Page 74

Somewhere past the city, on a dark road between nowhere and the airport, Lupo speaks. “Check your accounts.”

The full fee is there. Both halves. Ten times my salary was deposited today, hours after I found the drawer. It’s either the most honorable thing a criminal has ever done to me or the most efficient way to be rid of a liability, and the horror is that I can’t rule out either.

“I didn’t finish the job.” It’s the only thing I can find to say that isn’t a scream.

He doesn’t look at me. “You did more than the job. Don’t argue.”

There’s no thank-you in me for it. It’s a bribe. Or a guilt payment. Whatever.

Out the window, the dark fields run past, and one thought arrives clean. With this money, I never have to work again, but I will always know what it cost.

The road is empty and very dark. Diana’s headlights hold steady behind Nick’s behind ours, a small convoy of the last two months, and I let my eyes go to the mirror out of habit.

There are headlights behind Diana’s car that weren’t there a minute ago.

They’re closing.

Too fast for this road, too fast for this hour, gaining on the convoy with a speed that has intention in it. My first thought, absurd, doctor-brained, is that Lupo’s whole scheme has been discovered, that these are police, that the dossier went early.

But police don’t drive like that. Nothing legal drives like that.

I point past his shoulder at the mirror, at the headlights swallowing the last of the distance to Diana’s car. “Lupo. Someone’s coming. Fast.”

26

LUPO

The car rams us from behind before I finish turning to look, and the world becomes noise and physics. The impact throws me into the seat back.

For two months I put six men on a swim lesson and measured the sight lines at a pool. I never once measured this road, because this road was supposed to be her exit, not a kill box.

Enzo does everything right, the way I pay him to. He doesn’t brake. He accelerates into the hit and fights the wheel, holding us from the ditch by a hand’s width. Then the second car comes up on the left, and I understand what this is.

Not one vehicle but three, boxing us. Someone picked the dark stretch past the city on purpose—no cameras, no witnesses, only fields. Someone who’s been watching us.

“Down,” I tell Veda, and I don’t wait for her to obey it. I get a hand in her hair and pull her head into my lap, my body over hers. The first gunfire comes a half-second later. The rear window turns to a web, then to nothing.

Glass rains on my back, stinging where it stabs. Veda doesn’t scream. Under my hands she’s gone rigid and silent, her heartbeat hammering fast against my forearm. I pray the only way I know how, which isn’t words. Just her name, and not hit, not hit, not hit, on a loop under everything.

Enzo returns fire through the shattered rear glass while he drives one-handed, and I feel the car take two more rounds low in the body. Nick’s car swings wide and rams the vehicle on our left. Metal screams. It buys us a lane, half a heartbeat of one, and Enzo pours us into it.

Behind us—I twist to see it and wish I hadn’t—Ma’s car takes the third attacker at the front passenger wheel and goes off the road into the drainage ditch. Headlights spin down into the dark and stop at a wrong angle. My mother is in that car, and I cannot get to her, because there are still men trying to kill the woman under my hands.

The cold takes over completely then, the one that survives everything by narrowing the world to targets.

I count. Three enemy cars, two of mine still working, Nick engaged on the left. Ma’s off the road. Enzo is bleeding from the shoulder but still driving. Veda is under my hands and not hit.

Sarah is home, at the estate, behind the wall I built and the guard I doubled, with no reason for anyone to look for her tonight.

I get my own weapon out. “Enzo, hard stop on my mark. Give me a firing line.”

“Boss, your mother’s car⁠—”

“On my mark. We end this first, then we get to her. She’s alive.” She doesn’t die when Matteo says she does. Not tonight, not on his clock. “Mark.”

Enzo stands on the brakes and cuts the wheel. The car slews sideways across the road. I’m out the door before we’ve stopped, engine block for cover, and I put the first man down as he brings his own car around.

The night goes strobe. Muzzle flash. Headlights. The ugly stutter of a firefight in open country. Nick is out of his car too, moving, and between us we take the enemy apart the way it was built to take us apart.