Chapter 10
Caden
The cathedral district runs east to west along the old stone embankment, and in the morning it is the most exposed quarter-mile in Halo City.
Daniil Petrov has been patient and his window is closing. The files are off her system. The Consortium is negotiating. Every hour makes her safer and makes him less useful, and men like Petrov don't accept useless gracefully.
His patience is ending.
Garza is in my left ear. The field team is split between the north end of the Steps and the parking structure access two blocks east. Vivi is on my right, with the terms in the bag on her shoulder.
Walking her into this exposure is the hardest operational decision I've made in seventeen years.
I've run the numbers. There's no version where she doesn't move.
The deal closes here or it doesn't close, and if it doesn't close, Petrov finds another window.
So we move. I keep her on my inside and I scan the Steps and I run the scene in a continuous loop: sightlines, entry points, a woman with a stroller at the first tier who wasn't here yesterday.
She wasn't here yesterday.
"Contact vehicle stationary," Garza says.
Stroller.
No, not an ordinary stroller.
I move.
Bang!
The impact is not like in the movies. It is the sudden total failure of my left shoulder, a hot tearing wrongness that goes all the way through, and the ground comes up fast and my cheek meets the stone and there is a second where the world is just grey and the smell of old rock and the sensation of something very important leaving my body.
Then Garza, in my ear, sharp and close: “Shots fired, northeast. Caden, talk to me!”
"Down," I say. My voice comes out wet.
I take inventory. Right arm functional. Left is not. Breathing, but the left side is complicated. Not a lung. Close. I hold still and take the shallowest breath the situation allows and call that enough.
The Steps. Stone, tourists scattering, Garza's team closing from the north. And Vivi.
Vivi is on one knee beside me.
I don't know when she moved. She is simply there, her hand already pressing down on my shoulder with the full weight of her arm behind it, her face six inches from mine. No fear in it. No shock. Ever the mob wife. In control.
"Stay," she says. Just: stay. A command to a man she's decided is going to obey it.
She has my earpiece. I don't know when she took it. My vision goes in and out.
She's talking to Garza in a voice so level I'd think she does this every week — pressing down on my shoulder, her hand already dark to the wrist with my blood, not looking at it, not flinching, eyes on my face, talking Garza through the scene the same way I would and faster than I expected and correct on every detail.
"Petrov is down," Garza says. I can hear it faintly from the earpiece in her hand. "Alive."
"The contact still stationary?"
"Yes."
Her eyes leave mine. Her jaw sets. She's already decided. I see it land on her face before she moves.
"Don't," I say.
She looks at me.
"Don't." My voice is bad and she hears exactly how bad. "Wait for the team."
"The team is containing a scene." She gives the earpiece back.
Her hand returns to my shoulder and the pressure increases and I don't make a sound.
"The contact is stationary for another ten minutes, maybe less.
If I'm not there when he decides to move, the window closes and everything we've done is a body on cathedral steps. "
"Vivi."
"I'm six feet away." She holds my gaze. "I won't go further than six feet."
I look at her face.
My shoulder is losing the argument with gravity.
The cold from the stone has moved up through my jacket and into my spine and my right hand is flat on the step and I can feel each groove in the rock.
I want to get up. I have wanted to get up since the moment I went down and physics and Vivi's hand are the only things that have stopped me and I hate them both equally.
Vivi takes out her phone.
Six feet. She said it and she means it — moves exactly that far, angles herself so I’m in her sight line and the contact vehicle is in her other eye.
She’s calling above him, to the number she found in Dominic’s files and has been carrying since yesterday, and I understand in the same second that the Eighth Door meeting was never the agreement — it was the audition. She passed it. She always knew who she needed to reach.
I cannot stop her.
I hold that without wrapping anything around it. Seventeen years as the thing that goes between the threat and the target, and I am on stone with my shoulder in pieces and she is six feet away doing what I cannot do.
She's gone around the contact. Straight to Valenti leadership.
I know before she says a word — the number she dials, the half-second of silence before she speaks that means whoever picked up was not expecting to be called directly.
She found that number herself or she's had it for days.
I am going to think about which one of those is true.
I lie on the stone and I do not look away from her.
"The evidence routes through my foundation accounts," she says. "I hold the only access codes. You know that or you wouldn't still be negotiating." A pause. "Two conditions."
The cold is in my back and my hips and the hand flat on the stone. The breath I take doesn't go as far as I need. I watch her face in the morning light — composed, the bones of her jaw set, the eyes forward, nothing in her posture that admits to the man bleeding on the steps behind her.
"First," she says. "My name. Clean. Every connection between Vivienne Ferraro and Dominic's activities must be severed in writing, confirmed through your legal structure and sealed.
The skimming was his. The accounts were his.
I was his wife and not his accomplice and you're going to say so in terms that hold.
" A pause. Something from the other end.
She waits it out. "I'm aware. Do it anyway. "
The Steps are narrowing. Garza's team on the perimeter, the fake stroller on the ground with two of my people on her, Vivi's back, the grey sky above the cathedral, the blood on the stone under my cheek.
"Second," she says.
She turns slightly. Her eyes find mine. She holds them while she talks.
"Caden Byrne. Head of close protection, Halo Protective Group. His name is in the agreement or there is no agreement. His safety is guaranteed or this call ends and you can explain to your leadership why the evidence surfaced anyway."
She says my name to the Valenti leadership the way she says everything she's decided is not negotiable.
The medic reaches me. Hands that are not hers, turning me, finding what she found.
I don't look at any of it. I look at her.
She has stopped looking at me and I am lying on the ground with a stranger's hands on my shoulder trying to understand what a man does when someone puts his name in a Valenti agreement without asking him.
I put my name in nothing. I am leverage for no one. Seventeen years I have held that clean — because you cannot threaten what isn't claimed, because the work requires that nothing matters enough to cost you the job.
She claimed me.
She looked at me on the stone and decided my life was something she was going to guarantee and she did it the way she does everything she's decided is hers: without hesitation, without asking, without leaving room for argument.
The fury is total and has nowhere to go.
She hangs up.
She closes the six feet completely, drops to her knees on the stone without looking at her clothes, her hand back on my chest where the medic is working and the medic moves around it without comment. She looks at my face.
"Done," she says.
"I heard."
"Your name is in the terms."
"I heard that too."
Her hand is steady on my chest and her face is giving me nothing and I want to take her jaw in my hand and make her look at what she's done but my good arm has my weight and I'm staying on the ground and the fury is sitting in my chest with the shoulder and the cold and all of it pressing down at once.
"You did that without asking me," I say.
"Yes."
"Vivi."
"I'd do it again."
Flat. Certain. No apology coming and she knows I know it and she holds my gaze and doesn't move.
I look at her face. At her hand — my blood dried to the wrist now, dark in the creases of her fingers, and she hasn't looked at it once.
She just brokered a deal with the Valenti Consortium from a crime scene with her hand in my blood.
I’m losing consciousness now.
But when I wake up, I promise: I am going to tell her what I think about a woman who puts a man's name in a Valenti agreement without asking.
I am going to tell her at length when I have the lung capacity for it, and she is going to stand there with her chin up and tell me she'd do it again, and the fury is going to have to find somewhere to live after that because she's going to mean it and I am going to know it and neither of those things is going to change.
Because I love her.