Chapter 32
RAFFAELE
The acoustics of the room are wrong for a gunfight.
Concrete ceiling. Concrete floor. Steel rafters.
Every round, every casing on the floor, every shout—all of it gets amplified and bounced back at us from four different directions.
Within three seconds, I can’t hear what anyone’s saying.
Within five, I’m operating off muscle memory.
I drop behind the column to my left.
Lorenzo’s already there. He’s got his rifle up and is firing measured pairs across the floor—one, two; one, two—at the formation of Nico’s people, who’ve broken cover and are spreading toward the side walls of the warehouse the way trained men spread.
There are fewer of them than I counted on the way in.
Six. Maybe seven. The kid who fired first is already on the floor; Lorenzo got him inside two seconds.
Nico’s gone.
I scan for him through the smoke and the dust—I see his men. I see the muzzle flashes from the catwalk that one of his shooters has somehow reached in the chaos. I don’t see him.
That’s a problem. The problem.
Find Nico.
I shoulder out from behind the column and run, low, to the next one. A round chips concrete six inches from my ear, and the spray hits my cheek. I don’t slow down. Lorenzo’s covering fire pulls the shooter on the catwalk back behind the rail.
I make it to the next column. I search for my target.
Bingo.
Nico’s at the rear of the warehouse, behind a stack of pallets near the loading bay, directing his men with hand signals, eyes up, gun low. He’s gotten over the surprise faster than I expected. He’s not running. He’s fighting.
I should’ve known. The man inherited his father’s room of competence even if he could never use it. He shot Vincenzo in the chest with three rounds in a tight grouping. He’s not, despite everything, an amateur.
I make a decision.
“Lorenzo.”
He looks over.
“Take the floor. I’m going for him.”
“Boss.”
“Take the fucking floor.”
He nods, pivoting his fire across the side of the warehouse where two of Nico’s men are trying to flank us. The two men go down in sequence.
I move.
I go along the row of columns at the back of the warehouse—column to column, low, fast, the gun in my right hand and my left arm tucked tight against my ribs. I take rounds from the catwalk and from the floor and I don’t stop moving. Somewhere behind me one of my men screams. I don’t turn.
Twenty yards to Nico.
Fifteen.
He sees me coming.
He breaks cover.
We meet in the middle of the warehouse floor, both running, both with our weapons up.
I fire twice. He fires three times. None of them hit.
We’re both moving too fast, and the dust’s too thick.
I see his face—pale, sweating, eyes pinned to mine—and for one strange, suspended second I see the small fat boy who used to make a mess at his father’s dinner table.
The boy who couldn’t keep up with his father’s chess games.
The boy his father, eventually, stopped inviting to play.
Then he closes the distance and tries to hit me with the butt of his gun.
I get my arm up. The grip cracks against my forearm hard enough that my hand goes numb to the elbow. My gun goes skidding across the concrete.
I hit him in the throat.
Nico goes back hard.
I follow him.
He’s choking, trying to bring his pistol up, but his body won’t listen. I close the distance and grab his wrist, bringing his arm down just as the gun fires into the concrete by my boot. I twist his wrist until I feel the bone break. The gun falls.
He plunges a knee into my hip. Not hard enough.
I have to make this fast.
I have my left forearm across his throat now. My right hand has found the inside of his coat and is searching through it—for the second gun, for the knife, for anything sharp. He’s got a knife. I pull it from the inside pocket and throw it behind me into the dark.
He’s gasping. There’s blood coating his teeth.
“It’s over,” I growl.
But Nico just laughs.
“Over.” His eyes are wild. He hisses it through the blood. “Nothing’s over. You think killing me ends this? You think you win?”
“Yes.”
I let him hear it.
“I think I win, Nico. Thirty seconds from now I take this knee off your chest, put one in your forehead, and drive back to Newark. By sunrise I’m in your father’s chair.
By Friday the families have lined up to kiss the ring.
And you? You spend forever in the ground next to your father.
The only difference is he gets visitors. ”
I lean closer.
“I think the whole fucking thing is mine. Yes.”
Nico glares at me.
The wildness drops out of his face for a second.
“There it is.” He spits. “There you fucking are. I knew it. I always knew it. The whole goddamn family thought you were the quiet one, the lawyer with the brains and the manners who was just so happy to be useful. My father believed it. My father went to his grave believing it.” He coughs up blood.
“But you’re just another petty son of a bitch who wants the throne.
Same as the rest of us. You just wear the suit better. ”
A fire burns in my chest. I try not to let it show. It’s a losing battle.
“I wear the suit better because the suit was made for me,” I bite back.
“And yes. I want the throne. I’ve wanted it since the second I walked into your father’s house, Nico.
Since I knew what it was to be inside this world instead of outside it.
” I shift my weight. “What did you think? That I was going to be the scrappy little street kid forever? The grateful charity case who washes the car and runs the errands and is happy to be useful?”
I lean in.
“I’m fucking ambitious, Nico. I wanted the whole fucking family to serve me.
From the night I came in off the street, I wanted it.
And the difference between you and me is that you were born into it, and you couldn’t even hold on to it, and I came in cold and your father chose me anyway. What a fucking tragedy.”
“Fuck you.”
His hand scrabbles for nothing in particular. “I won’t go quietly. I won’t make killing me as easy as it was for you to kill my father.”
I freeze.
For a second the warehouse falls out of my head entirely. The gunfire, the dust, Lorenzo somewhere south of me—gone.
