17. Vince
VINCE
The shutter on the bodega stuck the same way it always did.
I put my shoulder into it, felt the metal give, and the thing finally slid home with a scrape that echoed down the empty street.
Two months ago I would have forced it and walked away satisfied I'd broken something.
Now I knew the trick. Press low, push up, don't fight the track.
I stepped back and checked the bolt. Secure. The cold bit through my jacket, sharper than it had been an hour ago. November was settling in hard. I flexed my fingers, stiff from the work, and turned toward the corner. Three more shops and I'd be done for the night.
The route was second nature now. I knew which alleys the kids used, which bins got hit, which locks needed replacing.
I knew the names of the businesses even if I'd never met the owners.
Maria's Alterations. The drugstore that closed at six.
Omar's laundromat on the corner, the one that ran all night and smelled like detergent and steam.
I knew which shutters stuck and which ones went down smooth, which storefronts kept bright lights all night.
I didn't own any of this. I just cleaned up after the worst of it and made sure the shutters went down right.
It wasn't complicated work. It didn't pay.
Nobody knew I was doing it, and that was the point.
Gideon hadn't seen me in weeks. My phone sat on the penthouse counter most nights, messages piling up, permits I didn't care about anymore.
The mayor could pull every last one for all it mattered.
I'd traded buildings for this — a six-block stretch I used to know by heart, and a routine that kept me out here instead of up there in that empty tower.
I was nearly finished. Another twenty minutes and I could head back.
The thought sat in my chest like a stone.
The penthouse would be dark and silent, the same as it was every night.
No sound but the elevator, the door, my own footsteps on that pristine floor she used to walk.
The rooms would smell like nothing, sterile and wrong.
I'd probably stand at the window for a while, looking down at the streets I'd just left, and then I'd go to bed and do the whole goddamn thing again tomorrow.
The diamond would still be sitting on the nightstand where I'd left it, catching the light from the city.
She'd never come back for it. I didn't blame her.
God, I was tired.
Movement down the block pulled my attention. Figures near the corner. Three, maybe four of them, moving wrong — not walking, circling. I slowed, then stopped. They were at Mercer's.
My heart kicked hard.
I couldn't see their faces from here, just shapes in the dark and the jerk of their movements, too fast, too purposeful.
One of them laughed. The sound carried, ugly and sharp.
Another one bent low, doing something I couldn't make out.
Then I saw it. The bottle. The rag stuffed in the neck.
The flick of a lighter, small and bright.
I didn't think about it. I went.
My feet hit the pavement and I was running, the cold air tearing into my lungs, my pulse hammering in my ears.
The distance closed fast. Thirty feet. Twenty.
I could see them clearly now — young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, dressed to disappear into the night.
One of them had the bottle raised. The flame was already lit, dancing at the top of the glass.
"Get away from her door." My voice came out louder than I'd intended, hard and flat.
They all turned. For a second nobody moved. The one with the bottle blinked at me like I'd appeared out of nowhere. Maybe I had. Then he grinned, slow and mean, and I realized exactly how stupid I'd just been. There were four of them. I hadn't thrown a punch since I was a kid on these streets.
"This your place, old man?" the one with the bottle said. He didn't lower it. The flame kept burning, close enough to the glass that I could see his face in the light.
"No." I stopped a few feet away, breathing hard. "It's hers. Put it down and get the hell out of here."
"Hers." He drew the word out, mocking. "You her boyfriend or something?"
"I'm telling you to leave."
They didn't.
One of them stepped closer, a skinny kid with a hoodie pulled low. "You telling us what to do?" He shoved me, two hands to my chest, and I stumbled back a step. "You don't run this corner, man. Nobody does."
I should have backed off. I should have pulled out my phone, called someone, let them scatter into the dark.
But I looked past him at the shop — her shop, the one her father built, the one she kept open when anybody else would've walked away — and I couldn't do it.
Four families lived off that shop. She'd put her whole life into it.
"I said get away from her door."
The shove came harder this time, and I shoved back.
That was all it took. The skinny one swung and I ducked, but not fast enough.
His fist caught my jaw and my head snapped to the side, bright pain exploding behind my eyes.
I tasted blood. I swung back, wild and graceless, and felt my knuckles connect with something solid.
He went down and another one was on me, grabbing my jacket, spinning me around.
I couldn't see who was where. Everything was movement and noise, fists and elbows and the scrape of boots on concrete.
I wasn't winning. I wasn't even holding my own.
These kids knew how to fight and I didn't, not anymore, and every hit I landed cost me two more.
My ribs took a hit that drove the air out of my lungs.
