My hands go up before the first officer breaches the door. I toss my gun across the room and fall to my knees. It makes me sick to my stomach to surrender, but running is pointless. I’d make it maybe ten feet before they turned me into Swiss cheese. Resisting would only give them justification to put bullets in me, and I promised Eliana I’d come home.
Cross my heart and hope to die.That’s what I told her.
The door explodes inward. Cops swarm through like hornets from a kicked nest, screaming contradictory commands over one another.
“On the ground!”
“Hands where I can see them!”
“Don’t fucking move!”
Two of them in head-to-toe SWAT garb snatch me and wrench my arms behind my back. They kick me to the ground and my face hits the floor hard enough to split my lip. The taste of blood floods my mouth as someone plants a savage knee between my shoulder blades.
Cuffs bite into my wrists. Metal teeth grinding against bone. Someone starts reciting my Miranda rights, not that I give a damn about that. My thoughts are on a woman’s womb, on roses in my nose and grass stalks in her hair. On promises kept and promises broken.
They haul me upright and drag me toward the door. Outside, the night has turned into a carnival of red and blue, strobing lights that burn my eyes after the dimness of that death house.
A cop shoves me into the back of a cruiser and slams the door behind me. Through the smeared window, I watch more units arrive. Forensics units and detectives unspool crime scene tape around the building where Solis and the prosecutor lie cooling in their own blood.
I imagine Eliana at the safe house. Checking her phone. Frowning at the silence. Growing worried when I don’t respond.
I wonder what she’ll think when she learns I’ve been arrested for double homicide. A cop and a federal prosecutor, no less. These kind of charges don’t come with bail. More like lethal injection or, best case, life in lightless, concrete solitary with no chance of parole.
I picture our child growing up visiting their father through bulletproof glass. Or worse, growing up without a father at all. I’ll be just a name on a headstone, a cautionary tale their mother tells them when they’re old enough to understand.
The cruiser pulls away from the scene. I slump against the seat as the future I thought I had in my hands recedes into the blackness behind.
Aleksei has won.
And everyone I love is now utterly, catastrophically unprotected.
54
ELIANA
the weeds /T?H? wedz/: noun
1: (kitchen slang) state of being overwhelmed; falling dangerously behind.
2: glass in your palms, blood on the floor, and no way to reach the people screaming your name.
In all the history of human civilization, no minutes have ever passed slower than these.
I’m curled up on the couch with my hand pressed to my belly. Baby Hale has been active tonight, full of endless little flutters and jabs. Normally, that would make me smile between winces. But tonight, those one-two combos feel like they’re synced to my anxiety.
Kick. Still no text.
Punch. Still no call.
Hook, cross, uppercut. Still nothing but this awful, terrible, suffocating silence.
But I don’t let myself show any sign of the internal turmoil. Everyone else around me has apparently gotten the same memo. We’re all pretending everything is ship-shape, nothing to be concerned about. Just another day in the very normal life of this band of wily fugitives. Zeke cleans the kitchen, Yasmin paints her nails, Mom knits, Sage hammers away at his keyboard.
Everyone is acting as this is just another evening. Everyone is failing miserably.
I poke my phone to wake it up again. The screen reader announces the time—9:51 P.M.—and confirms what I already knew: There are no new messages. My little heart emoji from two hours ago sits there like the sad, lonely little organ it is, unread and unanswered.
He’s fine. These things take time. Clandestine federal meetings don’t wrap up in twenty minutes.