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb.” His voice climbs. “I know it was you. The casino. You shot him in his chair like a dog while he played cards.”
“I didn’t kill Vincenzo.”
“Bullshit.”
“I didn’t.” My grip tightens at his collar. “I thought you did.”
Silence.
The shooting outside our small piece of the floor goes on without us—that’s still happening, somewhere—but inside the six-foot circle of me and him on the concrete, the air goes quiet.
Nico stares at me.
The hate in his eyes wavers. Confusion breaks through it. He searches my face.
“Why the fuck would I kill my own father?”
“And why would I? He raised me. He made me his heir.”
“His heir.” Nico laughs again. “That fucking will. Victor told me about it. Told me you’d forged it the night the old man went down.”
I stop breathing.
“That son of a bitch.” I say it through my teeth. “He set us up. Both of us.”
“You’re saying Victor killed him?”
“Of course he killed him. And then he framed us for it.”
The fight goes out of me.
Well, not entirely. I pick up the gun with my right hand while Nico’s still pinned under my left.
But the version of me that was going to put one in his head thirty seconds ago has been replaced by a version that knows, very suddenly, that the man on the floor under me is not the man I came here to kill. Not anymore.
I take my forearm off his throat and get my weight off his chest. I don’t take the gun off him—I’m not stupid—but I do shift back onto my heels and let him have his lungs.
He rolls onto his side and coughs more blood before gingerly pushing himself up to a sitting position.
“Both of us,” he rasps. “He fucking played us both.”
“Yes.”
“That son of a bitch—”
A gunshot.
It comes from behind Nico, close, much too close. His body jerks where he sits. His eyes go wide as he glances down.
The bloom is across his chest, just to the left of his sternum. Spreading.
He looks back up at me.
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
He crumples sideways. His weight goes off my forearm and onto the floor, and he is, in the span of about two seconds, gone.
I spin.
One of Nico’s men is standing twelve feet behind me. Gun up. Smoke curling from the muzzle. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking down at Nico’s body.
“Sorry, boss,” he says, but he’s not talking to me. “New management.”
Behind him, two more of Nico’s people lower their weapons and step back from the formation they’d been holding. One of them spits on the concrete. The other one nods once at the shooter, the small nod of men confirming a decision they’d already privately agreed on.
I have time to register all of this, but no time to do anything about it.
Then the warehouse goes sideways.
Some of Nico’s men turn. Not on me. On each other. Two of them open up on the shooter who just killed Nico, and the shooter goes down hard. His friend fires back.
I duck for cover. But as I roll around the fallen bodies, I see two of my men—men I came in with, men I drove out with, men I have known—raising their weapons. Not at Nico’s people.
At me.
Traitors.
Actual fucking traitors. Victor bought them. Planted them. Paid them in advance for tonight, and told them what the signal would be, and the signal was now.
“Boss!”
Lorenzo, somewhere to my left.
I don’t think. I move.
I roll behind the pallets Nico was using for cover earlier and come up firing. One of the men at the back column goes down with my first pair. The second one fires twice and misses both and starts to break cover, before Lorenzo takes him from the south side with a single round.
I don’t stop.
A bullet grazes my shoulder. I feel the heat of it but no pain yet—the pain comes later—and I keep going.
Two down.
Lorenzo arrives at my shoulder. Back to back. Both of us firing.
“How many of ours turned?”
“Too fucking many.”
Three. Four.
Bodies everywhere now. Some of Nico’s men are still firing at me. Some are firing at each other. Some are running. The whole warehouse has lost the shape of a battle and become a riot of men who no longer know who they’re working for.
I don’t care.
A thought has arrived in my head, and it has displaced everything else.
Victor knows where Bea is.
He planned this.
He knew the warehouse meeting would empty the house.
The rage that floods up through me is not the rage I have been carrying since Vincenzo’s death. The rage I have been carrying is hot and personal and grief-shaped, and it has been keeping me upright. The rage that arrives now is colder, and lower, and is going to take longer to spend.
I go blind with cold rage.
I don’t keep careful count. Five. Six. Seven.
Lorenzo is keeping pace beside me—the version of him I have only seen in the worst rooms of my life, brutal, efficient, gone somewhere internal—and we move through what’s left of the warehouse cutting down the men who turned and stepping over the men who didn’t.
Men fall. Men flee.
Eventually:
Silence.
And the warehouse is a graveyard.
Bodies everywhere. Nico is one of them, the red bloom across his shirt now a darker brown.
I’m breathing hard. There’s blood on my hands and on my face. Some of it is mine. Most of it isn’t. My shoulder has started to talk to me, which means the grace period is over and the next hour is going to hurt.
Lorenzo leans against a crate. He’s got one hand pressed to his side. He’s grinning. Crazy bastard.
“Well. That was fun.”
“How bad?”
“Flesh wound. I’ll live. Probably.” He spits blood. “Can’t say the same for half our guys. Fucking traitors.”
I scan the carnage, counting the faces I recognize on the floor.
Too fucking many.
“Bea.”
Lorenzo’s grin fades.
I’m already moving. Toward the side door. Toward the SUVs.
“What about—boss—the bodies. The cleanup.”
“Leave them.”
“Boss—”
“Victor’s going to make a move on her.”
“We’ve got the place guarded. Enough men to—”
“How many of those men are mine, Lorenzo? How many of them are like these fuckers in here? How many of them did Victor buy a week ago and tell to wait?”
A beat.
“Shit.”
I break into a sprint.
“We need to get back. Now!”