Chapter 14
Tiernan
She fought me for the hospital shifts. I gave them to her because I'd promised to stop deciding her life in rooms she wasn't in.
Taking them would have made me the thing she signed away her year to escape.
I knew the access was the weak point. It was the spot that would be easily exploited.
I posted a driver and a watcher and I told myself it was enough, but the whole time some cold part of me was running the odds on exactly this. The odds were never good.
After all my time building an impenetrable life, she walked in, pulled a lever on my structure, and created a door.
She didn’t mean to open it for the enemy, but she’s the key that granted him access anyway.
She’s also the reason that the comparatively small distance between us feels a lot like a death sentence.
The drive from my home to the hospital is four minutes. I do it in three, only because if I crash, I can’t help her. I still feel like I’ve arrived too late.
Emilio Moretti is in the staff lot with a gun on her.
The sight starts to unravel the last remaining bit of restraint and control I have.
I’ve killed men with less feeling than I have walking across this pavement.
I have buried people and slept fine. Every crime that I’ve committed has left me unbothered, but now …
Here’s a desperate man with a pistol pointed at a woman in hospital scrubs, and the world has narrowed to the eighteen inches between the muzzle and her. I understand, finally and completely, what it costs to let someone matter.
Even her calm face and relaxed posture can’t give me hope. I only feel the crushing ‘what if’ that will follow a fired gun and get a bone-deep chill at the idea of only holding Jack as she bleeds out. Forcing the emotions down, I make myself be present for her. Her safety. Her life.
She's talking. Of course she's talking. She has him half-convinced he's making a mistake, which he is. She would know, because she watches people make the worst decisions of their lives for a living. That doesn’t mean it will work on a made man who’s lost what matters to him.
Callen takes the left. Remy the right. I walk straight in, because Emilio needs something to point the gun at that isn't her, and I am happy to be it.
"Emilio." I keep my hands open and my voice flat.
My voice has ended more conversations than any weapon I own.
"You're surrounded, your cover's gone, and your uncle's people are forty minutes out and praying you do something they can disown. You know what that looks like. You know it’s not a martyr’s death.”
He sputters something in Italian without looking away from Jack, who’s finally quiet. Her face is open, understanding even. I hate that expression and how genuine it looks. I need his eyes on me at least.
I try again. “There's one move here that doesn't end with you in the harbor."
"You took everything." The gun stays on her. His hand is shaking now, which is more dangerous than I want to admit. I can practically see the part where the gun goes off by accident.
"I exposed what you already did. Your family did the rest." I take a step, drawing his eye, and drawing the muzzle a few degrees off her. "Put it down and you walk out of this lot breathing. That's the whole offer. It expires when I stop talking."
For one second it could go either way. Then Jack does the thing that tells me everything about why I will never recover from her.
Rather than taking the out, she steps half a pace sideways so that if the gun goes off, it goes wide of the building and the people behind the glass.
She’s calculating even now. The movement breaks Emilio's focus for the half-beat Callen needs.
I don’t breathe until it’s over without the sound of an errant shot punching through what matters most to me.
Thankfully, it's over fast. Emilio is on the ground, the gun skidding across asphalt. My knee digs in his back and his face presses against the cold pavement. He’s immobile and in my control, but my temper doesn’t know.
Eight years of instinct screams for a final resolution. Something deeper and hotter tries to tug my hand to my gun, put the muzzle against his head, and end him. He put a gun on Jack. There is a version of me that does it and feels nothing.
That version must already be dead and buried.
If I’d really gone soft, I’d do it, but I curl my hand into a fist instead.
Because killing a Moretti in a hospital lot starts the family war I've been working this whole time to avoid.
Handing him back to his own people, broken, disgraced, and alive, will cost the Morettis more than a body ever could.
They have to take him in. They have to deal with what he is in front of everyone who watched him fall.
A dead Emilio at my hand becomes a martyr.
A living one is a humiliation they carry.
So, I lean down and I say it quiet, in Irish, the way I said it to Donnelly, and Emilio goes white and still.
"Your uncle gets you back," I tell him in English, for the witnesses. "Tell him the waterfront stays Maddox. Tell him we're square, for now."
For now. The Morettis don't forget humiliation. This isn't finished, it's banked. Some night down the line it will come due. I know that even as Callen hauls him up and the family's car finally noses into the lot to collect what's left of Emilio.
But that's a problem for a different night.
Right now, there's a woman standing in the cold in bloodstained scrubs with her hand still wrapped around a panic button. Jack looks at me like she's checking me for damage. Even now, even after having a gun trained on her, she’s focused on everyone else.
I cross to her and take her face in both hands. I don't care who's watching. "You stepped sideways. Toward the gun."
"Away from the building. There were people behind the glass."
Of course there were. Of course she saw them. Of course she put them before herself.
I have spent eight years certain that wanting someone only tells your enemies where to put the knife. Tonight my enemy put it exactly there, and she talked him out of it while I was still three minutes away.
"I love you," I tell her, in a parking lot, in front of my men, with Emilio Moretti's family scraping him off the pavement behind us. "I should have led with that weeks ago instead of a contract. I'm telling you now."
She looks at me long enough that I think she might make me wait for it. Her lips turn up ever so slightly as her hands brush my sides.
"I know," she says. "I've known since the mugs."
Then she lets me hold her. The war goes quiet, and for the length of one breath in a cold hospital lot, there are no odds to verify.