302

302

The pandemonium exploded like a well-planned bomb.

"Half the tac team, up to the penthouse. Now. Full tactical entry. Get those women out alive. I want the rest of you to still hold your ground around the church. I don’t want –Do. Not- No you do NOT engage unless you hear it from me. Move!"

His troops shattered and fanned out with military gentlemanliness. Some of them sprinted and clattered on stones toward waiting cars. Those that did circled around the church wall and stationed at points across their weapons fire directed by stint and movement in the darkness.

Luca made a choice he’d regret for the rest of his life. He’d left the defense of the church’s ramparts to Marco, going back inside through a side door though he wanted to keep his eyes on Val when she was out and Bianca was safely within; couldn’t trust anyone else with her for more than a few minutes right now. His shoulder flared in agony from the wounding he’d endured in the warehouse—not fully healed yet, still tender—but he put it out of his mind. Pain was irrelevant. Val was all that mattered.
\---

Beneath her, the penthouse was raided by Lucas’s extraction team on a metronome’s tick.
Bullets would be ringing out across the hallways, though He wouldn't waste any of his men’s controlled bursts when echoed by panicked blasts from Bianca’s fellow mercenaries. Bullets struck light fixtures, punched holes in walls and ricocheted from the marble floors in blazes of violence.

At the apartment, Alecia’s eyes were slowly opening and her head was full of whatever pills they fed you over at Bianca's. The world kept coming in and out of focus. She’d been tied in a chair, her wrists shackled by thick plastic zip ties that cut into her skin. Beside her lay Kennedy, also unconscious and in restraints. Liv was chained to a third by the window.

Alecia forced herself to focus, to break through the haze of chemical mists in her head. She gnawed at the restraints, her teeth trying to get leverage on the knots meant to secure the zip ties, and throbbed inside her jaw. It was something she had watched in a movie sometime; it probably did not help — but it was all there was.

“What — where —” It was Kennedy, groggy now as she came to, head drooping down and hair hanging in her face.

"Fug," Alecia hazed her own words thick and raucous. "We need to get free. Now. Before they realize we're awake."

One of the apartment’s massive windows shattered under gunfire. The killer confetti pelted shattered pieces of glass on the furniture. A man in uniform entered the doorframe, weapon raised, gaze sharp and his face professional.

Before he could fire, one of Luca's men had flung himself full-body at Genco from the side out of the smoke in the hallway. They smacked against a wall so hard it shattered through concrete. The mercenary’s gun fired twice, the bullets going wide of the prisoners. Luca’s guy punched him in the face as the merc knocked his gun out of his hand and laid there, in front of them, unconscious.

"Get them out!" the Caruso operative shouted. His neck had been grazed, and he was bleeding, but his voice came across even.

It was Alecia breaking, finally, finally getting through the zip ties around her wrists. Her hands were tingling, the resurgence of circulation painful. She didn't reply but instead began to work on the restraints which held Kennedy down under his men, while Liv was wriggling alertly and helplessly impotently against her own.

"Go fetch Liv," Alecia snarled, fingers parodying the awkward but earnest snap.

Kennedy's bonds fell away. Somehow, the two of them had gotten Liv free at exactly the right moment—the gunfight erupted again as they reached the end of the hallway. The windows blew out, and showers of glass littered the floor. Bullets tore through walls and punctured the door to the hallway, chunks drawn into the carpet.

The three women pressed themselves behind the duplex’s reinforced bathroom wall, bodies wedged in a crevice between the toilet and bathtub as rounds tore through the apartment.

“We need to leave,” Liv panted, her voice keening. "We have to move. Now."

Lucas’s man pushed his way into the room through the heavily barred door and his face, hard with AT gear, was tight and scripted. "It's clear. We're extracting you. Follow me. Stay low. Stay quiet. Move."

They swept their way through the penthouse like ghosts, like shadows, hunkering down below windows, following the mercenary around hallways that still echoed with gunfire and shouted commands. Behind them, men were fighting—men howling, weapons glancing, the disorder of armoured combat.

They walked down the back stairs, out through the kitchen and into the cool streets of Naples at night. An armored S.U.V. idled, engine running, side door ajar. They were unceremoniously folded in and the car had already taken off before the door was all the way shut.
From the back window, Alecia watched the penthouse fade into the distance, and fire eating away at its windows on top. Bianca’s people had started fires, as had been promised.
The fight for their lives was just starting.

—

Within minutes, Antonio came tearing up to the church — frantic faced and disheveled. His hair was tousled, his face unshaven; his eyes were wild with terror and bewilderment. He broke through the thick wooden doors, the sound of his boots loud in the cavernous room, but stopped short when he found Val kneeling on her knees, Bianca holding a gun to her head and Luca hunkering in the shadows above.

