For tonight, it's enough.
27 - Wren
The Gilded Lily smells like gunpowder and spilled spirits.
The floor is covered in glass. It grinds under boots every time someone moves — a constant low crunch beneath the shouting, the radio static, the distant wail of sirens that have been circling for ten minutes without getting closer. Someone's brought floodlights in from somewhere. They make everything too bright, too flat. The neon sign outside is still flickering — cheerful pink light over a crime scene.
A body is being covered near the stage. One of ours. I know this because of the way Marisol stops when she sees it, stilling for a moment before she makes herself keep moving.
Smoke hangs near the ceiling where something caught and was put out. The copper smell underneath everything else is blood.
Nico is against the far wall, phone to his ear, voice too low to catch. He's been on calls continuously since the assault ended, coordinating cleanup, relaying information to La Sirena, accounting for everyone still unaccounted for. His free hand moves in clipped gestures — not agitation, just communication. I watch him for a moment and catch fragments.Jimmy's still in holding. Confirmed. Copy.He doesn't look toward the covered body. He files it and keeps going.
Gunner is moving through the debris near the stage.
He lifts a section of collapsed ceiling panel, concrete and drywall, and sets it aside without apparent effort. Looks at what's underneath. Nothing. Moves on. His hands are enormousand methodical. There's blood dried on his left forearm, a long dark smear from wrist to elbow, and he doesn't seem to know it's there. His pale eyes sweep the room in slow arcs, floor to ceiling, corner to corner. A man doing a job.
Marisol is crouching beside a security guard against the far wall. The guard has a field dressing on his shoulder that's soaked through. She's pressing fresh cloth to it — she found the cloth somewhere, I don't know where — and talking to him. I can't hear what she's saying. I can see the guard nod.
She moves past me a few minutes later with a bottle of water and stops. Her eyes do their rapid read — my face, my hands, the set of my shoulders.
"You're still in it," she says quietly. Not a question. "You’re still shaking."
"Am I?"
She puts the water in my hand. Closes my fingers around it. "It will get better soon." Then she's moving again, back into the room, back to the next thing.
The Siren is in a corner near the emergency exit.
She's sitting on a bar stool that somehow survived upright, her back against the wall, both arms wrapped around herself. She's talking to herself. Singing, maybe. The sound is too soft to carry over the noise of the room, but I can see her mouth moving. Her large dark eyes track every person who passes within ten feet, and every time someone gets close, her shoulders pull inward.
Then I see Juliet.
Someone found her a chair and placed it against the wall opposite the bar. There's a blanket around her shoulders. She's staring at the floor six feet in front of her.
Not at the debris. Not at the movement. At nothing. Her eyes are open and she's staring at nothing.
Marisol looked at me over Juliet's head twenty minutes ago and her face said everything she couldn't say out loud. The party girl who laughs through disasters looked genuinely afraid.
I know that blankness. I sat beside it for six years. It's where you go when surviving means leaving the body behind and waiting somewhere quieter until it's safe to come back.
Something terrible happened to Juliet in those last minutes. I don't know what, but I know what it left behind.
The assault is over.
I keep telling myself this. The Zayas are gone — I watched them retreat, heard Nico confirm it, watched the controlled withdrawal through the shot-out windows. The building is being swept. Pawlikowski is at the door. The sirens outside belong to someone else's emergency.
It's over. I'm safe.
My body doesn't believe me.
My breath keeps catching at the top, shallow, not finishing. My heart is loud enough that I can feel it in my throat. Every sharp sound — a piece of glass breaking under someone's boot, a burst of radio static, Gunner dropping a ceiling panel — sends a spike through me that I can't intercept.
I flinch. I can't stop flinching.
I press my back against the bar and focus on the weight of the floor under my feet. Hard tile. Real. Solid. Still. I count the pressure of it against my soles. I breathe in. I breathe out. My breath comes back shallow and I start again.
My mother is still in my chest.
