I put an elbow into the third guy’s throat, then let him slide to the ground. For a moment, the world stilled.
Catherine and I locked eyes, both of us waiting for the real move. But it didn’t come. Whether the enforcers were too green or just not paid enough to bleed, they sagged against the stucco and only glared at us, waiting for new orders.
Catherine tossed the Beretta into the dirt at the lead man’s feet. “Go home,” she said, and just like that, they left.
Chapter fourteen
Catherine
Inside the bakery, the light was a nicotine haze, drifting through slatted blinds and covering every surface in sour yellow. My nose filled first with the sharp, yeast-bitten perfume of uncooked dough, then the fainter, gamier notes of blood from the guys we’d met outside. The front room looked like a party interrupted by a bomb. Chairs were toppled, a half-eaten danish bleeding raspberry across a white plate, a cash register yawning open with bills fanned and counted, then abandoned in mid-count. The glass display cases reflected us back in fractured little panels, every angle a different version of myself.
Seneca moved ahead of me, gun in both hands, and swept the dead space behind the counter. His steps were surgical, and even in the chaos of the scene, I saw the way his boots left flour-ghosts across the tile. I trailed him, Sig raised, hands steady even as my nerves thrashed under the skin. I was half-expecting a runner, some poor bastard trying to bolt from the back room, but the only sound was the faint, persistent whir of the refrigeration unit and, somewhere deeper in, a low, animal panic-cry that faded almost as soon as I registered it.
We reached the swinging doors. I hesitated, felt the skin of my hand tighten against the grip of the Sig. Seneca shot me a look, and I nodded. He went in first.
The back room was chaos—metal racks half-emptied, flour spilled like snowdrifts, a pallet jack overturned in the narrow aisle between ovens. The only figure in the room was Martini. He was older than I’d pictured, but still built like a fridge, with the blocky head and butcher’s hands of someone who grew up breaking kneecaps for cash. He wore a shirt I recognized, custom-tailored, Italian, the sort my grandfather used to favor for big family dinners, and it was already spattered with sweat and something darker. Martini was shoveling bundles of documents from the safe into a battered Samsonite, hands moving with the desperation of a man who knows the clock is running out.
Seneca moved quick, smooth, and pressed the muzzle of his gun to Martini’s temple before the man could even look up. “Surprise, motherfucker,” Seneca said. His voice was so calm, so measured, it didn’t even sound like a threat.
Martini froze. The hand holding the last packet of papers hovered, trembling, in mid-air. For a heartbeat, nobody breathed.
“On your knees,” Seneca barked, and the old reflexes took over. Martini dropped, knees hitting tile with a thud. The packet tumbled from his lap, papers falling onto the floor in a mess of bonds and notarized lies. I stepped forward, kept the Sig trained on his broad back, and let my brain catch up to the moment.
That was when he saw me. He turned, neck cords bulging, and stared like he’d found a ghost in the flour haze. His eyes were brown, almost black, the same as every man in my mother’s side of the family, and for a second, I could smell the old church-basement dinners and hear the stories about who’d clipped whoand why the family business was a thing you never discussed outside the bloodline.
“Bellini,” Martini wheezed, half-laugh, half-threat. “You’re working with bikers now? Your grandfather would roll in his grave.”
The words cut, but not how he meant. I let the silence hold, and then said, "Fuck you, Martini."
Martini chuckled and glanced toward both exits, expecting his men. Not seeing them, he said, "It's hard to find good help these days."
"The old ways are dead." I knelt briefly. "The Bellinis and Martinis should know this."
Martini spat on my shoes.
"Why're you even here?" I asked. "I wanted to be the one to take out Bellini's granddaughter."
Seneca grabbed Martini by the collar and wrenched his arms behind his back and zip-tied him so fast and hard that I heard the rotator cuff tear. Martini hissed, but otherwise didn’t move.
“Is this a hit, or an extraction?” Martini asked, almost casual, like he was negotiating with a cousin over Sunday dinner. “Because if it’s a hit, do it now. If it’s an extraction, I’ll double whatever you’re getting paid.”
I had to laugh, the old Bellini snarl coming through. “You don’t have enough, Martini. Not in this lifetime.”
He shot me a look, and in it I saw what he’d always been. Just another scared old man with no real friends left alive.
Seneca finished the pat-down, found a snub-nosed revolver in the ankle holster, and pitched it across the kitchen. The weapon skidded into the base of a rolling rack, then settled there, inert. “You gonna keep talking, or you want your last words to be something your mom would approve of?” he said.
Martini’s jaw worked. For a second, I thought he’d spit at Seneca, but instead he looked up at me, eyes hollow. “You’re justlike your grandfather, Catherine. You got no loyalty. No sense of the old ways.” He spat at my feet.
I walked forward until the barrel of my Sig was less than an inch from his forehead. “The old ways got my mother killed,” I said, and the words came out so cold I almost believed them myself. “You want to talk about loyalty, Martini? Tell me what Jenna Smart bought with ten grand in cash and a one-way flight.”
His pupils dilated. “You think this is about you?” he said. “There’s no you, there’s only the family. Even the bikers know that. You’re just a piece on a board.”
He was right, but not in the way he thought.
Seneca jerked Martini upright and drove him to his knees again, harder this time. The man didn’t resist. He just looked at the papers, at the stacks of old secrets scattered across the floor, and let his head hang.
I kept the Sig on him, but my mind wandered to the next moves, the next escalation. The club was watching the doors, but the real trouble would come from whoever survived the cleanup out back. And if there was one thing I knew about the Martini crew, it was that nobody ever came alone.
