Our gazes lock.
Something passes between us, recognition, tension, a shared understanding that the air has shifted.
“Get in the car,” he says quietly as I approach, indicating his fleet of dark-tinted SUVs idling six feet away.
I frown, glancing at the restaurant. “Dinner?—”
“Is cancelled,” he finishes. “Now.”
I don’t argue.
As the door closes and the car pulls away too fast to be casual, Giovanni’s hand finds mine, grip firm, grounding.
“Something is happening, isn’t it?”
A brisk nod. “You felt it?” he says.
“Yes. I hoped I was wrong.”
“So did I.”
The city lights blur outside the window, and the normalcy of the afternoon collapses in on itself, fragile and gone.
Whatever has been watching us is done waiting.
And as Giovanni’s thumb presses into my palm, a silent promise of protection or possession, I can no longer tell, I know with cold certainty that this was the last quiet moment we were ever going to have.
The next one will be loud.
Violent.
Unavoidable.
14
GIOVANNI
The city gives you a half-second warning before it tries to kill you.
It’s never the noise. Noise comes later.
It’s the silence that tips me off…the way traffic stalls too cleanly at the far end of a Red Hook side street, the way pedestrians thin without explanation, the way the air tightens like a held breath.
I don’t have time to tell Lucia. Only to roar the order that surges up my throat.
“Down!”
I’m already moving, pulling her hard against me as the first shot cracks through the air and peppers the bulletproof glass behind where her head was a heartbeat earlier.
She gasps, but she doesn’t scream as the first barrage pounds us with unrelenting force.
Good girl.
I don’t need to tell my men to move.
But we only make it half a block before the second wave comes. More firepower than before.
Fuck.
