Chapter Thirty-Four
Cal
The first shot takes out the front café window.
It’s a bay window with glass that goes across the width of the shop and comes down in shards and pebbles.
The sound is different from what most people probably expect.
Not a bang.
More like the world cracking open at a seam, sharp and immediate. Then the glass is everywhere, and the room is changed—in the half second it takes for the second shot to follow, the air shifts, people shift, my world shifts.
Because my whole world is right beside me.
My body doesn’t wait for my brain.
My hand is on Max before anything else, pushing her down while my other hand goes for my gun.
Max.
Down.
Gun.
My brain catches up.
Her hip hits the counter edge, and I feel her sharp intake of breath against my chest as I hold her close but get her low, and I’m already scanning before she hits the ground.
A black car. Passenger window. Moving, not stopped—drive-by pattern, not a siege.
Two shooters minimum based on the angle of the shots still spraying the front of the building, not targeting.
Not targeting me—or Max—specifically.
That thought files itself away for later.
“Gio.” I don’t raise my voice; I don’t need to. “Back door. Now. Take her.”
I feel him move before I see it. His hand closes on Max’s arm and I don’t let myself watch them go because I can’t—I have to trust him to do what I trained him to do years ago when he was brand new to all of this; I have to trust that she is moving away from this and not toward it.
And if I watch her go, I will follow, and that is not what we need right now. I need to fix this.
I hear her though.
A whine or a scream, my name, overshadowed by the sound of continuing gunfire, shelves and glass and debris flying.
She doesn’t need a response.
What she needs is for me to end this.
I move back and around the counter, crouching, gun out, my back to the cold metal of the espresso machine counter. My finger sits along the barrel. Ready, but not itching.
I breathe.
The shots have stopped. I bring my eyes up over the counter line, just enough to see through the blown-out frame of what used to be the window. The car is still, almost lazy, like it has all the time in the world.
My father would be shooting already.
The thought arrives without fanfare.
Just a fact. My father would have put his first round through the windshield before the second shot landed, would have been on his feet and moving before the glass finished falling, because that was how he was built—reaction before reason, violence before calculation, always.
And it worked for him, mostly. It worked for him until it didn’t.
Nico would be shooting, too. Would’ve been up like our father, finger on the trigger without thinking about anything or anyone else. Just himself and the people on the other end of the barrel.
I stay where I am.
Because two feet in front of where I am behind the counter, pressed against the base of a table with her whole body curved forward, is a woman.
And underneath her, face pressed into her shoulder, is a little boy.
Maybe four. Maybe younger. He has blonde curly hair, and he is so small that his mother’s arms cover him completely, and his fist is wrapped around her sleeve like if he holds tight enough the world will stop being loud.
He opens his eyes and they find me.
I don’t know why I’m what he looks at. Maybe because I’m the only thing in his line of sight that isn’t glass or floor. Maybe because children look for certainty and I am trying very hard to be certain.
I lower myself and crawl back around the counter, staying low to the ground. I don’t hear the car outside drive off.
I lower my gun slightly. Not all the way, just keeping it out of view.
“Hey,” I say to the boy in front of me now, quiet and even. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
His eyes are enormous. He doesn’t move but something in both him and his mother shifts, some animal terror dialing back one degree, and I hold his gaze for another second before I shift my body up a degree to peek out at the car.
The window is down.
Passenger side.
One man visible, arm resting on the door like he’s waiting for a light to change, holding his gun like it’s a cigarette.
Light skin. Shaved head.
An expression that I have seen before—the expression of a man who does violence the way other men do paperwork, without feeling, without hesitation, as another function of his day.
I know that look.
I know it because I saw it. I know it because my father cultivated it in the men around him like a crop.
But I know this look in particular because there is a specific tradition of seemingly random shooting up of public spaces, and it belongs to one family in this city—it is not mine.
The Russians.
The car idles.
I stand up fully, gun hanging loosely at my side, finger still along the barrel and prepared. He doesn’t move a muscle, but he stares at me.
One second.
Two.
Long enough to be a message.
Long enough to say we were here and you saw us and there is nothing you did about it; nothing you can do about it.
Then he smirks, tilts his chin up in a quick motion. He pulls his arm inside the vehicle and the driver pulls into traffic, unhurried, and rounds the corner and is gone.
I breathe, tuck my gun into the holster and look down.
Glass everywhere. The lavender matcha latte is probably on the floor back behind the counter. Cups are cracked, coffee and milk mixing with shards of ceramic and clear glass. Pastries and food sprinkled among the wreckage.
The almond croissant she ordered because today felt different, because today she was trying the thing she’d never tried.
Gio has her.
She’s safe.
I don’t look at the material damage for long.
I move to the woman with the boy first. Crouch down, run a quick check on her eyes, her arms, the boy’s head, his hands. She shakes her head before I ask.
They’re okay. The boy is still holding her sleeve.
“You did good,” I tell her. “Kept him down. You did exactly right.”
Her eyes fill.
I move on.
The older man near the door has a cut across his forehead from the glass, bleeding freely but not deep. I press a napkin from the ground against it and guide his hand up to hold it. He’s shaking but upright.
Good.
The server who was behind the counter when it started is against the back wall, arms wrapped around herself; unhurt, eyes wide and watching.
A couple near the window—woman gripping the man’s arm hard enough to whiten her knuckles, both shaken, neither bleeding.
I move through all of them.
Every one.
The image of Max smirking at me in that green skirt after ordering her adventurous drink flies across my memory.
Gio has her.
She’s safe.
My father would have been out the door already. Nico would have been in a car, chasing.
Every instinct I was raised with is screaming at me to move, to pursue, to respond with equivalent force and do it now before the trail goes cold. And to hit them back harder.
Instead, I move through all of them anyway. Because this is the difference. I am different.
This is the line I decided on years ago when I chose to walk away. You don’t leave people on the floor. You don’t step over the civilians to get to the war. You check. You make sure. The innocent are not collateral damage.
I got pulled back into this when my father died, but I will not be roped into senseless killing and discarding witnesses and civilians like they mean nothing.
The older man nods at me from behind the napkin. He’ll be okay.
I straighten up, releasing the breath I was holding.
My mind clears a bit knowing no one was badly injured in what very well was a show of force just for the Renzettis, just for me. I turn in a circle, assessing the damage one more time.
My eyes fall on the hallway to the back door.
Gio has her.
She’s safe.
They went out the back and Gio is good, Gio is careful, Gio knows what he’s doing, and she is probably already a block away by now, probably already—
Two shots.
From behind the café.
I am moving before the echo stops.
Gun out, safety off, through the service hall, past the kitchen where a cook is pressed against the wall with both hands up—I don’t stop, I don’t slow.
My hand hits the crash bar of the back door and cold air hits my face and I’m in the alley and—