Chapter 25 - Wren
Logan should be gone. He said as much the moment we stepped through the door — Nico’s call was clear, the Zayas are massing outside La Sirena. He got us settled, confirmed the perimeter with Pawlikowski, and then stood in the middle of the room not leaving.
So I slipped into the back corridor to give him space to go. But instead, he followed me. His phone is in his pocket now. He keeps not looking at it.
"Tell me about Jimmy," I say.
He looks at me. His jaw works once.
"He was a fixer, like me," he says. "But apparently he needed more thank-yous than I do."
I wait.
"You don't look like a man who caught a traitor," I say. "You look like a man who caught a friend."
I put my hand over his. He doesn't move it away. I tug him back to the main room.
The stage is empty. The poles catch the dim light from the emergency lighting and hold it. We're sitting in a strip club but nothing about what's happening between us is transactional anymore.
His phone buzzes again. He pulls it out, glances at the screen, places it face down on the nearest table. He's borrowed every second he can. I can feel the minutes running out around us like a tide turning.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
Simple. Quiet. Just that.
I open my mouth to say I'm fine. The words are right there — I've said them so many times they've worn a groove, easy and automatic. I'm fine. We're managing. Mom is comfortable.
I look at him.
He's not asking about Mom. He's asking about me. And I don't know what the answer is. I have never been asked to find out.
For six years, I was the one who checked.
Are you warm enough. Is the pain bad today.
Did you eat. I learned to read her breathing in the dark — the difference between sleep and something worse.
I tracked her medications in a notebook I kept on the kitchen counter, three columns, times and dosages and whether she'd kept it down.
I was sixteen when it started and twenty-two when it ended and in all those years between, no one ever turned the question around.
My father stopped looking at me when she got bad. He looked at the bottle instead, and then he stopped coming home, and I stopped leaving notes. Friends drifted away. And then she was gone, and I sat in that room and waited for the grief that never came.
Then five years of nothing. Dirty motel rooms, strangers in the corridors, cities that all looked the same.
And now this man — this complicated, violent man who cannot make himself leave a strip club even when Nico is on the other end of the phone saying now — has asked if I'm okay. Asked it the way you ask someone when you actually want the answer.
Not once did someone ask me that. Not in six years of her dying and five years of drifting through the aftermath.
"I—"
The crack opens.
What comes out of me is not words. It's a gasp that breaks in the middle. And then I'm crying — not the clean kind, not tears sliding quietly down my cheeks. I'm shaking. My breath is coming in ragged pieces. The sound that keeps escaping me is wrecked and ugly and I can't stop it.
He moves without hesitation, around the booth, and then his arms are around me and my face is against his chest and I'm sobbing into the fabric of his jacket and I can't stop. I try to stop. I can't.
My mother.
She had soft hands. Even at the end, even when everything else was going, her hands stayed soft.
I held them and held them. I learned how to hold them safely — how to lift her wrist without hurting her, how to adjust the IV line, how to rub warmth into her fingers when she couldn't stop shivering. I knew her hands better than my own.
Her last breath. I was right there. I heard it — the sound of a body finally stopping. And I sat in that chair and held her hand and waited.
The grief didn't come.
I had prepared so carefully. I'd read about it, understood the stages, believed I was ready. I thought I knew what it would feel like.
Nothing came. Just quiet. And then I stood up, and I walked out, and I got on a bus, and I started moving.
"My mother." The words come out broken between the sobs. I'm gripping his jacket with both fists and I can't let go.
His hand is at the back of my head. He doesn't say it's okay. He doesn't say I'm sorry. He presses his palm against my hair and holds me and he doesn't move.
At some point, very quietly, he says my name — just Wren — and I feel it in my sternum.
She'll never meet him.
That's the thought that comes from nowhere and hits harder than the first wave — fresh grief breaking through just when the first one was beginning to crest. My mother, who used to ask me about boys with this particular hopefulness on her face, teasing and desperately curious — she'll never know that I found this.
She'll never know I woke up. She'll never sit in a kitchen somewhere and hear about the man who bought me a penthouse and couldn't leave a strip club and asked, quietly, if I was okay.
I'm not alone. That's what cracks me open further — the strangeness of it, after so long.
He's here and he's holding me and he doesn't understand what's happening and he's not leaving.
I give him fragments between sobs because that's all I have: alone, years, she's gone, I couldn't cry.
He holds each fragment without trying to arrange them into sense.
"She would have loved you," I manage, between breaths. Not to him, exactly. To the air, to her, to the five years I spent feeling nothing. "Or hated you."
