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“Tito’s dead,” Dmitri says, cutting his words short.

His mouth finds mine. The kiss is passionate and uncareful—teeth, breath, the salt of my own skin, the heat of a man who just put Tito Lucci in the floor and then came looking for me.

When he breaks the kiss he does not let me go.

“I love you,” he says. Undying love is in the way he says it, even if the word itself is simple. “One day we will rule side by side. This city. What is left of it after tonight. But for now your training continues. Do you understand me?”

I understand. Dmitri is my Master. Pakhan. Daddy.

The boy who wanted fast and dangerous and every day like it might be the last.

“Yes,” I say. “I understand.”

We kiss again. Harder this time. My bleeding arm trapped between us. I would stay in this filthy kitchen and let the world burn if he asked.

Hardy and Mackensie enter from the service stair and I know it’s time to move.

Hardy’s eyes go to my arm, to Zane, to the gun, and then to Dmitri. Mackensie checks the corners out of habit and then the door we will use.

“Time to bounce,” Mackensie says. “Streets are still ours but they will not stay empty.”

Dmitri’s hand stays on the back of my neck as we move.

I glance once at Zane on the mats.

Fuck him.

We climb out of the basement toward a city that does not yet know the Lucci head is gone, and I walk beside the man who said we would rule it together—someday.

For now I keep the gun in my good hand.

And I don’t look back even once.

The following morning comes and we have not slept for a single moment.

Dmitri’s couch is large enough to hold a war council and this morning it holds the two of us and the wreck of the night.

I sit tucked against his side, his arm along the back of the cushions, my bandaged arm resting on his thigh like it belongs there.

The city beyond the glass is going from black to a thin, dirty gold. Sun coming up on a town that does not yet know Tito Lucci is on a slab and Zane is cooling in a kitchen that still smells of onions.

We have talked all night.

Not the pretty kind of talk. The other kind. Who fell on the stairs. How Hardy’s shot sounded in the main room. The way Tito said rat and informant like he thought it would make a damn bit of difference.

The way my hands shook after I pulled the trigger and then did not shake at all. Dmitri has not dressed down from black. I am in one of his shirts and nothing else.

Hardy cleaned and bound my arm before he and Mackensie left to lock down what was left of the streets. The bandage is neat. Precise. Just like Hardy.

The sun clears a ledge and lays a strip of light across the rug…

“Is it always like this?” I ask. “After a big gunfight. This. Sitting. Not being able to close your eyes.”

Dmitri’s mouth moves into a wry smile. It does not reach the part of him that is still counting exits and planning the final sweep of the Lucci empire.

“It is all I know,” Dmitri says. “This is why I have never taken drugs. I do not need them. This is my own kind of twisted high. The come-down. The quiet. The fact that you are still breathing when other men are not.”

I look at the glass, then at the city he said we would rule one day, side by side, after the training.