The van’s side door rolled open from the inside, and I caught the shape of a driver at the wheel and another shadow deeper in the back.
The man with the knife pulled Livia closer and shouted, “If you shoot again, your wife is dead.”
Livia was crying outright by then. “Icon…”
Everything in me focused on that knife and her blood trickling down her neck, and the distance I still hadn’t closed between me and my wife.
Then a shot cracked from somewhere behind the bushes. The bullet hit the man holding Livia in the head from so close that it snapped him sideways before the sound finished bouncing around the lot. Blood sprayed across Livia’s face and coat. She froze for half a second, too shocked to even scream right away.
The dead weight of him dropped off her as I lit the van up. So did my security who had come out of the landscaping lining the walkway. I didn’t even know which of my team it was because all I could see was muzzle flashes and red. I emptied toward the open side door and then the windshield. Glass shattered inward.The driver slumped. Another figure in the back took rounds before he could even lift his weapon.
The gunfire finally stopped. For one second, all I heard was Livia crying.
I ran towards her on the ground in a mess of blood and glass, shaking, breathing too fast with one hand at her throat. I dropped down beside her and grabbed her face first, then her shoulders, checking her everywhere my eyes could get to.
“Look at me. Look at me,” I frantically panted.
Her eyes found mine, wide and broken open with fear.
“I’m here,” I told her. “I got you. You’re okay.”
“I thought he was taking me,” she cried.
“He didn’t.”
My hands ran over her again. The blood on her was mostly his. The cut at her throat was shallow but enough to enrage me all over again.
The guard who made the shot came up on us breathing hard. It was Winston.
I peeped the blood on his sleeve. “You hit?”
“Grazed,” he answered. “I’m good.”
I nodded once and got back to Livia. “Can you stand?”
She nodded, then shook her head and cried harder. I gathered her up anyway, pulling her against me while two of the remaining men checked the van.
One of them leaned in through the driver’s side and called out, “Driver’s dead.”
The other checked the body inside the sliding door. “This one too.”
Winston spoke into his radio, then looked back at me. “Me and the rest of security already checked the rooftops along the strip. Nobody’s there.”
“Then where the fuck were the shots coming from?”
“Probably inside one of the buildings across the lot,” he answered. “They’re gone now.”
Livia still had both hands clutching my coat.
I kissed the top of her head. “We gotta go. C’mon, baby.”
I walked Livia towards my ride with one arm around her and my gun still in my other hand, feeling like a failure. I didn’t care that every man on my crew knew the risks that came with this life, that they signed up for danger, wore guns, and understood that protecting men like me could get them buried. As a leader, none of my men should have been left on that pavement. That part left me with a lot of guilt, because no matter how much sense death made in this profession, I still took it personal when it happened under my watch.
I had already wanted the Crown dead for touching my family, business, and city. But putting a knife to my wife’s throat changed the temperature. This was no longer about answering an attack the right way or making a strategic example out of the right men. The gloves were off. Everybody tied to them had to suffer. Not just the shooters. Not just whoever gave the order. Everybody who ate off that name, hid behind that structure, or felt protected by that organization had to feel what it cost to come for mine.
25
TARIQ “REEK” HORTON
