I tell him the line he needs. “You and Mama go to the kitchen. Now.”
Lila comes back through the crowd, pushing past shoulders and coats, her eyes wide and searching. “Marco!” she calls, her voice breaking through the noise. “Marco!”
He twists in my arms at the sound. “Mama!”
She sees him and stops. Her legs forget how to move. Relief floods her face, raw and sudden. I hand her the boy. She pulls him in, holds him tight for a full second, then looks at me once. Then she turns and heads for the kitchen exit, her arm locked around her son.
More men come from the square. Their coats are different, but the way they move is the same—hands low, eyes scanning, balance forward. I have seen those hands before.
They push into the lobby and stop. Chairs block their line. A broom leans in their path. The piano crowds the corner. A group of teenagers stand shoulder to shoulder, counting one anotheroff. A boy with a trumpet lifts it without meaning to and ends up holding the bell across their path. The men pause, scanning the crowd, faces hard and searching. They are not here for fire or money. They are looking for someone.
Coach does the hard part. He goes low at the first man and drives him into a corner where the pew does not give. Eli plants the amp like a wall and forces the second man to turn his hips, just enough for Nico to take his feet. The jingle garland rings sharp, proof of contact. The one in the black coat lunges for the stage. Mrs. Doyle shifts her weight, nudges a chair with her heel, and he catches it mid-stride, pitching forward hard. One of the hunters grabs him before he can rise, a hand on his collar, the other steadying him like it’s just another Saturday scuffle. Hal sees it and tips his hat to Mrs. Doyle.
The first man scrambles to stand and meets my boot. He stays down. He shouts to the others, “The woman and the boy—find them!” The words cut through the noise, turning heads.
His cronies search the crowd, scanning faces, but the pair they are desperate for is gone. Their signal led them to the wrong doors. The manned exits are the artifice, and the flour at the kitchen threshold proves the passage stayed clean. One of the men lifts a small radio to his mouth and snaps out a message.La donna e il ragazzo sono nel vicolo sul retro.The woman and the boy are in the back alley.
Outside, a bottle bursts against the alley snow. It breaks. The red liquid spills, the snow swallowing what should have been flame. By the exit, Farrell is already there. He grabs one of Petro’s rubber mats. Mr. Farrell snatches the nearest rubber mat and smothers the spill with a grin. “Nice try, lads,” he says. I give him a quick salute.
Petro’s hand is faster than the thrower’s aim. He hauls a bag of winter salt to the door and dumps enough to turn the ice to paste before anyone can plant a foot. He looks like a janitor doing his job. He is building a problem for someone else.
I step into the alley. The cold hits hard and clears my head. At the far end of Main, an SUV waits with its lights off, rolling slow, testing the street. Behind it, a silver Accord idles, license plate hidden under a slab of frozen mud. Four silhouettes inside. Two stay put. Two get out. They think they can make something happen here. They are wrong.
Hal steps into the square with the ladder across his shoulders, holding it like a bar between him and the street. The ladder blocks the lane, part weapon, part warning. The deputy eases the cruiser up to the guide kiosk and angles it across the lane, engine idling low. He steps out with radio in one hand, gun in the other, while two men fan to the alley mouth and lobby steps. No shots, just a live barricade.
Nico drops the church steps two at a time, hands up, elbows tight, the stance of a boxer who has learned to end things quickly. Petro meets the two men who climb from the car. His broom swings like a staff, sharp and clean, catching one in the ribs and driving him back. Nico cuts across, hooks the second, and folds him down hard on the hood.
The sheriff is already there, cuffs out, as he pulls one man to his knees. The other bolts for the car. Doors slam. The engine revs. The SUV drops its crawl and throws snow high as it runs.
We pursue to the curb and no farther. This is not a chase we win on roads lined with families in boots. We walk back toward the square. Lila and Marco huddle with the others under blankets the nurse handed out. They look too small for all theshouting. Coach Ramirez’s boys have two men pinned against the snowbank, the ones who came out the side door and chose the wrong people to grab. The coach hands them over to the sheriff without a word.
Coach turns back toward the hall with Gus, Mr. Farrell, and the hunters. Others join them. They move like a cleanup crew that has done this before. There are two more men on the floor inside. The sight hits like a nail. We were supposed to host a pageant, and they took us for fools in our own house. What remains is smoke, a smear, and two men on the floor who wish they were somewhere else.
The town closes in fast, the way it always does when outsiders pick the wrong night. Mrs. Doyle wipes coffee off her sleeve and mutters that next time the troublemakers can bring their own urns. Mr. Finch folds the ladder and props it where no one will trip. Coach moves through the crowd, counting heads and checking who is still on their feet.
The sheriff clears a path with one hand and his voice, then radios for a car to take the first man to a room without windows. Everything starts to fall into place. The danger slows, shifts shape, and starts to look like order.
The moment cracks. One of the men goes tight. In one adroit move, he snaps his wrist inward, tucks his elbow, and rolls his weight, a quick wrist escape that frees him from the cuffs. He pivots hard and lashes out, blade flashing toward my collar. I hear the rasp of it more than see it. Eli reacts before I finish the thought. He swings the mic stand like a club and catches the man in the chest. The impact throws the knife aside and knocks the air from him. He folds down, winded and finished.
I do not feel the cut until I see the blood. It runs from the heel of my palm where the knife glanced, thin and bright. The ornament, Marco’s crooked star of driftwood and red thread, lies against my hand. He must have pressed it there when I passed him to his mother. I had not noticed he had been holding it all this time, fingers locked around it, unwilling to let go. I turn it once in my hand, the rough edge catching the light, the sting welcoming me. The reason I am still here. I stop moving for the first time in twelve minutes.
Smoke hangs in the air. Sirens fade down the street. The church bell starts ringing, deep and solemn. Someone inside thinks the sound will help. It does. People hear it and stop running. I walk back into the square, the star still in my hand, blood dried in the lines of my skin. The crowd opens around me, quiet, waiting. I do not look too hard at what that means. I just let it sit.
“Clear,” Petro says from my shoulder.
“For now,” I answer.
The bell finishes. Snow thickens, a white blanket over the night. Someone starts a car and lets it idle, not knowing what else to do. The kids begin to talk again in small, shaky bursts that turn into bigger ones. The town decides the pageant is over, and the night is not.
Lila steps out from the families and comes toward me. Her scarf is crooked, her face set. She looks at my hand, says nothing, and pulls a napkin from her pocket, one of ours from the coffee table, clean and neatly folded. She wraps it over my knuckles, her hands hovering over the star.
“It stays,” I say.
She ties the corners as if she has patched cuts like this, and it holds. The star rests against the white cloth and leaves a print of red no larger than a thumb.
Snow gathers on my shoulders until I feel the weight of it through the coat. I stand in it like a man who understands that this is the only kind of hush he is going to get for a while.
Lila tips her face up. Whatever she was going to say changes. She steps one pace closer so that the rest of the square falls away, and it is just her eyes and the slow fall of white.
