Chapter 22
twenty-two
BILLIE
The thing about accidentally shooting a man is that no one prepares you for it.
They don’t cover it in corporate onboarding.
There’s no pamphlet. No HR module titled “What To Do If You Kill Someone At Work, Part One: Managing Your Response.” I’m looking at Mateo on the floor and the gun still warm in my hand and I can’t quite figure out how to reconcile those two things into a coherent thought, so instead I just say it out loud, to no one in particular:
“I’m a murderer. I just killed a man. Murder. That’s something I do now, I guess.”
Nobody answers me. Probably because the room has exploded.
Marco is on his knees next to his brother.
That’s the part that freezes me in place for exactly one second longer than is strategically advisable.
His hands are on Mateo’s chest. His face is doing something between fury and grief so deep it looks like the ground opening up beneath a person.
He’s speaking in Spanish, low and fast, and I don’t understand a single word of it, but still; I understand all of it.
Then he looks up.
His eyes find mine across the room and I am genuinely certain, in a way I have never been certain of anything in my thirty-five years of professionally underestimating myself, that I am going to die here.
Alana takes a step back, and there’s a click-clacking of heels as she disappears, but my vision has gone blurry, and I can’t tell where.
“Get down—” Rodrigo says, pulling me across the room and removing the gun from my hand.
Rodrigo gets a hand on a heavy metal table and flips it with a force that shouldn’t be possible for one person, and then his other hand closes around my wrist and he pulls—hard, fast—and I am behind the table before I’ve consciously decided to move.
The first round hits the table while I’m still folding to the floor.
Then another. Then several more in quick succession, and the sound is enormous, filling the room from every direction, and I press my back against the table and pull my knees to my chest and try to remember if I’ve always been this small or if I’ve somehow gotten smaller.
“Are you hit?” Rodrigo says. His voice is calm. He’s checking my arms, my sides, his hands moving quickly.
“I don’t— I don’t think so.” I do a fast mental survey of my body. Everything reports in. “No. No, I’m okay.”
He exhales once. Short and controlled. His hand stays on my shoulder.
“Good,” he says. “Stay close.”
“How did the gun go off?” I murmur. “I didn’t even pull the trigger–”
“Black market weapons,” Rodrigo says as another bullet hits the metal table. He peeks over it and returns fire using the very same gun that just betrayed me. “They’re unreliable…”
And then, because the universe has a special sense of humor about me and my life, I hear the click of heels again.
I peek around the side of the table just long enough to see her:
Across the room, Alana is crouched next to Mateo’s body. No one seems to notice her in the chaos; Marco has already abandoned his brother’s body and is yelling at the guards in the corner.
Alana is alone with Mateo’s form and her pink blazer is immaculate.
Her nails—I can see her nails from here, pale pink with tiny crystals—are moving with delicate precision as she slides a ring off Mateo’s finger.
She does it the way you’d unclasp a bracelet you found on the sidewalk.
Practical. Unhurried. She examines it for one brief second, then tucks it into her blazer pocket and runs toward us, sliding behind the table to join us as if she’s making a home run and shooting all the way, keeping our enemies at bay.
“Really,” I say. “The ring? That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”
She looks at me the way a very patient teacher looks at a child who has just asked why the sky is blue for the fourth time.
“You’re bad at taking opportunities, Billie,” she says. A round hits the wall six inches from her head. She doesn’t flinch. “This is why you’re behind in life.”
More bullets fly from behind us, heading toward Marco and his men.
It takes me a second to realize that the guards behind us are…
helping us. We’re in the middle of a full shootout between Marco’s loyalists at the far end of the room and the guards who allowed us entry at the front doors.
I turn to Alana. “Why are they protecting us?”
Alana shrugs. “Not everyone likes Marco, Billie. He’s a bad boss.
Unlike you, and very much like me, they probably see an opportunity now that you assassinated his brother.
” She calls out over her shoulder to Ivan, whose bald head is visible above the crowd that’s giving us cover.
“Keep it going, Ivan! La Diabla thanks you!” She winks at me. “I’m very popular.”
I genuinely don’t know if she’s the most terrifying person I’ve ever met or the most instructive one, and I don’t have time to figure it out because she’s already standing fully upright— in the middle of an active firefight, in heels— and she’s raising her gun.
