“And then what? He comes with his brothers and those King niggas and we’re outnumbered and outgunned?”
“Then we make it count. We don’t need to win a war, Rodrigo. We just need to hurt him bad enough that he feels it for the rest of his life. Kill the woman. Kill the baby. Let him live with that.”
I looked at my brother and saw the same darkness in his eyes. Gabriel wasn’t afraid of dying. He’d made peace with that a long time ago. What drove him wasn’t survival, it was vengeance. Mateo, Manny, Fosso, LaLa, Paco. Five people he loved wiped off the earth by one family. He wanted blood and he didn’t care if his own spilled in the process.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s figure out how to get past the security at the hotel. If we can isolate Mehar while Quest is occupied somewhere else, we have a window. It’s small but it’s there.”
Gabriel leaned forward and we started talking through it. Entry points at the Ritz, timing, how to pull the guards off position. It wasn’t a sophisticated plan because we didn’t have the resources for sophisticated anymore. No money for bribes, no soldiers to spare, no technology to compete with whatever drones and surveillance the Banks were using. We were two brothers, a handful of guns, and enough rage to fill a cemetery.
We were maybe five minutes into it when Carlos, one of the few soldiers we had left, came running into the living room from the back of the house. He was pale and his eyes were too wide and he was holding a tablet with the security camera feed pulled up.
“We have a problem,” he said, turning the screen toward us.
I looked at the feed. The front gate camera showed two bodies on the ground where our gate guards had been postedfifteen minutes ago. They were face down, not moving. The gate was open. Beyond it, in the darkness of the tree line, I could see movement. Shadows shifting between the trunks. Multiple figures advancing toward the house from at least two directions.
They found us.
“How the fuck did they find us?” I said, but the question was pointless because the how didn’t matter anymore. They were here. Right now. On this property. Moving through the trees toward the house where my mother was sleeping upstairs and my brother was sitting on the couch and the last remnants of the Rios family were gathered in one place like targets at a shooting range.
Gabriel was already on his feet. His face hadn’t changed. No panic, no surprise. Just that cold focus that lived behind his eyes when the time for talking was over and the time for killing had arrived.
“It’s time,” he said, walking toward the back room where we kept the guns. “Let’s end this.”
46
Quest
We came through the east and west entries simultaneously. Prime’s team took out the patrol on the perimeter before they even had time to raise their radios and by the time the first door got kicked in, two of their soldiers were already dead on the lawn.
The house was dark. Suppressed gunfire popped through the hallways in short bursts, each one followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor. Creed’s mercs cleared the basement while Riot swept the ground level. Cannon locked down the garage like Creed told him to and within thirty seconds he radioed that both vehicles were disabled. Nobody was leaving this compound in anything but a bag.
I moved through the main hall with Justice beside me. A Rios soldier came around a corner with a shotgun and I put two in his chest before he leveled it. Another one came from the kitchen firing wild, hitting the wall behind us, and Justice dropped him with a clean shot that sent him sliding across the tile floor. My little brother moved like he’d been doing this his whole life and I didn’t have time to feel proud or horrified about that so I just kept moving.
Gabriel was in the back room.
We heard him before we saw him. Controlled bursts from an automatic weapon punching through the doorframe as we approached. He’d flipped a table for cover and was firing with the discipline of a man who’d been trained, not the panicked spraying of the soldiers we’d dropped on the way in. Two of the mercs tried to push through the doorway and Gabriel tagged one in the shoulder before the other pulled him back.
Justice looked at me. I looked at him. He nodded once and I laid down cover fire while he moved along the wall to a second entrance. Gabriel was focused on the doorway I was shooting from. Never saw Justice come through the side. Three shots from Justice’s Glock and Gabriel jerked backward, dropping behind the table. When I came through the door he was on his back, chest heaving, blood pooling underneath him. His gun was still in his hand but he didn’t have the strength to lift it.
Justice looked down at him with an expression I’d never seen on my brother’s face before, something cold and final and completely at peace with what he was about to do.
He fired once more. Gabriel stopped moving.
• • •
The house went quiet after that. Sporadic gunfire from the far end of the property where Riot and the mercs were finishing off the last of the soldiers, but inside the main house it was over. Bodies in the hallways, spent casings on the floor, the smell of gunpowder and copper hanging in the air.
I got separated from Justice during the sweep. He went left to clear the remaining rooms while I went right, following a hallway toward the back of the house where the bedrooms were. I pushed open the last door and found her.
There was his mother.
She was standing in the corner of the bedroom in a nightgown with a revolver in both hands, pointing it toward my chest. Her arms were shaking so bad the barrel was drawing circles in the air. Tears were streaming down her face and she was praying in Spanish, fast and desperate with a rosary tangled around her wrist.
She wasn’t going to shoot me. She couldn’t. Her hands were shaking too hard and her eyes were too full of tears to see straight.
I walked toward her. She flinched backward into the wall. The gun wavered, her grip gave out, and it clattered to the floor. I grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the bedroom, through the hallway, past the bodies of her family’s soldiers, and into the living room where the overhead lights were still on and everything that had just happened was visible in full color.
“RODRIGO!” I yelled, holding his mother by the arm. “WHERE YOU AT? I GOT YOUR MADRE!”
