His body stayed between me and every doorway we passed. Not beside me. Not leading me. Between—a wall of muscle and aggression that absorbed the angles, that presented itself to the dark rectangles of potential threat so that if anything came through them, it would find him first. His weapon was up. His torch was off. He navigated by the thin grey light that leakedthrough curtained windows at the corridor's end, moving with the particular confidence of a man who operated in darkness as comfortably as most people operated in daylight.
His hand on my arm didn't loosen. Didn't adjust. The grip was calibrated to exactly one purpose: keeping me moving at a pace that my legs could barely sustain and his body demanded.
We hit the main staircase.
The firefight was right there.
Not distant. Not muffled by floors and walls and the buffering architecture of a large house. Right there,in the entrance hall below us, visible in flashes that turned the darkness into a strobe. Muzzle flash. White. Orange. The split-second illumination of a staircase railing, a chandelier swaying from concussive force, the frozen silhouette of a man firing from behind an overturned table. Then dark again. Then light. Then dark.
The noise was something I had no framework for. It was a physical thing. A pressure that hit my eardrums and kept hitting, wave after wave, the deafening percussion of multiple weapons firing in an enclosed space where marble floors and stone walls turned every shot into a ricochet of sound. I couldn't hear my own breathing. Couldn't hear my feet on the stairs. Could only hear the world ending in intervals of light and noise, and Santo pulling me through it like it was weather.
He fired twice over the banister.
Didn't slow down. Didn't stop moving. His right arm extended over the railing—weapon angled down, two shots in rapid succession—and in the muzzle flash I saw a Valenti guard drop. The man was mid-stride, moving between cover points, and then he wasn't. He folded like something whose strings had been cut, and Santo was already past, already descending, his shooting hand returning to its position by his ear as his left hand dragged me down the stairs behind him.
The ground floor was chaos.
Caruso soldiers. They were pushing through the entrance hall toward the blown service entrance, and the Valentis were pushing back.
More of them than expected. Six, maybe seven, pouring in from a corridor to the east—reinforcements from another part of the house, or from outside, men who'd been positioned as a second line and were now collapsing inward to defend the ground floor. I could hear radio chatter from their direction—tinny, urgent, the sound of someone calling for more bodies.
We were outnumbered.
Santo shoved me behind a marble column. Wide enough to hide my body. He took the other side, pressed against the stone, weapon up, firing in controlled bursts at the advancing Valentis. The column shuddered with each impact, not from his shots but from theirs, the returning fire chipping marble, sending small fragments of stone spinning into the air like teeth knocked from a jaw.
The angles were wrong. Too many doorways. Too many directions. The entrance hall was a crossfire waiting to happen, and Santo knew it. I could see it in the way his head swiveled between shots, tracking threats from multiple vectors, his body trying to be a wall in a room that had too many holes.
A Caruso soldier to our left went down.
I saw it. The flash caught it—a man spinning, his weapon flying from his hands, his body hitting the marble floor with a sound that was wet and final. He didn't move. Didn't get up. The muzzle flash died and the darkness swallowed him and he was gone, and I pressed my back against the column so hard the stone cut into my spine and I couldn't breathe.
Then Santo jerked.
The sound was small. A sharp, involuntary grunt, the kind of noise a man makes when he walks into a table edge, whensomething surprises his body before his mind can intervene. Not a scream. Not a shout. Just a compression of air forced through clenched teeth, and the particular quality of it—the surprise, the refusal, the way it was bitten off before it could become anything that might be mistaken for weakness—told me everything.
His left side. In the next muzzle flash I saw a dark bloom spreading across his shirt, the wet gleam of fabric saturated. The blood moved fast. Soaking outward from a point below his ribs, spreading across the dark henley with the unstoppable progression of ink on paper, of water on cotton, of damage that couldn't be undone by stubbornness alone.
He didn't stop firing.
His jaw locked.
Santo keyed his radio with his free hand.
"We need the package out now." His voice was flat. Compressed. Each word squeezed through a throat that was managing pain and adrenaline and the biological reality of blood loss simultaneously. "I'm hit."
Static. Then Marco's voice, clipped, fast, stripped of every trace of the charming nightclub owner and rebuilt from something harder: "Thirty seconds. North side."
Santo looked at me. His dark eyes found mine in the strobing dark, and what I saw there wasn't fear. Wasn't pain. It was the look of a man who had made a promise to his brother, and intended to keep it regardless of what his body had to say about the matter.
"Move," he said.
He grabbed my arm. The same iron grip. The same impersonal, immovable hold. But his left side was soaked now, and when he pushed off the column I heard the sound he didn't want me to hear, the short, bitten-off hiss of a man whose body was screaming and whose will was screaming louder.
Cold air hit me like a wall. Real air, not the climate-controlled atmosphere of Enzo's guest room, not the cordite-thick soup of the hallway, but actual October night, sharp with frost and exhaust and the particular electricity of a world that had not ended.
Gravel driveway. Headlights — not two, not three, but a constellation of them, cutting the darkness from every angle, turning the front of the Lake Forest estate into something that blazed with the flat, unforgiving brightness of exposure. Of being found.
Not three vehicles. Twelve.
