Chapter 3
Dominic found his own weapon in his hand. He did not remember drawing it. The Beretta was familiar weight, familiar trigger, twenty years of the same firearm. He pressed his back to the table and tried to breathe steadily while his café, his territory, his corner of the world, came apart around him.
Through the smoke and the sound of boots outside regrouping, he heard Lorenzo’s voice in his memory: Don’t leave. Important news. Twenty minutes.
Ten minutes ago now.
Ten minutes that had contained all of this.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Elisa ejected the magazine from her left pistol to count rounds without looking at it, her eyes still tracking the shattered doorway. The question didn’t seem to surprise her.
“Right now,” she said, “I’m what’s keeping you breathing. The rest is a longer conversation.”
A canister bounced through the doorway, trailing white smoke.
She grabbed his collar again—he was beginning to understand this was her preferred way of moving him—and pulled hard.
“Kitchen. Now.”
The flashbang detonated behind them as they hit the kitchen doors.
White. Then ringing. Then the cold tile of the kitchen floor under Dominic’s palms, and Elisa’s voice cutting through the noise in his skull.
“Stay low. Follow me. Don’t stop to think.”
His phone was still in his hand. The screen showed Lorenzo’s last message, glowing.
Twenty minutes. Sent nineteen minutes ago.
One minute.
May you like
His brother would be here in one minute, and then the math would change, and then this would be over.
He followed the woman with two guns and a dead waitress’s name into the dark, and tried not to think about how quickly everything he believed to be solid had just turned to smoke.
