Chapter 23
MATTEO
THE FIRST SHOT CRACKS before any of us are in position, and I duck behind the loading container with Amalia right next to me. So much for the stealth approach. One of our men got spotted, or one of theirs got jumpy.
“That wasn’t us,” Amalia says, pressed against the metal, her gun up, her shoulder against mine.
I take a quick peek around and pull back. Dominic’s crew is spread along the warehouse wall, behind the trucks. Our guys have the high ground by the fence, but not by much.
Gunfire goes back and forth. The container rings every time a round hits it.
“Do you see him?” I ask.
“Not yet.” She edges to the corner. “There’s a car between us and the door. If we get behind it, we can move up.”
I check the gap. At least two of his men have eyes on it. “We’ll get cut down halfway.”
“Then we wait for our guys to draw them out.”
I hate the waiting, but I’m not about to run into the open like an idiot. Marco’s group is laying into the trucks from the left, and one of Dominic’s men breaks cover to reposition.
“Now,” Amalia says.
I run low for the car and slide behind it, Amalia hitting the ground next to me. Rounds punch into the door panel above our heads, but the engine block takes most of it. Good enough.
I come up over the hood and fire twice at the man near the warehouse door. He stumbles back inside. My ears are ringing.
“This is going better than I thought,” I say.
Amalia looks past me, toward the far end of the lot.
“What?” I follow where she’s looking.
Vans rush through the back gate, their headlights off, and men spill out of them before they’ve even stopped. They fan out fast and take cover as if they planned this. That’s not Dominic’s usual crew.
“He brought backup,” I say.
“He knew.” Amalia’s jaw clenches. “He fucking knew we’d do this!”
I don’t have time to think about that, because the new men push up our flank, and we’re about to be pinned between them and the warehouse. We need to fall back to the containers, but the open ground is worse now than it was.
“We have to move,” I say. “Back the way we came.”
I lean out to clear a path, firing at the closest van. One of their men crouches behind the second vehicle and lines up on me, and I see a gun pointed toward my chest. I’m too slow. I know it even as I try to drop to the ground.
Amalia slams into me, shoving me down, and the shot tears through the air where my head just was. Metal squeals as the round rips into the car frame.
She ends up on top of me, both of us in the dirt behind the tire. My heart pounds like crazy in my chest.
“You okay?” she gasps, her hand fisted in my jacket, her face inches away from mine.
“Yeah.” I grip her arm. “You?”
She nods, breathing fast. There’s a smear of grease on her cheek, but she’s not hit. I’m not either, somehow.
“That was close,” I manage.
“Too close.” She doesn’t let go of my jacket. “He shouldn’t have known. Nobody knew about the specifics but us and a handful of our own men.”
I want to tell her to focus on getting out, but she’s right to be rattled, because this changes everything. Dominic didn’t stumble into our trap. He set one of his own, and we ran straight into it.
A round skips off the dirt near my boot, and that snaps both of us back. We’re still pinned, and the second crew is closing in.
“We can’t go back the way we came,” I say. “They’ve got the lot now.”
Amalia twists. “The dock. If we get to the edge, there’s a maintenance walkway under it.”
“Under the dock?”
“It runs along the pilings to the next pier. We can come out past the gate.”
I don’t love that plan, but it beats getting shot in the open.
“Marco,” I shout over the noise. “Cover us! We’re going right.”
Our guys open up hard on the vans, forcing the new crew to keep their heads down.
“Go,” I say to Amalia.
She moves first and I follow, the two of us bent low. A round splinters wooden crates near my shoulder, and I grab Amalia’s collar and yank her down as another one whips past. We crouch in the gap between two stacks, both breathing hard.
“You good?” I ask.
“Keep going.” She’s up before I am.
We make it to the edge of the dock, and she hops down onto the walkway below. I follow, and my boots hit slick boards just above the waterline. It’s dark down here.
Amalia leads, moving fast along the narrow planks. “Watch the gaps. Some of these boards aren’t nailed down right.”
I test each one before I step on it. The water’s dark, and I really don’t want to find out how cold it is. Amalia’s a few steps ahead, and I keep my hand near her back in case she slips.
We reach the next pier and she pulls herself up onto a service ladder, with me right behind her. When I come up over the top, we’re in the dark by a row of empty fuel drums, and the warehouse and the vans are a good distance behind us now.
Amalia crouches behind the drums.
“We made it,” she says.
“Barely.” I check the lot behind us.
No one’s followed. Yet.
She turns to me, a strand of hair stuck to her cheek. “I need to know how he figured it out.”
I press my hand over hers where it’s braced on a drum. “Right now we need to get away from here, and then we deal with the rest.”
She holds my gaze for a moment, her brow drawn tight.
“Someone talked,” she says quietly.
“Maybe.”
A car engine starts somewhere near the gate, and we both go still. Then it pulls away, going the other direction.
“Come on,” I say, helping her up. “Let’s get to a car.”
Whoever sold us out, Dominic was ready for it, and we just barely got away. But there’s something else I can’t stop thinking about.
Amalia threw herself at me to save my life. No one has ever done that before, because no one cared enough. She could’ve just let me get shot, but she decided to risk her life for me. I don’t know what to think about that.
And maybe it’s better like this. At least we’ll still get to work together.