Bullets hammered from above, striking the concrete around us with sharp sparks. My husband’s hand clamps onto the back of my vest, yanking me forcefully behind a barricade of steel crates. My shoulder crashes into the cold metal, the chill seeping through my gear.
“Stay down,” he orders.
“I hate when you say that,” I bite back.
A grenade skids across the floor.
“Move!” Nico tries to get to me, but it’s too late.
The explosion detonates behind us, punching a wall of heat into my back and lifting a ringing silence into both ears that swallows everything for three full seconds.
Nico crawls toward me. He grips my face. His brown eyes are wild with concern. “Are you all right?”
I can barely hear him. I nod, then stand through the smoke, coughing, eyes already scanning the upper railing. Movement. A silhouette shifting along the catwalk above.
I raise my Glock and fire.
The body pitches forward over the railing and drops, hitting the concrete below with a sound like a bag of wet cement.
“Boss,” Miff’s voice comes through the comms, steady and clipped. “Movement on the second floor.”
Nico and I look up at the same time.
My hard gaze lands on him.
He stands above the chaos on the mezzanine level like he has simply stepped out to observe something mildly interesting. Silver threads his temples. His hands are folded behind his back with the patience of a man who has never once in his life been afraid of anything happening below him. His suit is dark and expensive, and completely, obscenely clean.
Ettore.
The air leaves my body in one slow, silent pull.
And then I am fourteen years old.
My mother curls herself tightly on the floor. Hands tied in front. Her arms clutch her swollen belly, desperate to shield whatever she can still protect. Lurch’s boot crashes into her heavy pregnant stomach. Her sobbing, a sound more unbearable than the screams that fill the room.
Ettore’s brother grins cruelly in my face, laughing as I’m trapped, forced to witness the nightmare unfold.
I blink.
The warehouse floods back in. The smoke and the gunfire, and the bodies on the floor. I am here. I am grown. I am armed and I have been training for this moment for years. I roll my shoulders back and I feel the weight of both weapons on my body like an answer.
“Ettore,” I breathe.
He looks down. And when his eyes find me across the chaos, his mouth curves into a slow, unhurried smile. The kind of smile that says he finds this all very amusing. The kind of smile I have imagined erasing from his face for the better part of my life.
Then he turns and walks calmly deeper into the building.
“No.”
I move before the word is fully out of my mouth.
“Serenity!” Nico’s voice breaks through the noise behind me like thunder.
I know my husband wants to protect me, but I’m done waiting.
The metal stairs thunder beneath our boots as we push upward, the whole staircase shaking with the weight of us moving fast. One of Ettore’s men materializes from a side corridor, weapon swinging toward Nico. Nico puts two rounds into him without breaking stride. Another comes from the opposite direction, and I shoot him clean between the eyes and step over him without slowing.
We reach the office at the end of the corridor. Ritchie doesn’t bother with the handle. He drives his boot into the door, and it swings open hard against the inner wall.
