PART 10:

Scared men made mistakes. They also made fast decisions. “Put it down,” Enzo said to Luchiano. Luchiano hadn’t drawn. His hands were at his sides, and he was looking at Enzo with an expression that had completed its journey now. All the calculation burned off. All the professional distance burned off. Something underneath it that was older and simpler and more dangerous than anything she’d seen on him tonight.

Enzo, he said, “Don’t.” The arm tightened. Rowan kept her body still and her chin up and made herself breathe slow because panic was a physiological event and she could choose not to give her body permission for it. I know what Tanner told you. I know what was in that file. Then you know where we are.

I know where you think we are. His voice was shaking slightly at the edges. Not enough to be weakness, just enough to be human. It wasn’t what he told you, Marco. What happened to Marco wasn’t Don’t Luciano said. Same word, different temperature. The silence stretched 4 seconds. I didn’t know he was going to die, Enzo said.

I passed information to protect my position. That’s all I did. What they did with it? You handed them his name. Luchiano’s voice was still level. That was the most frightening thing about it. You handed them his name and he was dead in 72 hours. And you stood at his funeral and you looked me in the eye and you told me we would find out who did it. He paused. 18 years, Enzo. I know.

18 years. I know. And something in Enzo’s voice cracked along a fault line that had probably been there for 4 years. a fracture held together by behavior and routine and the particular cowardice of a man who has done something irreversible and chosen to keep living as if he hasn’t. I know what I did. I’ve known every day.

But if I came to you, she if I told you, you would have. Yes. Luciano said, “I would have.” Enzo’s arm tightened again. Rowan felt her vision go slightly dim at the edges from the compression, and she forced it back, forced her focus onto the physical details. the angle of his elbow, the position of his feet behind her, slightly wider than shoulder width, balanced, which meant he’d been trained and would be hard to destabilize from the front.

She was not going to be destabilized from the front. She wasn’t planning on the front. She dropped, not slowly, not partially. She made her body go completely limp in one fast decision, all her weight surrendering downward, and the shift was enough. The arm that had been across her chest was suddenly around nothing, and she hit the concrete floor on her palms and knees, and the pain was bright and immediate, and she ignored it completely and rolled left away from where she calculated his feet were, and came up against the wheel well

of the nearest vehicle and stayed low. The gun went off. The sound in the enclosed structure was enormous. It hit her ears like something physical. She pressed herself against the car and made herself small and looked through the gap between the vehicles. Lutano had moved the same instant she dropped, not toward her, toward Enzo, closing the distance in three steps that covered ground faster than she would have predicted from how he moved in ordinary circumstances.

He hit Enzo’s gun arm at the wrist before Enzo could recalibrate his aim, drove it upward, and the second shot went into concrete ceiling. The third didn’t happen because Luciano had the risk controlled and was inside Enzo’s reach now. And the fight that followed was brutal and brief and had the specific ugliness of two men who had known each other for 18 years.

It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t skilled in any aesthetic sense. It was just force and proximity and the terrible efficiency of rage that had found its object after 4 years of having nowhere to go. When it was over, Enzo was on the floor. He was breathing. Luchiano stood over him with the gun in his own hand now and his chest moving hard and a cut above his left eye that was bleeding into his eyebrow.

He stood there for 5 seconds looking down at Enzo with something that wasn’t satisfaction and wasn’t mercy and wasn’t grief exactly, just all three of them layered into something that had no clean name. Rowan got up from behind the car. Her palms were bleeding from the concrete. She looked at them briefly and then looked at Luchiano.

“We have to go,” she said. He didn’t move. Luchiano, she crossed to him. She stood beside him and looked at Enzo on the floor, conscious, eyes open, watching Luchiano with the expression of a man who had made his calculations and reached the end of them. And then she looked back at Luchiano. 4 and 1/2 hours to Wyoming.

We have to go right now. He breathed in, breathed out. He looked at her. She held his eyes and didn’t fill the silence with anything because there was nothing useful to put in it. He took out his phone, made a single call, said three words in Italian that she didn’t know and didn’t ask about. Ended the call. He walked to the escalate. She got in.

They left Enzo on the parking structure floor with whatever was coming to him arriving in its own time. And neither of them talked about it, and the city opened up ahead of them as they cleared the structure exit and turned toward the highway that would take them out of Chicago and into the dark middle of the country toward Wyoming, toward Declan Pierce and an archive room, and four years of answers that a dead 26-year-old had tried to give his brother before someone made sure he couldn’t.

Rowan sat in the back seat and wrapped her bleeding palms in a cloth she found in the door pocket and looked out the window and tried to find the part of herself that had existed before tonight before the bathroom floor and the wrong number and the drive and the penthouse and all of it and she couldn’t locate it with any precision.

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