"Pretty girl. I'll remember you."
Then he turns and walks back into the smoke, unhurried, and he's gone.
The Zayas are out.
The sound changes first — gunfire dropping off, the rhythm of it altering from engagement to extraction. Then the comms confirm it: north exit, south exit, vehicles moving. Pulling back with purpose, covering each other, disciplined even in retreat.
Through the main room's shot-out windows I catch movement on the mezzanine above the loading bay. A figure I haven't tracked all night. Standing at the rail, not fighting, watching. Dark suit. Ramón Zayas, Héctor's strategist.
He's been watching the whole time.
Not counting the dead or watching his soldiers pull out. Watching us. How we regrouped. How Nico redirected the defense. Where Gunner moved and how our people responded. Filing it all — every piece of information about how the Delgado organization fights when it has to.
He looks at me.
I look back.
He nods once. Unhurried. The nod of one chess player acknowledging another after a hard game — not friendly, not respectful exactly, but something adjacent to both. Then he moves to the back stairwell and he's gone.
They're leaving with a map of how we hold. The assault failed. But the reconnaissance succeeded.
Now, the counting begins.
Two of our security people dead. Four wounded. One dancer who'd been in the back office for reasons unrelated to any ofthis — wrong place, badly hurt, still shaking. Tables overturned, glass everywhere, bullet holes in the stage and the bar and the ceiling. The Gilded Lily will need weeks of repair before it opens again.
Gunner is standing in the middle of the main floor.
Blood on his hands, his forearms, a spray of it across the left side of his face that he hasn't touched. Weapon holstered but hands loose, still ready. Scanning the room with those pale eyes, slow and methodical, checking corners. His body hasn't received the signal that the fight is over.
One of our security staff walks past him and gives him a wide berth, eyes averted. A man who works with Gunner every day — choosing not to look directly at him right now. I understand it.
Juliet is being led away by Wren and the Siren, one on each side, arms around her. Wren's braced right arm makes the gesture awkward but she manages it, her left hand firm at Juliet's back. Juliet is walking but not quite present — her eyes still fixed on something that isn't in this room. Santi's threat sitting in her like a stone dropped in still water.
She'll carry that. Longer than tonight.
Marisol moves through the wreckage with a phone to her ear, organized and focused, the cost of this held somewhere behind her eyes. We held. That's the true thing. The Delgados held and the Zayas didn't take what they came for.
It should feel like a victory, but it doesn’t.
Wren finds me near the bar.
She doesn't say anything. She stands beside me and takes my hand, and we stand in the ruined club together.
I look at her. The cut on her left arm, already crusted over. The grime on her jacket. The steadiness in her eyes — which has no business being there after everything tonight. My thumb finds the inside of her left wrist, where her pulse lives.
Fast. Real. There.
"I'm still alive," she says.
Alive," I repeat, because it’s all I can say.
Ramón was watching tonight and he's patient, and that nod from the mezzanine wasn't concession — it was note-taking. He'll come back with better information and a longer plan.
And somewhere out there Santiago Zayas is driving through the city with blood on his shirt that isn't his, remembering a soft girl with terrified hazel eyes who couldn't move when he looked at her. That promise of his isn't the kind that fades. He means it.
Back at La Sirena, Jimmy Polson is still in holding. Still in the chair. That accounting waits for me.
But Wren's hand is warm in mine. Her pulse steady under my fingers where our palms press together. Alive. Both of us alive, standing in the wreckage, the city going about its business outside.
