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Luca’s reply is a nod.
His elbow rests on the ledge of his window with his hand curled into a loose fist near his mouth. The glass is tinted and hopefully dark enough to prevent any curious bystanders from identifying either of us as we sit and wait for someone to tell us what the fuck is happening. Strain pulls at the line of Luca’s neck, the muscles tense and rigid from his jawline until they disappear into the opening of his shirt.
Neither of us are really in this car right now. We’re inside that warehouse, searching through smoke and flame for the heinous thing we’re too afraid to give voice to.
“Luca—”
“I don’t know, goddammit.”
I chew on my nails and battle the urge to leap from the vehicle and run across the parking lot, every muscle locked and quivering with the need to do something. “I can’t just sit here, Luca.” Behind us in the back seat, Baccio whines, and Luca pulls my fingers from my teeth and folds my hand into his.
“There’s nothing else we can do, Carina.”
The warehouse, constructed primarily of metal and stone, appears mostly intact. Save for char blackening different areas on the walls around the windows, plumes of smoke disappearing into the night sky, and the flames that continue to writhe from the windows and the roof, it’s difficult to tell that the structure is even ablaze.
And as far as city planning knows, it’s just a warehouse—a massive storage facility and parking deck.
There’s no need for urgency, no cause for New York’s finest to risk life and limb trying to save a hunk of concrete and metal. Teams of firemen man multiple hoses with practiced efficiency, spraying arcing streams of water at those points determined to put the flames out fastest.
Ambulance personnel wait by their buses, just in case.
There’s nothing on paper or blueprints about the massive underground structure of the Pits. Nothing about the humanity who dwell on the lower levels.
“They had to have gotten past my proxies,” Luca mutters. “They knew where to hit, knew everything I’d been working on—”
“You weren’t only working on the Pits, though.” I play devil’s advocate, needing to tie it together more tightly. “You were working on a lot of things.”
“It was the biggest thing, and it wasmything. My mission, the reason I’d been working with the feds. It wasn’t sanctioned by anyone. It had the potential to blow up in multiple individuals’ faces,” he explains, his voice impassioned. “They knew setting fire to it was the only way to get around that.”
“It’s not your fault, Luca.”
Luca straightens suddenly in his seat, his arm falling from the windowsill and his hold on my hand going lax. “Oh, my God. Oh, no—”
I sit forward in my seat, brow furrowed as I look where Luca is focused with a kind of dread. There’s a commotion at one of the multiple access doors at the far end of the building, a group of firemen shouting. One breaks off, running toward a truck, and meets another midway.
He has a pair of bolt cutters in his hand. As we watch, they race back to the doors and start working on something. What they’re doing quickly becomes obvious when they break a chain with the bolt cutter and toss it to the side, then throw the door open. Smoke billows out.
My throat is raw, but I force the question out, anyway. “Was that door always—”
“No.”
That’s all he says.
It’s enough.
They locked them inside. All those people I saw on the lower level—the homeless, the caged, the drugged—they’re the only reason anyone would put a chain on one of the only access points.
I’m sure when they circle the building, they’ll find a similar door with a similar lock.
“No. No-no-no…” I can’t stomach the grim awareness and stumble from the car to dry heave the scant contents of my stomach up. I can’t remember the last time I ate and retch fruitlessly, painfully, until Luca’s hand pulls my hair back.
“Come on, wild one. It’s not safe out here with all these people. You’re too exposed.”
Tears mingle with the burn of acid in my throat and nose, and I shake my head. “Maybe only the upper level burned. Maybe they’re okay—”
Luca leads me back to the car and lifts me into the front seat. “Maybe,” he says, the set of his jaw grim, and he closes the door on my tears. He rounds the hood of the car and climbs back in beside me, then surprises me by pulling me onto his lap.
We sit quietly, watching them work the scene, until a knock on the window startles us both.