Something caught my shoulder, hard enough that my arm went numb.
My knee buckled and I caught myself on the doorframe — Mercer's doorframe, solid under my hand.
One of them kicked my leg out from under me and I went down hard on the pavement, my palms scraping raw.
"Stay down," someone said above me.
I didn't. I dragged myself back up, using the door, and put my back to it. My chest was heaving, my mouth full of blood. I spit it onto the sidewalk and looked at them. "You want in, you go through me."
"Jesus Christ." The one with the bottle shook his head, disgusted. "You're insane."
Maybe I was. I didn't care. They'd come here to burn her out, to wreck the one thing she'd built with her own hands, and I was standing between them and that door.
I'd stand here all goddamn night if I had to.
She wasn't here to see it, would never know.
That didn't matter. The shop mattered. She mattered.
The skinny one came at me again. I blocked the first punch, missed the second.
Something hit my side, low and sharp, and I thought it was another fist or maybe an elbow.
It didn't hurt. That was the strange part.
It should have hurt, but it just felt wrong, like pressure in a place pressure didn't belong. I looked down.
The knife was already pulling away.
I stared at it — a stupid, cheap thing, the blade dark and wet — and my brain tried to make sense of what I was seeing.
The kid holding it looked as surprised as I felt.
Then the pain arrived, bright and total, spreading through my side like something tearing open from the inside.
My legs went weak. I pressed my hand to the wound and it came away slick and hot.
"Shit," one of them said. "Shit, man, we gotta go."
"We didn't mean?—"
"Shut up and run."
They ran. I heard their footsteps pound away down the block, fast and fading, and then there was nothing but the sound of my own breathing, ragged and too loud.
I turned my head, slow, and looked at Mercer's.
The windows were dark. The door was still locked, solid and whole.
The bottle lay on the pavement a few feet away, the flame out. Nothing burning. She was safe.
I slid down the door and sat, my back against the wood, my legs stretched out in front of me on the cold concrete.
The pressure in my side was building, a deep ache that pulsed in time with my heartbeat.
I kept my hand pressed there, but I could feel the blood pushing through my fingers anyway, warm and relentless.
My vision blurred at the edges. The street tilted and I blinked hard to steady it.
I wasn't sorry. Not for a second. They were going to burn her shop and I'd stopped them.
That mattered more than anything else. More than the blood, more than the cold seeping into my bones, more than the fact that I couldn't catch my breath.
If this was the cost, fine. I'd pay it. I'd pay it twice over if it meant she still had this place, still had the work her father left her.
But God, I didn't want to die here.
Not like this. Not without seeing her one more time.
I thought about the last time I'd seen Josie — really seen her, not just the shape of her leaving or the back of her head as she walked away.
I thought about her hands, the way they moved when she was working, strong and sure and making something beautiful out of nothing.
I thought about the way she used to look at me, before I'd ruined it.
Before I'd chosen everything else and left her with nothing.
The diamond was still sitting on the nightstand.
I'd never given it back to her. The iron ring, the one I'd made with my own hands when I had nothing, was gone.
She'd kept it in a drawer for four years and I'd never asked why.
I understood now, too late. She'd kept it because it was the only time I'd ever given her something that mattered.
The only time I'd put my own hands to the work instead of buying my way past it.
I should have walked these streets with her. Every time she asked, I should have said yes. Every time she asked me to come back here, to remember where we came from, to see the corner the way she still saw it — I should have done it. It would have cost me nothing. Just time. Just showing up.
My hand slipped, just a little, the pressure against my side weakening.
I tried to press harder but my arm wasn't listening anymore.
The cold was inside me now, spreading from my chest outward, heavy and final.
The street went quiet. No footsteps, no voices, no sound but the wind rattling a loose shutter somewhere down the block.
I wondered if anyone would find me. Probably not till morning.
Some kid on their way to school, maybe, or Omar opening up the laundromat.
I thought about her face. The way she looked when she smiled, really smiled, the kind that reached her eyes and lit up the whole room. I hadn't seen that smile in years. I'd probably never see it again. That hurt worse than the knife.
My vision dimmed. The edges closed in, dark and soft, and I let my head fall back against the door.
It didn't matter that nobody was coming.
It didn't matter that I'd end up here, alone in the cold, bleeding out on the corner I should have come back to years ago.
What mattered was her. What mattered was that she was safe, that the shop was standing, that I'd done the one thing I should have done from the start.
I'd stood between her and the worst of it.
Her name rose in my chest, the last thing I had left to give. I tried to say it out loud but my voice wouldn't come. My lips shaped the word anyway, soundless and certain.
Josie.