“Can you get a clean shot?” I ask, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.
“Negative. His positioning is too good.”
I need to fix this and fast. I can’t show failure to the Families. “I can get him,” I whisper into the comm, “but I need a distraction.”
“Negative. Hold position,” he orders.
“Alessandro, we’re running out of time?—”
“I saidhold position.”
Something in his voice makes me freeze.
Not anger, but absolute authority—the kind of command that brooks no argument.
For the first time since we started working together, he’s not treating me as an equal partner.
He’s taking control.
What happens next takes my breath away.
Alessandro creates a series of diversions using the warehouse equipment.
He topples storage units, triggering fire suppression systems, even using the building’s electrical system to create strategic blackouts.
Each distraction moves the final target exactly where Alessandro wants him, until the man is positioned perfectly for elimination.
The final kill is clean, professional, and staged to support our original false narrative despite everything that went wrong.
When Alessandro’s voice comes through with “Target down, scene secured,” I nearly sob with relief.
My legs are shaking as I emerge from behind the crates, and I have to grip the concrete wall to steady myself before I can move.
The staging feels surreal after the chaos of actual combat.
We work in tense silence, positioning corpses to create the illusion that they killed each other—placing weapons in dead hands, adjusting blood spatter patterns, creating powder burns that tell the story of close-quarters betrayal.
Alessandro’s movements are methodical and practiced, like he’s done this before.
Mine are clumsy with adrenaline, my hands still trembling as I try to angle a pistol to look like it discharged during a struggle.
“Not like that,” Alessandro says quietly, gently repositioning the weapon in the dead man’s grip. “The angle needs to match the bullet trajectory we created.”
My face warms, feeling like a small child being schooled by a teacher.
This takes twice as long as planned because we have to compensate for the chemical residue, the bullet patterns thatdon’t match our story, and the general chaos that resulted from my failures.
Alessandro works efficiently, adjusting details I hadn’t even considered, turning disaster into something that might still pass for gang warfare.
We exit through separate routes, but I find myself shaken in ways I hadn’t expected.
Not by the violence or the killing, but by how completely I’d lost control of the situation.
How my careful planning had fallen apart the moment reality didn’t match my expectations.
Alessandro had been forced to save both the mission and my life because of my fuck up.
We make it to my penthouse, both running on adrenaline but for different reasons.
