Chapter 20 - Nitro #2
Holloway took another step, so close now that the glass almost kissed the muzzle. “You come out, you get in the car, you tell them what they want, and maybe you come back with all your fingers. Or—” He shrugged, “—we make it look like a domestic, and someone else gets the Nobel.”
Seraphina blinked once. Then she did something so reckless I almost shouted. She set the phone down, turned the knob, and opened the door.
The air went dead silent.
She stepped out onto the porch, her posture loose, almost resigned. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”
He grinned. “Smart girl.” He motioned with the gun, but his eyes tracked the inside of the house, looking for a second threat.
That was my chance. I angled off the deck, circled to the side, and climbed the retaining wall. I didn’t care about the scratches. The pain was now, and the outcome was all that mattered.
I lined up behind the porch post, maybe ten feet from the two of them. The gunman had his back to me now, too focused on the prize.
I waited until he was a step from Seraphina.
She stopped, arms at her sides, and looked him in the eye. “Are you going to shoot me here?” she asked, voice flat.
He laughed, a sound of pure condescension. “Not unless you make it interesting.”
She nodded. Then, in a movement so fast it stunned me, she turned and sprinted for the far edge of the porch. Holloway moved to grab her, his attention split, and that was when I made my play.
I stepped on the first riser, let the wood creak, and called out: “Hey!”
He spun, gun up, scanning the dark for the source. That was all the time she needed. She pivoted at the porch rail, doubled back, and crashed into him shoulder-first.
The gun went wide, but the shot didn’t. A single round popped off, burning the night. I heard it hit the eave, tile splintering.
She kept going, ramming him into the wall. The gun dropped to the boards. I was up the steps and over the rail before he could regroup.
He tried for the weapon, but Seraphina was on him, hands around his wrist, digging in with the kind of leverage that only comes from knowing the angles.
I hit him from the side, shoulder to ribs, and drove him back into the stucco. His head bounced. He slumped, dazed, then reached for the gun again.
Seraphina kicked it away. She was breathing hard, eyes locked on the weapon, not the man.
I knelt beside him, pinning his good arm under my knee. “You alright?” I called over my shoulder.
She wiped a smear of blood from her chin, nodded.
Holloway looked up at me, teeth gritted. “You don’t get it,” he spat. “None of you get it. You’re just—just the disposable layer.”
I twisted his arm until something popped. He screamed, then went limp.
Seraphina stood over him, chest heaving. The blood on her knuckles was already drying. “What do we do with him?” she asked, and the calm in her voice was colder than any mountain night.
I shrugged. “Cops are five miles down. He’s not going anywhere.”
She nodded, then looked at me. There was something different in her eyes—no panic, just the dead calm of someone who had finally found the bottom and realized it was solid.
“Thank you,” she said.
I let go of Holloway, got to my feet, and wrapped her in both arms. She didn’t flinch.
We stood there, the three of us—one unconscious, two unkillable—until the world remembered to start spinning again.
The woods were quiet, the night absolute, and every single star watched us in silence.
***
We trussed Holloway up with three orange extension cords and the grounding wire from her espresso machine.
He came to with his head lolling, eyes glassy, a thin rivulet of blood charting a river from his hairline to the collar of his Brooks Brothers.
We sat him in the middle of Seraphina’s kitchen—her kitchen, the room I’d only ever seen as a backdrop for awkward breakfasts and the smell of old Sumatran roast. Now it looked like an interrogation cell with better appliances.
She stood in front of him, feet apart, badge still clipped to her blouse, the dried blood on her knuckles a bold new accessory. She was silent, letting him orient. It took a full minute before he looked up at her, blinked the fog away, and registered that he’d lost.
I circled, slow, boots grating on the tile. I let my hand rest on the butt of my backup, the little Glock with the trigger job, just to see if he’d flinch.
He didn’t.
“Holloway,” she said, as if reciting a case file. “Wake up.”
He squinted at me, working his jaw. “You must be the infamous Nitro.” His voice was ragged, but he tried to sound like a man used to giving orders.
I smiled, all teeth. “Heard a lot about you, Doc. Most of it sounded like you were a prick.”
He sneered. “I always said you were a liability, Seraphina. Now look at you. You’re a murderer’s groupie.”
She didn’t react. Just paced in front of him, eyes laser sharp. “Why are you here, Holloway? Who are you working for now? The Russians, really?”
He gave a little laugh, as if the answer should be obvious. “Nobody works for anybody. Not really. I’m just the middleman.” He licked his lips, gaze darting between us. “It’s always the Russians with you, isn’t it? Always the shadow games.”
“You sold me out,” she said, not angry—just confirming her hypothesis.
He shrugged, which took effort given the cords pinning his arms. “You’re too valuable to let walk. I was supposed to bring you in alive, but after the last fiasco, well…” He nodded at the mess of blood on her knuckle. “They said dead was fine, too.”
