Chapter 26 - Logan
La Sirena is eight minutes away when the call comes.
Nico. I answer on the first ring, half my attention still on the route ahead, running the entry points, calculating positions, how many soldiers Gunner can hold at the service entrance while I take the main floor—
"It's not here." His voice is wrong. The tone is nothing like his usual military clip.
"What?"
"The assault. They're not at La Sirena, Logan. They hit the Gilded Lily."
For one second, the world simply stops.
Then it crashes through me all at once. Jimmy.
Sitting in holding at La Sirena, having already fired off whatever message he needed to fire.
Three years of learning how I think, how I plan, what I do when the empire comes under threat.
The evacuation protocol — non-combatants to the Gilded Lily, controlled entry, far enough from the main threat.
He gave them the playbook. He gave them all of it.
I sent her there.
Twenty minutes ago I had my hands in her hair and she was telling me she wasn't alone anymore, and I kissed her goodbye and drove away into the wrong fight.
The car turns hard — the wheel yanked, tires screaming against the pavement — and I'm already racing back the way I came, city lights smearing past the windows.
The guilt doesn't arrive like a wave. It arrives like an earthquake, everything shifting at once. Her face wet with tears. I'll come back. That's what I said. And Jimmy had already given them the address.
I seal it. Press it flat, let everything else run over the top of it, because she needs me functional.
"When?" My voice comes out level. I don't know how.
"They hit it fast. Three minutes ago, maybe. Our people are engaged but outnumbered."
Marisol is there. Juliet. The Siren. Wren.
Still alive is the only thing I'm allowed to want.
The car does ninety on a street that doesn't allow it. I don't care.
"I'm four minutes out," I tell Nico. "Get everyone there. Now."
The Gilded Lily is still dark when I arrive. Three vehicles in the lot that weren't there when I left, doors hanging open. Two of our security people down on the pavement — one moving, one not.
I'm out of the car in an instant.
Inside is worse.
Shattered glass everywhere, scattered from the windows in arcs across the floor.
Tables overturned. Bodies down on both sides — I can't stop to count, can't stop to identify.
Neon light from a neighboring club bleeds through the shot-out windows in sick pink strips, and the smell of gunpowder and spilled alcohol is sharp in the air.
I take cover behind an overturned table and look for Wren, but I can’t see her anywhere. A dark shadow moves across the stage, but I can’t tell if he’s friendly, so I hold my fire.
Gunner comes in beside me, crouching behind the same table, just minutes behind me. His weapon is drawn.
A Zayas soldier moves through the club toward the stage, and then Gunner is between me and that man and something happens that I will not forget.
He doesn't shoot. He closes the distance in three steps, gets inside the gun, and breaks the man's arm at the elbow with his bare hands. The crack is audible from the other side of the room. The soldier falls. Gunner doesn't look at him again. Already moving to the next target.
Precise. Each movement its own complete sentence, nothing wasted.
Another soldier comes around the back bar — bigger, faster, expecting to have the advantage. Gunner hits him twice. The second blow drives the man's face into the edge of a table and he goes down and stays down. No drama. No hesitation. Gunner steps over him and continues.
A knife appears in his hand. I didn't see him draw it.
The third man sees Gunner coming and runs. Actually turns and runs. I watch a Zayas soldier — trained, armed, paid well enough to accept violence as a job description — choose flight over whatever is moving toward him in the flickering pink light.
Two of our own security staff are ahead of me, and when they see Gunner work, the fear on their faces is genuine. These are men who know him. Men who've worked alongside him for years. Afraid of him right now — not of the Zayas, not of the bullets. Of him. Of what he is when the lid comes off.
He's not angry. No rage, no heat. He's doing a job. The cold efficiency is total. The blood on his hands doesn’t register, and that’s the most terrifying thing I've seen tonight.
I'm moving through the back rooms of the club, my weapon up, clearing corridors and corners, shooting men who need it. That's when she finds me.
Marisol. Golden hair, a gun she absolutely did not have when I dropped her here, and the expression of a woman who has decided she is not dying in a strip club. Crouched low near the end of the bar, pointing toward the back corridor with two fingers.
"They're behind the office," she calls out. "All of them. I got them back there when the glass blew. Wren pulled Juliet. We ducked behind the bar at first, but I thought it would be safer behind the office. I covered them. They’re alive."
Alive. The word lands in my chest.
Nico's voice comes through the comms. He's inside now, somewhere on the mezzanine level, working positions, angles, redirecting our people from defense to pressure.
He calls it in the cadence of someone who has done this in worse places with worse resources, and our people respond.
The soldier's voice, the tone that says I know exactly where to put you and why.
The Gilded Lily's defense starts holding with intent instead of desperation.
I take an order from him — east corridor, cover the exit — and I go.
His read is better than mine right now and I know it.
I move as part of the unit, giving orders when I see more, taking them when Nico sees better, and the Zayas are losing the math.
Our people rallied, Gunner carved through the main floor, Nico turned chaos into geometry.
Three minutes, maybe four. The assault is failing and the Zayas are beginning to feel it.
I get to the back office.
Wren is against the far wall when the door opens — on her feet already, the Siren close beside her, both of them pressed as far from the door as the room allows. I'm across the room before she's fully stepped toward me.
