.

She goes still at the sound of her name, and at the way he'd said it.

I know that voice, she thinks. The way he's holding her puts his face inches from hers, and when he tilts his head a certain way, the little light that's able to filter into the corridor glints off a pair of eyes so dark she feels they might consume her. She's had that feeling exactly one other time in her life, in the presence of exactly one person. There's a second of horror so profound she actually feels her limbs seize up.

Holy hell, it's John Wick. The sudden inevitability of her own death hits her like a sledgehammer to the face. Then, hysterically: He's supposed to be retired!

She realizes in that instant who, exactly, could make a man like Wick come out of retirement, and for what.

Winnie, she realizes, and a beat later she's thrashing like a madwoman, snapping her teeth, spitting in his face, jerking her body in a desperate attempt to just get him off, get him away, all I need is a moment, I just need a second to get to Winnie, you can't take her you can't have her no no no -

"Moone!" He rears back and slams her against the baseboard again, jarring her back to temporary stillness. "I'm not here to kill you."

"What," she rasps, sneering, once she recovers, curling her hands into fists despite the way his hold on her is making them go numb, "are you here to sell girl scout cookies?"

Now that she's actually looking at him, she can see he doesn't look well - he's bleeding from injuries she knows she didn't cause and gasping for breath like he's just run a marathon. He's pale and, if she's not mistaken, actually trembling. And still beating me to a pulp, she thinks with no small amount of annoyance, glowering.

There's a flash of something in his expression, something she can't read in the dark but might have named uncertainty.

"Do you have a first aid kit?" he says finally, and she's so surprised she actually laughs at him.

"Not for you, jackass."

He presses on her windpipe harder in response. She spits again, bracing for another blow. It doesn't come, but what does hits her just as hard.

"Mommy?"

Madilyn jerks her head back so quickly she knows she pulls something, taking in the upside-down sight of her daughter standing in her bedroom doorway. Her thumb is in her mouth, free fingers curled around a ratty stuffed lamb, and her Rapunzel nightgown is twisted around her body. Her brow is furrowed in the gentle, innocent confusion of a child who doesn't quite understand what violence is and so is unable to be properly frightened by it.

She's standing, completely defenseless, directly in the crosshairs of the assassin professionally known as the Boogeyman. The irony would be almost comical if it wasn't so horrific. Madilyn feels something in her unfurl, spring free of a cage she'd kept locked for five years.

Mine!

At the sight of her daughter, Wick's grip slackens just slightly, possibly in surprise. It's all she needs - Madilyn rears up with everything she has, straining every muscle in her torso and arms, and slams her head into his. This is not an ideal move, for obvious reasons, but it's all she's got, and it works despite the way her vision temporarily whites out from pain. He recoils from her with a grunt, dazed - she snatches the knife in her newly-freed grip and drives the handle with all her might directly into his temple.

He collapses, senseless, to the floor beside her, and does not move again.

Madilyn doesn't hesitate - she wriggles out from under him and all but claws her way down the hall, every muscle in her body screaming even as a singular thought drives all notice of it from her mind: get to Winnie, get to Winnie, get to Winnie.

Her arms fold around her baby, holding her close, rocking her gently in the dark of the hallway. Mine, repeats the monster under her skin, temporarily appeased. Winnie is plainly confused, but doesn't say anything, doesn't squirm, simply lets herself be held.

Madilyn had been wrong, so wrong, to think her past wouldn't catch up to her here - Wick had been an unknown quantity, one she never would have foreseen in a hundred years, but that's no excuse. She'd grown complacent, comfortable with the security she'd forged around herself and her daughter, and Winnie had almost paid the price for it.

A wave of nausea nearly bowls her over - it's only several deep breaths that keep her from being sick all over the hallway floor. She needs her head clear, needs to think.

"Who is that?" Winnie asks after a long time, and possibly more than once - it's hard to hear anything through the ringing in her ears.

After a moment, Madilyn finds her voice again. She pulls back to look her daughter in the face, to smooth stray pieces of rose-red hair away from her eyes. It's curious to her how much she loves this little girl when love had always been a foreign, abstract concept before, but she can't, in this moment, think of anything she wouldn't do to keep her safe, no level she wouldn't sink to, no crime she wouldn't commit.

"He's nobody, baby," she lies, smiling gently as she can. The blood is still buzzing under her skin. She turns to look at Wick's prone form over her shoulder. Wrath stirs within her again, whirling like dust kicked up in a windstorm, tinting the edges of her vision red. "Mommy's gonna take care of him, don't worry."

Her daughter nods, trusting her completely. She blinks once, twice, slowly, clearly in need of several more hours of sleep. Madilyn picks her up, tucks her close, carries her back into her bedroom. A steady resolve is building in her blood, plans spinning through her brain.

She's going to do whatever is necessary to protect Winnie, the same way she had five years ago.

Which means John Wick is going to have to die.

A/N: John Wick: Parabellum killed me. I'm deceased.
Also it's worth mentioning that the absolute last thing I want IN CANON is for John to have a love interest other than Helen because they definitely will screw it up. But I'm gonna make it an angst-filled realistic slooooooooow burn, ya'll. Also, Helen straight up TOLD him to find something to love. So I'm technically only following her orders.

I don't own anything but Madilyn Moone and Winnie. Indian Springs is a real place in Nevada, but I've never been there so if I got something right it's by accident.

Reviews are love!

Sincerely,

Starcrier.