"Bianca," Antonio whispered and his voice was empty. "I should have known. Of course it was you."

"You should have known?" Bianca's icy exterior cracked ever so slightly. Her voice went up a notch, raw with emotion, with years of hurt packed into two little words. "You killed my sister!"

"I didn't kill Isabella." His voice, Antonio’s, was strong and sturdy with the conviction of all-absoluteness. "I loved her."

“You loved her so much you had someone cut her brakes?” Bianca yanked the folder she subsequently had impaled right in front of Val, threw it at Antonio’s feet, hard enough that the contents billowed out onto the cold stone floor. "I have proof. Bank records. Communication with the mechanic. The payoff to make it appear accidental. Everything. I have everything."

Antonio looked at the jumble papers and turned a sallow color. “Bianca, I don’t know what you think you have, but —”

"But what?" Bianca's gun was there, snug in her hand, steady and true. "But you're going to deny it? Lie to me like you lied to Isabela! So like all your life, you’ve been lying for fifteen years?”

Like a cat, Luca crossed the rafters of the church with hardly a sound and took up position directly over Bianca. His gun was rock-steady, pointed directly at her; his step was cautious and deliberate even as he sucked air in through the hole she’d created in his shoulder; even with blood trickling from under a bandage covering that wound.

"Let them go, Luca!" he screamed down the stone chambers. “This is going to be you and Antonio now. Let them all walk out, and I won’t kill you.”

Bianca whirled, gun swinging toward Val’s head with frightening velocity. "One more step and she dies. I swear it. I will shoot her in the temple.”

The moment extended, dangerous and delicate as glass.

Antonio let out a yelp and lunged with frantic swiftness, bellowing "No!" at the top of his lungs. It was a cry of an old man, one of fear and instinct devoid of menace but sufficient to divert the attention from Bianca for a single critical second.

On pure reflex, her trigger finger twitched.

The gunshot roared inside the church, impossibly loud, devouring every other noise. The bullet hit Antonio in the chest, and he fell dead on the floor like a marionette with severed strings.
Val screeched — primal, shattering, pure anguish.

Luca shifted to aim at Bianca, but Antonio gasped something and reached for Val with desperate urgency.

"Bianca... didn't. …Antonio coughed blood, and more blood, the spot quickly spreading across his clothes. "It wasn't... Isabella... she knew... the truth... I have to... tell you..."

His eyes, which had been battling to open and see Val’s face, shut of their own accord.

Val knelt down by her father, and did what she'd been trained to do – held the wound as hard as she could. Bran intervened, his warm blood gushing between her fingers but she might as well have been pouring it over snow:it ran without stopping, and her attempts to staunch the flow got nowhere near sealing up the hole the Slug had made.

"Stay with me!" Val's voice cracked, shattered. "What truth? What are you talking about? Antonio, look at me. Promise you won’t die before revealing the truth!”

But Antonio wasn't responding. He was breathing shallowly, erratically; his body was starting to close down.

Bianca froze, gun dangling at her side, face drained of colour—shock and what was surely worse settling inside her; the growing horror of it dawning on her that she’d killed the only person who could have provided details about Isabella's death. She’d shot on reflex and in doing so had stilled the only confession that counted.

“I didn’t mean to,” Bianca said in a small, empty voice. "I just—he moved and I—"

"Shut up," Luca snapped. He repelled down from the rafters with one arm and landed loudly next to Antonio’s lifeless form. That is where his gun was pointed, at Bianca. To men around the church: “Get an ambulance. Now. Move!"

"Do not leave me without knowing!" Val pressed her father's wound, tears still flowing freely. “Not until you tell me the truth. Antonio, look at me. What did Isabella know? What were you going to say to me?”
Antonio's lips moved - mouth shaped to make sounds that sounded way, way too difficult and oddly kept quiet, his voice dropping to almost nothing. "Listen... carefully... you need to..."

But his hand slipped off of Val's jacket.

His eyes, which had been working so hard to see, closed tight and never got any further opened.

"No. No, no, no.” Val pressed harder still, desperation competing uselessly with futility in her actions. "Don't do this. Don't leave me without answers. Antonio, don't you dare—"

The sound of sirens wailed in the background and got closer with every passing moment. But Val knew in her bones that they wouldn’t get there in time. Some distances couldn't be crossed.

Her father had gone to his grave with his secret, which left Val on her knees in a church full of white lilies and her father’s blood, and more questions than she’d even had to start with – only no way of getting any answers.