She's shaking. Both of us shaking. Holding on too hard in the middle of a room that smells like old beer.
"Logan." Just my name. Just air.
I pull back enough to look at her — face, eyes, the brace still on her right arm, the bandage at her temple intact. A shallow cut along her left forearm where glass must have caught her when the windows blew.
"Your arm—"
"It's nothing. Just flying glass." She lifts it briefly to show me, then lets it fall. Her eyes are clear and direct despite everything. "How did this happen?"
"Jimmy told them where you'd be."
She absorbs this. One breath. A single nod. "Okay," she says. That's all.
I pull her into a tight hug, wondering if I’ll ever find the strength to let her go.
Over her shoulder, I see Juliet.
She's in the doorway to the back corridor — standing absolutely still, arms at her sides, face gone the color of old ash. Her eyes are fixed on something emerging from the smoke beyond the doorway.
I pull Wren tighter against my chest.
Santiago Zayas comes through the smoke.
The son. The problematic Zayas. The psychopath.
He should be leaving. The Zayas are retreating on every other front — I can hear it in the shift of the gunfire, the calls coming through comms, the changing geometry of the fight. But Santi isn't retreating. He walks into the doorway and stops, and the blood on him is not his, and he is smiling.
The smile doesn't change when he sees me. He looks at me the way you'd look at furniture. Then his eyes move to Juliet and they stay there.
She cannot move. Frozen in the doorway while the predator looks at her like he's deciding what shelf to put her on. She's trembling — the fine shaking of a body that is screaming at her to run while her legs have stopped working.
He tilts his head. Looks at her terror like someone studying a painting they want to own. Takes his time with it.
Then he speaks. Soft, almost conversational, delivered like a promise.
"Pretty girl. I'll remember you."
Then he turns and walks back into the smoke, unhurried, and he's gone.
The Zayas are out.
The sound changes first — gunfire dropping off, the rhythm of it altering from engagement to extraction. Then the comms confirm it: north exit, south exit, vehicles moving. Pulling back with purpose, covering each other, disciplined even in retreat.
Through the main room's shot-out windows I catch movement on the mezzanine above the loading bay. A figure I haven't tracked all night. Standing at the rail, not fighting, watching. Dark suit. Ramón Zayas, Héctor's strategist.
He's been watching the whole time.
Not counting the dead or watching his soldiers pull out. Watching us. How we regrouped. How Nico redirected the defense. Where Gunner moved and how our people responded. Filing it all — every piece of information about how the Delgado organization fights when it has to.
He looks at me.
I look back.
He nods once. Unhurried. The nod of one chess player acknowledging another after a hard game — not friendly, not respectful exactly, but something adjacent to both. Then he moves to the back stairwell and he's gone.
They're leaving with a map of how we hold. The assault failed. But the reconnaissance succeeded.
Now, the counting begins.
Two of our security people dead. Four wounded.
One dancer who'd been in the back office for reasons unrelated to any of this — wrong place, badly hurt, still shaking.
Tables overturned, glass everywhere, bullet holes in the stage and the bar and the ceiling.
The Gilded Lily will need weeks of repair before it opens again.
Gunner is standing in the middle of the main floor.
Blood on his hands, his forearms, a spray of it across the left side of his face that he hasn't touched. Weapon holstered but hands loose, still ready. Scanning the room with those pale eyes, slow and methodical, checking corners. His body hasn't received the signal that the fight is over.
One of our security staff walks past him and gives him a wide berth, eyes averted. A man who works with Gunner every day — choosing not to look directly at him right now. I understand it.
Juliet is being led away by Wren and the Siren, one on each side, arms around her.
Wren's braced right arm makes the gesture awkward but she manages it, her left hand firm at Juliet's back.
Juliet is walking but not quite present — her eyes still fixed on something that isn't in this room.
Santi's threat sitting in her like a stone dropped in still water.
She'll carry that. Longer than tonight.
Marisol moves through the wreckage with a phone to her ear, organized and focused, the cost of this held somewhere behind her eyes. We held. That's the true thing. The Delgados held and the Zayas didn't take what they came for.
It should feel like a victory, but it doesn’t.
Wren finds me near the bar.
She doesn't say anything. She stands beside me and takes my hand, and we stand in the ruined club together.
I look at her. The cut on her left arm, already crusted over. The grime on her jacket. The steadiness in her eyes — which has no business being there after everything tonight. My thumb finds the inside of her left wrist, where her pulse lives.
Fast. Real. There.
"I'm still alive," she says.
Alive," I repeat, because it’s all I can say.
Ramón was watching tonight and he's patient, and that nod from the mezzanine wasn't concession — it was note-taking. He'll come back with better information and a longer plan.
And somewhere out there Santiago Zayas is driving through the city with blood on his shirt that isn't his, remembering a soft girl with terrified hazel eyes who couldn't move when he looked at her. That promise of his isn't the kind that fades. He means it.
Back at La Sirena, Jimmy Polson is still in holding. Still in the chair. That accounting waits for me.
But Wren's hand is warm in mine. Her pulse steady under my fingers where our palms press together. Alive. Both of us alive, standing in the wreckage, the city going about its business outside.
For tonight, it's enough.