I raised the gun.
I wasn’t going to take any chances.
The first man died reaching for his weapon.
Two rounds, center mass. The distance was ten feet. The angle was generous. The outcome was never in question. He went backward—the chair tipping, the body following, the particular gracelessness of a man whose nervous system had just been disconnected from the machine it was running. He hit the floor and didn’t move.
The second was faster. His gun cleared the holster—I heard the click of the safety, saw the muzzle come up, the barrel finding me with the trained efficiency of someone who’d done this before. He got a round off. The sound enormous in the closed room—a concussion that slammed through the walls and rattled the glasses on a shelf somewhere I couldn’t see. The round went wide. Plaster exploded behind my left shoulder.
I closed the distance.
Three strides. The gun was for range—this was close work, and close work was mine. My shoulder hit his chest. The impact drove him backward into the wall. His weapon hand came up and I caught it—wrist, twist, the bones grinding under my grip. The gun fell. My forehead met his face. The headbutt landedon the bridge of his nose and he dropped. Not unconscious — stunned. Enough. I kicked the gun across the floor and it disappeared under a table.
Ferrara was gone.
The chair where he’d been sitting was empty. Pushed back. The table still held the evidence of his performance—a water glass, a folder of what were probably fabricated documents, the careful staging of a man who’d been mid-con when the door blew open.
The kitchen. He’d gone through the kitchen.
I moved. Through the dining room, through the hallway, through the kitchen.
The alley.
Ferrara was fifteen feet from the door. Running—or trying to. His shoes slapped the wet pavement. His breath came in white bursts.
I caught him in four strides.
My hand found the back of his collar. The leather jacket—the expensive one, the one with the garden-gate crest. I used it like a handle. Yanked him backward. Spun him. Slammed him against the alley wall with a force that I felt through his skeleton and into the brick.
His head bounced off the wall. Not hard enough to knock him out. Hard enough to remind him of the situation.
The Beretta found the soft space under his jaw. The muzzle pressed up—into the flesh, into the bone behind it. His eyes found mine. Dark. Watering from the impact. The mask of composure completely gone now, replaced by the particular expression of a man who had just watched two of his people go down in four seconds and was reassessing every decision that had brought him to this alley.
“Is Maria alive.”
The words came out flat. Not a question—a demand. The same register I used for everything that mattered, the low frequency that didn’t leave room for interpretation.
Ferrara’s mouth opened. “Listen, Santino, it doesn’t have to be like this. We can come to—”
I broke his nose.
The cartilage gave. I felt it—the wet collapse of tissue designed to be fragile. Blood followed immediately. Down his lip, off his chin, onto the leather jacket.
He made a sound. Not a scream—the strangled, choked noise of a man processing pain through clenched teeth.
“Is Maria alive?”
He spat blood. A glob of it hit the pavement near my shoe. His eyes were streaming—the reflex tears that came with a broken nose, the body’s involuntary response to sudden structural damage.
“She’s dead—of course she’s dead,” he said. The smooth accent was gone. Replaced by something raw—nasal, wet, the voice of a man speaking through a face that was rearranging itself. “You stupid animal. She’s been dead twenty years.”
The confirmation hit me in the chest. Not because I hadn’t known—I had known. Cora had known.
“Say her name,” I said.
Ferrara blinked. The blood was in his eyes now—running from his forehead where the wall had opened the skin, mixing with the tears.
“Say her name.”