I reached forward, grabbed him by the hair, yanked his head back so he had to look at her. “Finish,” I said, voice low.
He snorted, but I saw the terror under it. “Your code is compromised. The moment you typed in your fail-safe last week, they had it. There are no secrets, not in your world, not in mine. They’ll rebuild it, or they’ll ruin you trying.”
Seraphina stared at him, face unreadable. “How much did you get?”
He laughed. “Not as much as I wanted. There’s always a bigger fish, right?”
She nodded, once, then balled her fist and shattered his nose with a single, clinical punch.
The crack echoed off the tile, the blood a fine spray across his tie and the white grout of the floor.
Holloway howled, then went limp, his eyes watering, the pride draining out of him like he’d sprung a leak.
I let go of his hair, impressed. “You’re a quick learner,” I said, grinning at her. “Most people flinch.”
She flexed her hand, shook the sting out. “I’ve had good teachers.”
We left Holloway slumped in the chair, bleeding and sobbing, and stepped out onto the porch. The air was cool, the silence absolute except for the faint sizzle of her porch light and the low whine of distant coyotes.
She leaned on the rail, hair wild, jaw set. I watched her in the moonlight, the way her body held the tension, the way she never once looked away from the night.
“They’re never going to stop, are they?” she said, voice almost a whisper.
I shook my head. “Not until you’re obsolete. Or dead. Or both.”
She turned to face me, eyes full of something I’d never seen before. Not fear—resolution.
“Then we make them regret it,” she said.
I put my arm around her, and she let me. We stood there, two scarred-up animals on a deck in the middle of nowhere, and I thought about all the times I’d tried to quit this life, all the times I’d lied to myself about starting over.
“You know,” I said, “you’ll like club life. You get to punch a lot of people.”
She smiled, blood still on her knuckle. “I’m starting to see the appeal.”
We watched the stars for a long time, until the porch light buzzed out and the cold made her shiver.
She glanced at me, her glasses tilted in a funny way, and then at the road below, then back. “Stay with me tonight?”
I nodded, no hesitation. “Always.”
She grabbed my hand, pulled me inside, past the bleeding and unconscious Holloway, and down the hallway to her bedroom.
I could smell the iron tang of blood, the faint, lingering sweetness of her perfume.
She shut the door behind us and leaned against it, breath coming hard, her body alive with the aftermath.
I stepped to her, hands on either side of her face, kissed her slow, gentle, letting the violence drain away, letting the world disappear until all that was left was her.
We undressed in silence, letting the night swallow all the questions we couldn’t answer. Her body was warm, real, every inch of her mapped with scars new and old, every line a story I wanted to hear again and again.
We fucked like people who had run out of words, who needed only the language of skin and breath and the hard, electric pulse of being alive. There was nothing left to prove, no angle, no trick—just the raw, impossible certainty that, for now, we’d beaten the odds.
Later, wrapped in her sheets, we listened to the wind outside, the way it curled around the eaves and battered at the glass. She lay with her head on my chest, her fingers drawing idle lines across my stomach.
“You’re not going to leave, are you?” she said, so quiet I barely caught it.
I thought about lying, about giving her some clean, hopeful answer. Instead, I told her the truth.
“I don’t know how,” I said.
She nodded, and I felt the smile against my skin. “Good.”
I closed my eyes, and for the first time in years, I let myself believe in something.
***
At dawn, I woke to the sound of a tow truck. I rolled over and watched her get dressed—no drama, just efficiency, the same way she worked through a neural network bug or a half-collapsed data cluster. She looked at me, caught the stare, and smirked.
“Help me drag him outside?” she said.
We hauled Holloway, still bound and leaking blood, to the edge of the driveway and left him in the shadow of the mailbox. When the tow truck jacked Holloway’s car, we watched from the porch, arms folded, two outlaws with nothing left to hide.
The driver looked at the scene, saw the blood, the cords, the ruined face, and shrugged. “He owe you money?” he asked.
Seraphina smiled. “Something like that. Drop him and the car at the FBI office on Rodeo Park.”
The truck rumbled off, Holloway rattling in the passenger seat, and we listened to the engine fade down the mountain.
She turned to me, eyes clear and hungry. “What now?”
I shrugged. “We ride.”
She nodded, and that was that. We packed up, hopped on the bike, and let the road do the thinking.
The wind was sharp, the sun barely over the horizon, the world waking up for another round.
Her arms wrapped around my waist, tight and sure, and I opened the throttle, the machine roaring under us, the sky wide open ahead.
As we hit the first turn, she leaned in, lips to my ear, and said the thing we’d both been avoiding.
“I love you, you know.”
It hit harder than any punch. I squeezed the throttle, grinning into the wind, and let the bike carry us into the future, whatever the hell it had in store.
We didn’t look back. Not even once.