I want to laugh at that, but instead I’m sobbing even harder.
He holds me through the wave. And the next one. His hand in my hair, steady. Not leaving.
The phone rings.
Not buzzes — rings. The sound cuts through the booth and he tenses against me, one instant of every muscle going tight, and I already know. He was already borrowed time. This is the debt called in.
I pull back. Wipe my face with the back of my hand, which helps exactly nothing. My eyes are swollen. I can feel the heat in my cheeks.
He's looking at the screen. He answers and I watch his face do what it does when the war calls him back — the shift is complete and immediate, the soft thing receding, the fixer surfacing.
"How many," he says.
A pause. He's looking at the exit.
"I'm leaving now."
He ends the call. He looks at me.
I'm already gathering myself — sitting up straight, taking a breath that shakes only a little. "Go," I say. "You have to."
"Wren—"
"Logan." I meet his eyes. "Go."
He reaches for my face. Both hands, his palms against my cheeks, tilting my head. He looks at me — tear-streaked, wrecked. He looks at all of it and doesn't flinch.
"I'll come back," he says. A promise, not a reassurance. The difference is everything.
"I know." I press my hand flat against his chest for one second — just that, just the warmth of him under my palm — before I drop it.
He kisses me. Brief and fierce, sealed against my mouth before I can say anything else. Then his hands drop, and he's standing, and he's moving toward the door, and he's gone.
The door swings shut.
I sit in the booth and breathe.
Marisol materializes from somewhere and sets a glass of water on the table in front of me, then sits on the other side without being asked.
She doesn't say anything. Neither do I. After a moment she puts her hand over mine, warm and steady, and we sit there while the grief settles into something I can carry.
The Siren is sitting quietly. Juliet hasn't moved from her booth. The quiet gathers itself around us, patient and still.
I press my thumb to my pulse. Beating. The grief has cracked me open but I'm still here. Still present. Still in this body, in this room, in this life I've been slowly, improbably building.
Outside, somewhere, Logan is driving toward La Sirena.
I close my eyes and listen to the refrigeration unit hum.
And then it shatters.
The sound comes from outside — wrong, out of place, the grind of vehicles that don't belong in this parking lot at this hour. The security at the main door goes rigid. Radios crackle. Someone says something low and urgent that I can't hear from the booth.
Marisol is already on her feet.
I'm watching her face when the glass breaks.
The front window — one enormous blast that sends shards across the floor, and then the shooting starts, and every sound is happening at once.
Someone screaming. A guard going down near the entrance.
Marisol shouting get down, get down and pulling the Siren off her stool and behind the bar in one motion.
I'm on the floor of the booth without deciding to be. My brace hits the seat hard and I bite down on the pain and press myself flat.
Juliet is frozen. I can see her from here — still in her booth, across the room from mine, eyes wide, not moving.
A second burst of gunfire from the east side of the building and I scramble out of the booth and across the floor and grab her arm with my left hand.
"Move."
"I can't—" Her voice is high, wrong.
"You can." I pull her down. She moves.
We're behind the bar with Marisol and the Siren, the four of us crouched on the rubber mat while the Gilded Lily comes apart around us.
Glass raining across the bar top above our heads and the smell of the place changes — under the perfume and the rubber floor mat, gunpowder sharp in the air, and my whole nervous system registers it before my brain does: this is real.
The security team is returning fire at the front.
Someone on a radio is calling for backup, wrong building, wrong building, the address coming through in fragments.
The address.
The Gilded Lily. Not La Sirena.
The Zayas are here. They hit the safe house.
They knew exactly where we'd be — the protocol, the playbook, the whole careful procedure of keeping the non-combatants clear of the violence.
Jimmy would have known. He had sat in every meeting, invisible, and he would have known that if La Sirena came under threat, the women went to the Gilded Lily.
Logan had extracted that from him in the holding room — what he'd told them, how much they knew — and the answer had been everything.
Jimmy had given them the map and they'd built their trap around it and we walked straight in.
Logan is driving in the wrong direction. He's headed toward the wrong building while this one burns around us, and there is nothing I can do about that except stay low and stay alive long enough for someone to tell him.
Another burst of gunfire. Juliet's hand grips my arm so hard I've lost feeling in my fingers.
This was Jimmy's final betrayal — not the accounting fraud, not the money, not the months of feeding information to the people who wanted to tear down everything Logan had built. This. Sending us here. Making the safe house the kill zone.
Marisol meets my eyes across the dark space behind the bar. She has her phone in her hand.
She's already dialing.