I heard movement from the front of the bakery. The room was filling, the air growing hotter and tighter as Bloody Scythes and Bellini men crowded into the same doomed space.
Seneca was all nerves now, scanning the doorways. “This is what you wanted, old man? A massacre?”
My father looked bored. “It’s what I expect,” he said, “when children refuse to listen.”
I wanted to scream. Instead, I said, “That’s always been your problem. You think everything is a test, and every loss means someone failed you. Maybe it’s just that the world changed, and you didn’t.”
For a moment, I thought he’d hit me. Instead, he smiled, cold and full of pity. “The world doesn’t change, Catherine. Only the people too weak to survive it.”
He turned to the room, raising his voice. “Lay down your arms. All of you. If you walk away now, nothing follows you out of New Mexico. If you fight, you’ll die.”
There was a shuffle, a nervous ripple, but the Scythes held their ground. Damron looked at me, then at Seneca. “What’s the play?” he asked.
Seneca kept the gun trained, but his voice was low. “We wait. They want to talk, let them talk. They want to shoot, we shoot first.”
My father waited for my answer, the room’s pressure closing in like a vise.
I looked at Seneca, then at Damron. Then I said, “If you want me, you’ll have to drag me back to New York in a body bag. I’m not your property.”
Dad’s expression didn’t change. “You always were dramatic,” he said, and signaled to the men at the front.
On cue, ten more Bellini soldiers entered, weapons up, faces impassive. They lined up behind the counter, every gun pointed at someone I cared about. The bakery had become a war zone, and all I could do was stand in the flour dust, hands sweating on the Sig, and wish I’d learned how to disappear.
Anthony stepped back, arms open like a father welcoming his lost child.
“You’re outnumbered,” he said, voice silk over razor wire. “And unlike Martini’s men, mine don’t miss.”
Guns up, faces locked in the rictus of last chances, the room was an abattoir waiting for the first spatter. My father’s men lined the counter, the Bloody Scythes bunched in the narrow aisle behind us, and Seneca at my side, coiled and ready to kill or die or both. And all I could think was that if anyone so much as sneezed, there’d be enough bodies on the floor to bake a meat pie for every orphan in Yonkers.
I stepped forward, hands up, Sig aimed at the ceiling now. My boots scraped the tile with a sound like breaking teeth. “Stop this,” I said, as loud as I could without the words shaking. I looked from my father to Seneca and back, willing them both to remember who I was, what I was made of. “Nobody else dies today.”
For a split second, the world seemed to consider it.
Father’s lips pressed together, a line so thin it could have cut granite. “You think you’re in charge here?” he asked, but the words were less mockery and more test.
I didn’t hesitate. “If I go with you, you let them walk. All of them.” I said it clear, with the force of the gavel and the whiplash of Bellini blood. “That’s the deal.”
Behind me, I could feel the Scythes shift, a ripple of disbelief and relief, and the brittle taste of hope. Seneca’s jaw locked, but he said nothing.
Father measured me with his eyes, searching for the lie. He glanced at Seneca, then at Damron, then at Martini, still kneeling, sweat dripping down his chin.
“And Martini?” he asked.
I shrugged. “He’s yours. Do what you want with him.”
There was a long pause, the kind that resets the calendar of a whole family. Then my father nodded, once, sharp as a trigger pull. “Deal,” he said, and the air moved again.
Seneca’s eyes found mine. I saw it all there—anger, love, the knowledge that this was the only way out that didn’t end with both of us dead. My composure broke, just a crack, but enough for him to see through.
“I have to go,” I said, and my voice was almost gentle. “But it’s not goodbye. It’s just... necessary.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He just reached for my hand, caught it, and for the first time since the shooting started, I let myself feel the heat of his skin, the heartbeat running through both of us.
I stepped closer, close enough to smell the flour on his shirt, the sweat and blood, and the hint of spent shells that always clung to him. The room was still full of guns, but nobody moved.
Seneca cupped my face with his hand, rough and tender at the same time. I rose up, closed the last inch, and kissed him.
It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t careful. It was the kind of kiss that bruises, that leaves traces, that says all the things you can’t say with words because there’s never enough time. I tastedflour dust and old bourbon and something wild, something I’d thought I’d lost forever.
