I hear the rustle of the rough blanket. I hear her bare feet moving across the floor. She retrieves her clothes from the chair where I discarded them hours ago.
I continue to pull gear from the bag. A tactical flashlight. A combat knife with a serrated edge. A first aid kit. I arrange everything with meticulous precision. Every item has a specific purpose. Every weapon is a promise to keep her breathing.
The burner phone sits silently among the tools of war.
The screen is dark. The encrypted stream is quiet.
The broken timing flashes in my memory. The numbers that won't line up. The intel arriving before the event. A ghost in the machine. A shadow moving through the Costa network.
Something inside our walls isn't right. Either that broadcast leaked early, or it was fed into the system to force a reaction. The Bellantis are using us against ourselves.
The thought does not trigger the blinding rage this time. It triggers a cold, calculating lethality.
When this is over, I'll find out where that broadcast really came from. I'll trace it back to its source. Whatever I find, I'll deal with it then.
But not now.
Tonight, my mission is the woman pulling a sweater over her head behind me. Everything else can wait until she's safe. My only objective is defending this span of stone and steel.
She steps up beside me. She is fully dressed. The Bellanti princess is gone. The survivor stands in her place. She looks down at the arsenal laid out on the crate.
She reaches out, fingers brushing the cold steel of the spare magazines.
"Are they coming now?" she asks.
I look at the iron door. The metal is thick enough to stop a bullet. It's not thick enough to stop an army.
"Yes," I answer. The truth is unavoidable. The war has accelerated. "They are coming."
I pick up the Sig. The grip is molded to my hand. The weight settles me the way nothing else ever has. I drop the magazine, check the top round, and slam it back into the well. The click is decisive.
I stand in the center of the subterranean tomb. The freezing draft from the rusted flood pipe sweeps over my shoulders, cutting through the rot of the walls with the cold bite of river water.
I'm Fabio Costa. The weapon my family kept on a leash for twenty years.
The leash is snapped clean. The war is here.
And heaven help the first man who tries to breach that door.
7
Catalina
The Sig'smagazine snaps home in Fabio's hand, and the sound bounces off the damp walls like a verdict.
Fabio racks the slide, and the sound is vicious, final.
He sets the Sig on the rusted metal table and reaches into the duffel bag for the spare magazines. He moves with the terrifying efficiency of a man who learned the grammar of bloodshed before he learned anything else. The sterile white wash from the internal generator carves harsh shadows across his shoulders. Tension wires the line of his throat down into his shoulders.
He lines up three spare magazines next to a combat knife that belongs in a jungle warzone, not a decommissioned prohibition tunnel under the Chicago River.
Does he expect a strike team or a zombie apocalypse? With a Costa, the line is practically nonexistent.
He thinks he can just grunt, lay out an armory, and expect me to sit quietly in the corner like a good little rescued princess. Please. I learned to read armed, paranoid men across a dinner table before I learned to read poetry. Brooding mafia giants don't intimidate me.
Except this one does.
Not because of the guns. Because of what he said before he started unpacking them. He promised to stand against his own blood to put a wall between me and the bullet meant for my head.. He rejected the tactical reality of the fake Bellanti broadcast. He chose a defector over his own family's potential strike force.