What happens next is not something I can describe in real time because time stops existing when Alana goes to work.
It’s more like a series of still photographs.
One guard in the doorway. Then not. He collapses.
Another coming around the side of the room, weapon raised.
Then not— she takes him out. A third one I hadn’t even clocked yet, near the far window.
Then not. She moves through the room with the kind of unhurried efficiency that I have, until tonight, only seen applied to things like very good espresso service.
The dissonance is so complete that some part of my brain just refuses to fully process it as real.
She pauses. She checks her nails. One is chipped.
“Unfortunate,” she says, to herself.
Rodrigo has his hands on my shoulders to keep me under the edge of the table, and his cologne carries the scent of memories we never got the chance to make. I can’t help but think that— if I’m going to die here— at least it was because I was trying to help someone like him. Someone kind, and brave.
“Alana,” Rodrigo calls out, a warning in his voice. “Get us out of here! ?Rápido!”
“Yes, yes.” She drops her hand. “I know.”
She’s cleared most of the path to the far window, but the room is still active, still loud, still full of men who want us dead for a variety of reasons that have escalated dramatically in the last four minutes.
Rodrigo keeps his body between me and the remaining line of fire, which is something I notice and immediately file under “things I’m going to think about later.
” He’s been doing that since the moment everything went sideways.
Putting himself between me and whatever’s coming next, like he’s thought about this before— like this is a decision he made quietly, somewhere in the chaos, and didn’t mention.
I duck when a guard comes around the edge of the table at a low angle, faster than the others, getting past Rodrigo’s line of sight. His hand closes around my throat before I can get my voice working, and the world tips sideways— and then there’s a sound, one shot, close, and the grip disappears.
The guard goes down.
I stumble back. My hand goes to my throat. I’m breathing.
Rodrigo is standing on the other side of where the guard used to be, a gun in his hand.
He shot the man to save my life. I look up at him, and he looks down at me, and there is one half-second of something passing between us that is very quiet and has no good words for it— something that in another life, in a different room without all the bullets, might have been the beginning of a conversation.
Then Marco screams.
Marco— from across the room— is on his feet now, looking at the guard Rodrigo just shot.
“My cousin!” he shouts.
The words land.
I look at Rodrigo.
Rodrigo looks at me. Now we’ve killed Marco’s cousin.
“What kind of fucked-up family business is this?!” I shout.
Something crosses Rodrigo’s face that might, in a universe slightly less violent than this one, have been a laugh. The corner of his mouth does a thing. His eyes do a thing. It lasts approximately half a second before he locks it back down.
“It might be good to like, get to the window,” Alana says. She’s pointing. “Now.”
Marco is moving toward us, or trying to in the midst of the shooting— but he is moving, and his face is something I’m going to see in my nightmares. I turn toward the window.
Rodrigo gets there first. The latch gives.
He pushes it open and turns back to help me through the window by grabbing my ass and lifting me up.
He is really strong, I think, but then I remember I’m supposed to be surviving— so I climb over the sill with all the grace of someone who has spent her career in an ergonomic office chair.
My shoelace catches the frame. Rodrigo’s hand guides my foot free.
I land on the other side in a crouch that I would generously call intentional.
Alana comes through behind me without any of this difficulty whatsoever. Her heels touch the ground and she is already moving. Rodrigo follows her, a rogue bullet shattering the window glass as he tumbles out.
The compound grounds open up ahead of us— wide, dark, flat, lit at intervals by lights along the perimeter that make the shadows between them all the more absolute. We run. Rodrigo keeps one hand at my back and Alana runs slightly ahead of us both.
Behind us, through the window, I hear Marco’s voice.
It doesn’t sound like shouting anymore.
“I’ll kill you first, Rodrigo,” he shouts. “And then The Negotiator. And finally… La Diabla! I will take my time! You can run but none of you will live.”
I don’t look back. I keep my eyes on the dark line of the perimeter ahead, on Alana’s pink blazer catching the light, on the ground in front of my feet. Rodrigo’s hand stays at the small of my back, and I focus on that— on the warmth of it through my shirt, on the fact that his hand is there.
The perimeter wall rises up ahead of us, and Alana doesn’t slow down, so I don’t slow down, and somewhere back in that building Marco Ledger is reorganizing his grief into something that has a target.
We have a head start.
We’re going to need it.