The ping tore through the kitchen like a gunshot – and Doyle flinched.She briefly turned her gun in the direction of the sound, and Luca exploded toward her, toward her wrist.He clamped both hands around her right forearm and drove forward with everything his legs had.A gunblast eroded his eardrums, then another, and plaster dust from the ceiling rained like hail.Doyle's high-pitched wails sounded somewhere beyond his scope of hearing, and she thrashed and kicked, but Luca pushed her forward and slammed her into the kitchen unit.
Doyle’s gun fell from her grip and skittered across the counter.Luca reached beside him, grabbed the mug of boiling hot coffee and swung it into the side of Doyle’s face.
Doyle shrieked an inhuman sound as scalding coffee drenched her skin.The smell of burnt flesh and dark roast filled the kitchen in the same sickening breath.Coffee and shards and blood, all at once; a brown and red mess that sprayed across the counter and the wall and the front of Luca’s shirt.
Then Doyle crumpled.Her legs went out from under her and she hit the kitchen floor hard.One hand clutched her face, the other was bent at an angle that hands were not supposed to bend.She tried to get up.Luca put her back down with a compact fist that Ella would have approved of.Doyle’s head bounced off the linoleum and she went still.
Luca had always wondered whether he had it in him to hit a woman, and now he had his answer.
But this, he reasoned, was no woman.
Coffee dripped from his forearm onto Doyle's jacket.There was blood on his knuckles, and he didn't know if it was hers or his, and he didn't care.
Then he picked up the Glock and pointed it at the woman on his kitchen floor and held it there.
Doyle looked up at him through a mask of coffee and blood.One eye was already swelling shut.Her broken wrist lay across her stomach.She didn’t speak.
‘Move and you die,’ Luca said.
On the table behind him, his phone rang.
Luca kept the gun trained on Doyle and reached back with his free hand.He didn’t look at the screen.He didn’t need to.
He answered and said, ‘Ell.It’s over.She’s on the floor.I’ve got her gun.She’s not going anywhere.’
Ella screamed something down the line but Luca didn’t catch it, because there was a knock at the front door.Three hard raps.
‘Police!Open up!’
***
Three hours of driving later – and barely dropping below ninety the whole time – Ella turned into her apartment’s parking lot and saw three cruisers.
Lights off but present, parked at angles that saidthis is a scenerather thanthis is a routine call.An ambulance too, doors open, but nobody inside it.There was yellow tape across the entrance to her building that an officer was already pulling down.
And Luca.
He was standing beside the nearest cruiser with his arms folded and a paper towel pressed to his right hand.There was something brown down the front of his t-shirt.His hair was a mess.He was talking to a uniformed officer and nodding at whatever the officer was saying, and he was upright and breathing and alive.
Ella pulled her car across two spaces at a diagonal, killed the engine before the vehicle had fully stopped, and got out.She left the door open.She left the keys in the ignition.She left everything because none of it mattered.
She crossed the lot at a run.
Luca saw her coming.He said something to the officer, who stepped aside, and then he turned to face her.He didn’t move toward her.He just stood there with that paper towel on his hand and a look on his face that she couldn’t read because her eyes were blurring and the parking lot lights had turned into smeared orange halos.
She hit him at full speed and wrapped her arms around his neck.‘Hawkins,’ she breathed.‘What the hell happened?’
‘Yeah, sorry I didn’t call back.Me and the cops have been… busy.’
Ella pulled back.She held his face in both hands and looked at him.She checked his eyes, his skin, the color of his lips.She checked him the way she checked victims at crime scenes, except this was the opposite.She wasn’t looking for what was wrong but confirming that everything was right.He was warm.His pupils were even.There was a small cut above his left eyebrow and a bruise forming on the heel of his right hand where the paper towel was, and that was it.
That was it.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Sorry.I smashed your favorite mug.’
Ella stared at him.‘What?’
