I duck for cover. But as I roll around the fallen bodies, I see two of my men—men I came in with, men I drove out with, men I haveknown—raising their weapons. Not at Nico’s people.
At me.
Traitors.
Actual fucking traitors. Victor bought them. Planted them. Paid them in advance for tonight, and told them what the signal would be, and the signal wasnow.
“Boss!”
Lorenzo, somewhere to my left.
I don’t think. I move.
I roll behind the pallets Nico was using for cover earlier and come up firing. One of the men at the back column goes down with my first pair. The second one fires twice and misses both and starts to break cover, before Lorenzo takes him from the south side with a single round.
I don’t stop.
A bullet grazes my shoulder. I feel the heat of it but no pain yet—the pain comes later—and I keep going.
Two down.
Lorenzo arrives at my shoulder. Back to back. Both of us firing.
“How many of ours turned?”
“Too fucking many.”
Three. Four.
Bodies everywhere now. Some of Nico’s men are still firing atme.Some are firing ateach other.Some are running. The whole warehouse has lost the shape of a battle and become a riot of men who no longer know who they’re working for.
I don’t care.
A thought has arrived in my head, and it has displaced everything else.
Victor knows where Bea is.
He planned this.
He knew the warehouse meeting would empty the house.
The rage that floods up through me is not the rage I have been carrying since Vincenzo’s death. The rage I have been carrying is hot and personal and grief-shaped, and it has been keeping me upright. The rage that arrives now is colder, and lower, and is going to take longer to spend.
I go blind with cold rage.
I don’t keep careful count. Five. Six. Seven. Lorenzo is keeping pace beside me—the version of him I have only seen in the worst rooms of my life, brutal, efficient, gone somewhere internal—and we move through what’s left of the warehouse cutting down the men who turned and stepping over the men who didn’t.
Men fall. Men flee.
Eventually:
Silence.
And the warehouse is a graveyard.
Bodies everywhere. Nico is one of them, the red bloom across his shirt now a darker brown.
I’m breathing hard. There’s blood on my hands and on my face. Some of it is mine. Most of it isn’t. My shoulder has started to talk to me, which means the grace period is over and the next hour is going to hurt.
