"I know." I press my hand flat against his chest for one second — just that, just the warmth of him under my palm — before I drop it.
He kisses me. Brief and fierce, sealed against my mouth before I can say anything else. Then his hands drop, and he's standing, and he's moving toward the door, and he's gone.
The door swings shut.
I sit in the booth and breathe.
Marisol materializes from somewhere and sets a glass of water on the table in front of me, then sits on the other side without being asked. She doesn't say anything. Neither do I. After a moment she puts her hand over mine, warm and steady, and we sit there while the grief settles into something I can carry.
The Siren is sitting quietly. Juliet hasn't moved from her booth. The quiet gathers itself around us, patient and still.
I press my thumb to my pulse. Beating. The grief has cracked me open but I'm still here. Still present. Still in this body, in this room, in this life I've been slowly, improbably building.
Outside, somewhere, Logan is driving toward La Sirena.
I close my eyes and listen to the refrigeration unit hum.
And then it shatters.
The sound comes from outside — wrong, out of place, the grind of vehicles that don't belong in this parking lot at this hour. The security at the main door goes rigid. Radios crackle. Someone says something low and urgent that I can't hear from the booth.
Marisol is already on her feet.
I'm watching her face when the glass breaks.
The front window — one enormous blast that sends shards across the floor, and then the shooting starts, and every sound is happening at once. Someone screaming. A guard going down near the entrance. Marisol shoutingget down, get downand pulling the Siren off her stool and behind the bar in one motion.
I'm on the floor of the booth without deciding to be. My brace hits the seat hard and I bite down on the pain and press myself flat.
Juliet is frozen. I can see her from here — still in her booth, across the room from mine, eyes wide, not moving.
A second burst of gunfire from the east side of the building and I scramble out of the booth and across the floor and grab her arm with my left hand.
"Move."
"I can't—" Her voice is high, wrong.
"You can." I pull her down. She moves.
We're behind the bar with Marisol and the Siren, the four of us crouched on the rubber mat while the Gilded Lily comes apart around us. Glass raining across the bar top above our heads and the smell of the place changes — under the perfume and the rubber floor mat, gunpowder sharp in the air, and my whole nervous system registers it before my brain does:this is real.The security team is returning fire at the front. Someone on a radio is calling for backup, wrong building, wrong building, the address coming through in fragments.
The address.
The Gilded Lily. Not La Sirena.
The Zayas are here. They hit the safe house. They knew exactly where we'd be — the protocol, the playbook, the whole careful procedure of keeping the non-combatants clear of the violence. Jimmy would have known. He had sat in every meeting, invisible, and he would have known that if La Sirena came under threat, the women went to the Gilded Lily. Logan had extracted that from him in the holding room — what he'd told them, how much they knew — and the answer had been everything. Jimmy had given them the map and they'd built their trap around it and we walked straight in.
Logan is driving in the wrong direction. He's headed toward the wrong building while this one burns around us, and there is nothing I can do about that except stay low and stay alive long enough for someone to tell him.
Another burst of gunfire. Juliet's hand grips my arm so hard I've lost feeling in my fingers.
This was Jimmy's final betrayal — not the accounting fraud, not the money, not the months of feeding information to the people who wanted to tear down everything Logan had built. This. Sending us here. Making the safe house the kill zone.
Marisol meets my eyes across the dark space behind the bar. She has her phone in her hand.
She's already dialing.
26 - Logan
