Chapter 35 Twice as fallen

Chapter 35 Twice as fallen

The stairwell smelled of rust, wet concrete, and the ghost of cheap ink that had soaked into the walls when this building still printed newspapers. We descended in silence, two shadows moving against the weak orange glow of emergency bulbs. Every step echoed like a heartbeat neither of us wanted to admit was racing.
At the third-floor landing Luca stopped, pressed two fingers to my chest to still me. He tilted his head, listening. I heard it too: the soft scrape of a boot sole on the floor above. Someone had followed one of us after all.
He drew the matte-black pistol from the holster under his coat without flourish. I didn’t bother with mine. My Agency sidearm was loud, registered, and would bring every badge in the city down on us before we reached the street. Instead I slid the carbon-fiber knife from my sleeve (short, ugly, and quiet).
Luca’s eyes flicked to it, then to me. A question.
I answered by moving first.
We climbed back up six steps, slow, breathing through our mouths. The follower was good (no silhouette against the bulb, no silhouette at all). But good wasn’t perfect. I caught the faint scent of gun oil and bergamot cologne. Nico.
Luca’s jaw clenched so hard I heard the click.
I touched his wrist (one finger, barely pressure). Let me.
He hated it, but he let me take point.
I stepped onto the landing like I belonged there, hands loose at my sides. Nico melted out of the alcove opposite the freight elevator, gun already raised. Same cheekbones as his brother, same storm-gray eyes, but colder. Always colder.
“Evening, cousin,” Nico said in the soft voice he used right before he killed someone. “You’re supposed to be in protective custody.”
“I got bored.”
His gaze slid past me to Luca. “You too, brother? Thought you were done dragging Elio into your messes.”
Luca’s reply was to cock the hammer on his pistol. The sound ricocheted like a gunshot in the narrow space.
Nico smiled without warmth. “They have Marisol in the old catacombs under St. Agnes. South branch. You go down there tonight, you won’t come back up. The family voted. You’re a liability now.”
“Funny,” Luca said. “I don’t remember attending that meeting.”
“You were busy losing at cards and pretending you still had a soul.”
I stepped sideways, putting myself between the brothers. “Nico. Look at me.”
He did. Reluctantly.
“You want to pull that trigger, you’ll have to go through me first. And you know how that ends.”
His knuckles whitened on the grip. For a moment I thought he’d do it anyway (family loyalty is a brittle thing when betrayal has been seasoning for years). Then he exhaled through his teeth.
“She’s already dead, Elio. They just haven’t cut her throat yet. Walking in there is suicide.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m tired of attending funerals I could have prevented.”
Something flickered across his face (guilt, maybe, or the memory of the summer the three of us were kids stealing peaches from the market and swearing we’d never let the world make us monsters). It was gone as quickly as it came.
He lowered the gun a fraction. “South branch is flooded knee-deep this time of year. They’ll be waiting at the old iron gate. Six men, maybe seven. Automatic rifles. Thermals.”
Luca spoke for the first time since the rooftop. “How long have you known?”
“Long enough.” Nico’s voice cracked on the last word. He hated that it did.
I took one step toward him. “Then come with us.”
He laughed, bitter and short. “You think they’d let me live after I put a bullet in every cousin guarding that gate? I’m trying to keep what’s left of this family breathing, Elio. Even if it means cutting out the rot.”
Luca moved so fast I barely tracked it. The pistol was at Nico’s temple before the echo of his laugh died.
“Rot,” Luca repeated softly. “That what Marisol is to you now?”
Nico didn’t flinch. “She was collateral the moment you decided to skim from the shipment three months ago. You knew the rules.”
I saw Luca’s finger tighten on the trigger. I stepped in again, laid my hand over his, forced the barrel down.
“Not here,” I said. “Not him. Not tonight.”
Luca’s eyes were wet, but the tears never fell. He was stone carved into the shape of grief.
Nico holstered his weapon. “Forty minutes. That’s how long you have before they move her to the docks for the buyer. After that, she disappears into a container and you’ll never find the right ocean.”
He brushed past us, shoulder checking Luca hard enough to stagger him. At the stairwell door he paused.
“For what it’s worth,” he said without turning, “I hope you both burn the whole world down getting her back.”
Then he was gone.
We stood in the humming silence until the sound of his footsteps faded entirely.
Luca spoke first. “I can’t kill my own brother.”
“You won’t have to,” I said. “But we are going to burn something down tonight.”
He looked at me then (really looked), and I saw the boy I’d met at sixteen beneath all the scars and bad decisions. He nodded once.
We ran.
The streets were slick mirrors reflecting red and violet neon. Luca drove (an old black Charger that growled like it resented being woken up). I rode shotgun, stripping and reassembling my Agency rifle in the dark out of habit. The familiar click-click-click grounded me.
“Turn left on Delaney,” I said. “We’re not going through the main cathedral entrance. There’s a drainage culvert behind the rectory that lets out into the south branch.”
“You’ve been planning this.”
“Since the day they sent me that first photo of Marisol with a gun to her head.”
He glanced sideways. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you would have run in alone and died spectacularly. And I’m selfish enough to want you alive.”
The Charger fishtailed around a corner, tires screaming. Luca’s hands were steady on the wheel, but his voice shook. “I don’t deserve that.”
“Probably not. Tough shit.”
We ditched the car three blocks from St. Agnes and moved on foot through back alleys that smelled of piss and jasmine. The church loomed ahead, gothic and hulking, its spires clawing at the low clouds. We skirted the wrought-iron fence and found the culvert exactly where my contact said it would be (half-collapsed, overgrown with ivy, forgotten by everyone except rats and people who needed to disappear).
