“You got this,” Zane whispered.
Seven took a slow breath, trying to steady the tremor in his hands. His palms were slick with sweat, and his mouth tasted like iron. The warehouse suddenly felt smaller, every echo sharper.
He unholstered his Glock in one smooth motion, thumbing off the safety. There was already a round chambered. He raised the gun, feeling the familiar tension in his shoulders, that deadly equilibrium between precision and panic.
Elio and Ansel weren’t tall, but Caesar and Fritz were short, squat bastards. There was just enough overlap to make his shota nightmare. If he was off by even a millimeter, he wouldn’t be saving Enzo’s brothers; he’d be killing them.
“Yeah, our mother…Francesca Conti,” Ansel spit, clearly expecting the two men to quake at the name.
Instead, Caesar’s eyes gleamed with cruel amusement. “That cunt’s your mom? Sending her your bodies in pieces will be a pleasure.”
Ansel turned on him fast. Too fast. The bravado vanished, replaced by the reckless energy of someone who hadn’t yet learned what fear should feel like.
And then all hell broke loose.
Caesar hit the ground hard, already raising his gun toward Ansel. Fritz swung his weapon in the same instant, both barrels glinting under the sodium lights.
“Get down!” Seven roared. His voice cracked across the space like a gunshot of its own, the echo almost painful.
Brioni dropped first, then the boys hit the concrete just as Seven fired. Once. Twice. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space, the recoil slamming into his arm, the muzzle flash lighting the warehouse in brief, violent snapshots.
Two screams followed, echoing off the steel rafters.
Then—crack.
A stray bullet zipped past so close he felt the heat of it before the pain. His cheek burned, hot blood cutting a slick line down his face, the coppery sting blooming instantly. The world tilted sideways, a high, piercing whine flooding his ear.
He staggered back, one hand braced against the rusted wall, the other gripping the gun tight enough to make his knuckles ache. The noise was chaos—boots pounding, voices shouting—but it was all distant, muffled beneath the relentless ringing.
The others surged past him, shadows and movement, heading for the stairs.
When he pushed forward again, vision swimming, he saw Elio and Ansel holding the discarded weapons, their hands shaking. Or maybe that was just Seven. Fritz was on his knees, missing two fingers on his right hand, blood spraying in rhythmic spurts, like something out of a low-budget horror movie. Caesar clutched his forearm, a red bloom spreading fast through his sleeve, his hand curled uselessly.
Seven’s breath came short and ragged. Every heartbeat made the cut on his face throb, each pulse echoing in the hollow where his hearing used to be. He’d been aiming for the gun—he knew that—but Caesar had moved. It didn’t matter now. Both men were on the ground, writhing and howling.
Avi and Asa disarmed the teens, who looked a little dazed, though he could practically smell the way they thrummed with adrenaline. Seven reached the top of the stairs just as Enzo brought his boot down on Caesar’s face. The wetcrackthat followed was unmistakable. The man’s scream rose, gurgling, then cut off.
Enzo turned to his brothers. “You fucking idiots.”
They stumbled back, expecting fury, punishment, but instead, Enzo pulled them both into a crushing hug. His shoulders shook once, just once, before he steadied.
Relief washed through Seven, dizzying and warm. They were good. Everything was good. It was fine. They were all gonna be fine. And then the floor shifted. No, not the floor. His balance. The whole world tilted on its axis like gravity had suddenly taken a vacation. What the hell was wrong with him?
He felt the edge of the stair catch the back of his boot, then the freefall. Metal bit through fabric, meeting his body like a crowbar. The air left his lungs in a ragged gasp, the world spinning in a wash of light and noise and pain.
“Seven!”
Enzo’s shout broke through the ringing in his ear, the sound stretched and distorted but unmistakable, like he was hearing him from the bottom of a swimming pool.
He hit the concrete hard, the impact knocking every ounce of air from his chest. His vision went white at the edges, the taste of blood thick in his mouth, the faint echo of Enzo’s boots pounding toward him the only thing tethering him to the world.
Then nothing.
Enzo sat with his back to the cold metal, Seven in his lap, his head heavy against his chest. There was a bandage covering the four-inch groove the stray bullet had carved into his cheek and another wrapped around the missing curve of his earlobe. Atticus had assured him Seven was fine—“mild concussion, ruptured eardrum, no internal bleeding”—but Enzo’s chest was still too tight to breathe right. He believed Atticus. He just didn’tfeellike believing him. Every rise of Seven’s chest against his own came as proof he refused to stop checking for.
They’d moved. Not far—just across the docks to another corpse of a building—but far enough that the shadows had rearranged themselves. The abandoned processing shed loomed like a rusted cathedral, its corrugated roof slick with moonlight. A single sodium lamp leaned crookedly from a post, flickering in and out, like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to live. It threw light in uneven pulses, heartbeat flashes that made the wet ground look like it was breathing.
Atticus lingered close, his usual calm pulled taut, like he knew the second he walked away, Enzo would unravel. Jericho’s low voice carried from somewhere deeper in the shed, smooth and steady as a surgeon’s hand, impossible to read. Grant and his buddies lay hog-tied in the open, their muffled groans catching beneath the whine of distant waves. Somewhere out on the water, there was a relentless dinging sound that he couldn’t quite place. Enzo’s brothers were orbiting the scene, one moment hurling insults at the captives, the next craning their necks toward the far side of the room where Avi’s “project” was taking shape.
