The doors blow inward with a force that shakes the walls, and then there are bodies pouring in wearing tactical gear with FBI in white letters across their chests, and there are voices screaming commands, and there are weapons raised, and the crowd scatters like roaches when the lights come on.
Percy drops the knife. It clatters on the concrete, and he drops to his knees, and he’s heaving up these guttural sobs. I’m over him in a second, my body between him and whatever’s coming, because that’s the only thing I know how to do. Protect the kid. Protect the people who can’t protect themselves.
“Hands up! On the ground!”
“He’s a kid!” I shout, my arms around Percy, shielding him. “He’s eighteen years old, he’s a victim, don’t you fucking touch him.”
Someone grabs my arm and I almost swing before I clock the FBI vest and the badge. “Lance Calloway?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re safe, sir. It’s over.”
The words don’t register. They bounce off me like stones skipping on water, because nothing is over, because Cassandra is somewhere and she needs to be in cuffs, and Brutus was toasting me, and Percy is shaking against my chest, and Art is…
My hands won’t stop moving.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about the moment the fight ends. Your body doesn’t know. Six years of training, of reading a room for exits and weapons and the flicker of lights that tells you when to go down—it doesn’t just switch off because someone in a vest says you’re safe. My fingers are still curled into fists around Percy’s jacket. My shoulders are still braced for the next hit. My jaw aches from clenching, and I canhear my own heartbeat louder than the shouting, louder than the boots on concrete, louder than anything.
Percy’s face is pressed against my chest, and he’s saying something, but I can’t make it out over the ringing in my ears. I hold him tighter and try to breathe, slowly—in with four beats and out with six—except the only number my brain can land on is seven and that makes me think of Genevieve, and thinking of Genevieve makes my ribs crack open wider than Percy’s punches ever could.
Is she alive? Did Cassandra keep her word?
I don’t know. And the not knowing is a wound no one can stitch.
An agent crouches in front of us, hands visible, palms up, like he’s approaching something feral. “Sir, we need to move you to a secure area. Can you stand?”
I can stand. I’ve stood through worse. But my legs don’t move, because standing means letting go of this kid, and letting go of this kid means trusting that the world outside this cage is different from the world inside it, and if the last few months—the last fewyears—have taught me anything, it’s that corruption bleeds into the mundane, everyday things.
Percy pulls back. His face is blotchy and streaked, snot and tears and blood from where his own knuckles split against my ribs.
“Is it real?” he asks. “Are they really here?”
“Yeah. They’re really here.”
“So I don’t have to—”
“No. You don’t have to do anything. Not anymore.”
His chin trembles, and he nods, and then he lets the agent help him to his feet. I watch them drape a shock blanket aroundhis shoulders, and my vision goes hazy, because he looks so small inside it, and I think about the first time Benjamin brought him downstairs at the tavern, scared shitless and trying to hide it, and how I wished with everything in me that I could get him out.
I didn’t get him out. Someone else did. But he’s standing. He’s breathing. And the knife is on the ground where it belongs. I force my own legs to work. When I stand, the warehouse tilts sideways for a second before it rights itself, and my hands are shaking. Not trembling—shaking, the kind that starts in your wrists and works up through your forearms and makes you feel like you’re vibrating apart at the molecular level. I press them flat against my thighs and hold them there until the shaking becomes something I can hide.
Art.
I scan the warehouse. Agents are swarming. Spectators are face down on the concrete with their hands behind their heads. I see Brutus’s table, glass shattered on the floor, but his chair is empty.
He’s gone.
But Art isn’t.
He’s standing near the service entrance with two agents flanking him, and he’s not running. He’s not resisting. His hands are raised, palms out, cuffs around them, and he’s talking. I can’t hear the words over the noise, but I can see his mouth moving, and there’s something about his posture that doesn’t match a man being arrested.
It matches a man turning himself in.
His shoulders are loose. His weight is even. There’s no tension in his jaw, no darting of his eyes toward the exits. He’snot calculating an escape. He’s not performing calm for the agents the way he performs it for everyone else.
He’srelieved.
