The third man sees Gunner coming and runs. Actually turns and runs. I watch a Zayas soldier — trained, armed, paid well enough to accept violence as a job description — choose flight over whatever is moving toward him in the flickering pink light.
Two of our own security staff are ahead of me, and when they see Gunner work, the fear on their faces is genuine. These are men who know him. Men who've worked alongside him for years. Afraid of him right now — not of the Zayas, not of the bullets. Of him. Of what he is when the lid comes off.
He's not angry. No rage, no heat. He's doing a job. The cold efficiency is total. The blood on his hands doesn’t register, and that’s the most terrifying thing I've seen tonight.
I'm moving through the back rooms of the club, my weapon up, clearing corridors and corners, shooting men who need it. That's when she finds me.
Marisol. Golden hair, a gun she absolutely did not have when I dropped her here, and the expression of a woman who hasdecided she is not dying in a strip club. Crouched low near the end of the bar, pointing toward the back corridor with two fingers.
"They're behind the office," she calls out. "All of them. I got them back there when the glass blew. Wren pulled Juliet. We ducked behind the bar at first, but I thought it would be safer behind the office. I covered them. They’re alive."
Alive. The word lands in my chest.
Nico's voice comes through the comms. He's inside now, somewhere on the mezzanine level, working positions, angles, redirecting our people from defense to pressure. He calls it in the cadence of someone who has done this in worse places with worse resources, and our people respond. The soldier's voice, the tone that saysI know exactly where to put you and why.The Gilded Lily's defense starts holding with intent instead of desperation.
I take an order from him — east corridor, cover the exit — and I go. His read is better than mine right now and I know it. I move as part of the unit, giving orders when I see more, taking them when Nico sees better, and the Zayas are losing the math. Our people rallied, Gunner carved through the main floor, Nico turned chaos into geometry.
Three minutes, maybe four. The assault is failing and the Zayas are beginning to feel it.
I get to the back office.
Wren is against the far wall when the door opens — on her feet already, the Siren close beside her, both of them pressed as far from the door as the room allows. I'm across the room before she's fully stepped toward me.
She's shaking. Both of us shaking. Holding on too hard in the middle of a room that smells like old beer.
"Logan." Just my name. Just air.
I pull back enough to look at her — face, eyes, the brace still on her right arm, the bandage at her temple intact. A shallow cut along her left forearm where glass must have caught her when the windows blew.
"Your arm—"
"It's nothing. Just flying glass." She lifts it briefly to show me, then lets it fall. Her eyes are clear and direct despite everything. "How did this happen?"
"Jimmy told them where you'd be."
She absorbs this. One breath. A single nod. "Okay," she says. That's all.
I pull her into a tight hug, wondering if I’ll ever find the strength to let her go.
Over her shoulder, I see Juliet.
She's in the doorway to the back corridor — standing absolutely still, arms at her sides, face gone the color of old ash. Her eyes are fixed on something emerging from the smoke beyond the doorway.
I pull Wren tighter against my chest.
Santiago Zayas comes through the smoke.
The son. The problematic Zayas. The psychopath.
He should be leaving. The Zayas are retreating on every other front — I can hear it in the shift of the gunfire, the calls coming through comms, the changing geometry of the fight. But Santi isn't retreating. He walks into the doorway and stops, and the blood on him is not his, and he is smiling.
The smile doesn't change when he sees me. He looks at me the way you'd look at furniture. Then his eyes move to Juliet and they stay there.
She cannot move. Frozen in the doorway while the predator looks at her like he's deciding what shelf to put her on. She's trembling — the fine shaking of a body that is screaming at her to run while her legs have stopped working.
He tilts his head. Looks at her terror like someone studying a painting they want to own. Takes his time with it.
Then he speaks. Soft, almost conversational, delivered like a promise.
