Chapter 8
The world stopped.
“What?”
“Bianke knows about the setup. He’s furious, and he believes you were part of it. He demanded an exchange.” Aleandro was striding toward the door, Vinnie’s number already dialing on his phone. “Marco for you.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him no.”
Bella grabbed his arm. “You told him *no*?”
“I don’t trade my people.” He looked down at her hand, then up at her face, and something in his expression was harder than she had ever seen it. “Not even for the ones I want.”
They took three cars to the Kenosha shipyard.
The drive was forty minutes of Bella staring at the rain-streaked window with her hands clenched in her lap. Aleandro sat beside her and did not speak. He checked his pistol twice. He made two phone calls in Italian. That was all.
The shipyard was a graveyard of rusted cranes and stacked shipping containers, lit by sodium lamps that turned the rain the color of old brass.
Aleandro told her to stay in the car.
She stayed for four minutes.
Then a gunshot cracked the air, flat and enormous, and she was out of the door and running before she had decided to run.
She came around a container and found a standoff frozen in the lamplight.
Bianke stood behind Marco with a pistol pressed to his head. Marco’s face was gray, his eyes wild, his mouth moving soundlessly. Two of Bianke’s men flanked them. On the far side, Vinnie stood with his weapon up, and Aleandro stood between them all with his hands open and empty, the way a man stands when he is trying to keep someone alive.
And on the roof of the container behind them, silhouetted against the sodium glow, a sniper was adjusting his scope.
Bella saw the rifle swing toward Marco.
“No!”
She screamed it, and the sound broke the tableau, and in the half-second that everything moved at once, Aleandro turned, saw the roof, and did the thing that Vinnie Gallo would talk about for years afterward.
He put his body between the rifle and her brother.
The shot came. Aleandro staggered — clipped across the shoulder, spun half around — and Vinnie’s pistol came up and fired twice, and Salvatore Bianke went down on the wet concrete and did not get up.
The other two men dropped their weapons.
Vinnie was shouting orders. Marco was on his knees, shaking, and Bella was already there, her arms around him, and he was sobbing into her shoulder in a way he had not since he was a child.
They fled.
In the car, with the shipyard lights falling away behind them, Aleandro reached into the glove compartment and took out two passports and a folded slip of paper.
He handed them to her.
“Go to Italy,” he said.
May you like
The wound in his shoulder had soaked his shirt dark. He did not seem to notice it.
“Start over. It’s the only way I can keep you safe.”