Luca went first, because the tunnel was narrow and he was broader than me. I followed, knife between my teeth, water already soaking my jeans to the knee. The cold was immediate and vicious.
Twenty meters in, the tunnel widened into the catacombs proper. Brick arches disappeared into darkness. Somewhere ahead, water dripped in a slow, patient rhythm. I clicked on the small red flashlight taped under my rifle barrel. The beam caught centuries of graffiti, names of saints and sinners overlapping until the walls looked like scar tissue.
We moved fast but quiet. Every few seconds Luca would pause, head cocked, listening for voices or footsteps. Nothing yet.
Then we heard her.
A single muffled sob, cut off quickly, like someone had clapped a hand over her mouth.
Luca’s whole body went rigid.
I grabbed his arm. “Control it. We lose discipline now, she dies.”
He nodded, but his eyes were wild.
We crept forward until the tunnel opened into a brick chamber lit by two hanging work lamps. Seven men (just like Nico said). AR-15s, body armor, the lazy confidence of people who believed they were the only predators down here.
Marisol was zip-tied to a metal chair in the center, head hanging forward, dark hair matted with blood. One eye was swollen shut. Her breathing was shallow, but she was breathing.
Luca made the smallest sound in his throat (half snarl, half prayer).
I counted positions. Two guards playing cards on an overturned crate. Three more smoking near the far exit. One pacing with a radio. The seventh stood directly behind Marisol, knife in hand, scrolling on his phone like this was just another Tuesday.
I looked at Luca. Tapped my chest twice (my target). Pointed at him, then at the two card-players. He nodded.
We moved like we’d never stopped being a team.
I came in low from the left, knife first. The man behind Marisol never saw me. The blade went in under the edge of his body armor, up under the ribs. I caught him as he folded, eased him to the ground so the noise was only a soft thump.
Luca was already on the move (two quick shots from a suppressed pistol). The card-players dropped without getting a round off. The smokers spun, rifles coming up, but Luca was rolling behind a pillar and I was already firing short, controlled bursts (center mass, double-tap). Two down.
The pacing man with the radio shouted something into it, voice cracking with panic. Luca stepped out and put one round through his forehead. The radio clattered to the wet floor.
Silence, except for dripping water and Marisol’s ragged breathing.
We cleared the room in seconds. Old habits.
Luca reached his sister first. He dropped to his knees, hands shaking as he cut the zip ties with the dead guard’s knife.
“Mari, hey, look at me. It’s me. It’s Luca.”
She lifted her head slowly. The good eye focused on him, then on me standing behind him with the rifle still up, sweeping corners.
“You came,” she whispered, voice cracked and raw. “Both of you.”
Luca pulled her into his arms like she was made of spun glass. She clung to him and sobbed (ugly, relieved, human sounds that echoed off the brick until the whole catacomb seemed to weep with her).
I let them have thirty seconds. No more.
“We’re not clear yet,” I said softly. “Nico said forty minutes. We’ve used twenty-eight.”
Luca stood, lifting Marisol with him. She was fifteen but small for her age, and he carried her like she weighed nothing.
“There’s another way out,” I said. “Old smugglers’ tunnel that runs under the river to the warehouse district. We used it when we were kids.”
Luca’s face twisted. “You remember that?”
“I remember everything.”
We moved.
The smugglers’ tunnel was worse (lower ceiling, deeper water, air thick with mold). Marisol’s teeth started chattering uncontrollably. Luca shrugged out of his coat and wrapped it around her without breaking stride.
Half a kilometer in, my earpiece crackled (Agency frequency). I’d forgotten I was still wearing it.
“Asset Zero-Nine, report. Satellite shows heat signatures converging on St. Agnes. What the hell are you doing?”
I clicked the mic twice (standard signal for comms compromised). Then I yanked the earpiece out and crushed it under my heel.
Luca raised an eyebrow.
“They’ll burn me for this,” I said.
He didn’t even hesitate. “Then we disappear. All three of us.”
The tunnel spat us out into a derelict warehouse smelling of salt and dead fish. Dawn was still hours away, but the sky over the river had begun to pale to the color of a healing bruise.
We stole a panel van from the long-term parking lot (Luca hot-wired it while I kept watch, Marisol curled in the back under blankets we found in a locker). When the engine coughed to life, I felt something loosen in my chest I hadn’t realized was knotted.
Luca drove. I rode in the back with Marisol, cleaning the worst of the blood from her face with a bottle of water and the hem of my shirt.
She watched me with her one good eye. “You’re really leaving them? The Agency?”
“They left me first,” I said. “The moment they decided collateral damage was acceptable.”
She was quiet for a long time. Then: “Nico told them where to find me. Did you know that?”
I met her gaze. “Yes.”
“And you still didn’t kill him.”
“Not my mercy to give,” I said. “That belongs to your brother.”
She looked toward the front where Luca’s silhouette cut against the windshield.
“He won’t ever forgive himself,” she whispered.
“No,” I agreed. “But he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to earn it anyway.”
We drove north, out of the city, past the last reach of streetlights and into the pine-dark countryside where the family had safe houses no one had used since the old wars. Marisol fell asleep somewhere around the state line, head in my lap, fingers curled around my wrist like she was afraid I’d vanish.
Luca caught my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Where are we going?” he asked quietly.
I thought about it. Really thought.
“Somewhere they’ll never think to look for ghosts,” I said.
He nodded, and the smallest smile (tired, battered, but real) touched the corner of his mouth.
The road unspooled ahead of us, black and endless and, for the first time in years, ours.
Behind us, sirens began to rise in the city we’d just set on fire.
We didn’t look back.