Chapter 7 - The Attack and the Arrest
Armed men poured out from behind containers and high catwalks. It was an ambush. But then Enzo said the line that made Silas’s face break. The dog was never the weakness. You were.
Gunfire started a second later. The first burst hit metal hard enough to shower sparks over concrete. Men shouted in two languages. Bodies moved behind crates. My heartbeat became a physical thing banging against Kevlar and bone. Cerberus lunged. I nearly lost him. I followed because letting him disappear into crossfire would have been like losing him twice.
Then I saw what he saw. Silas had circled behind Enzo’s cover. Clean angle. Easy shot. One squeeze and the man who had built his life around control would die with his back turned to the betrayal.
I sent the code to Enzo’s secure line. He read it. Understood. And in the half-second that followed, I gave the command I had prayed I would never need to use. Protect him.
Cerberus launched. There are moments that do not feel real even while they are happening. A hundred pounds of scarred loyalty hit Silas in mid-step and sent his gun skidding across concrete. The man screamed. Cerberus took his arm, not his throat. Held. Pinned. Disabled with surgical fury. It would have been easy for the dog to kill him. He didn’t. Even then, some part of him still obeyed the difference between justice and bloodlust.
Call him off, Silas shrieked. Call him off. Enzo stepped out from behind cover with his weapon trained and his face emptied of every trace of mercy. Behind him, Marco’s team was already overwhelming the remaining shooters. The trap had sprung in both directions. Silas just had not understood soon enough that he was the one inside it.
Then Enzo looked at me. Your dog. Your call. I walked into the open on legs that felt made of somebody else’s courage. Silas saw me and for the first time since I had met him, all the polish vanished. He looked terrified. You remember me now, I said. The girl in Queens. The puppy you stole. The animal you sold into hell. The crime you turned into a ladder. It was business, he gasped.
That sentence did something cold to me. Because men always reached for abstraction when they wanted to bleach the blood off what they had done. Everything is personal, I said. Cerberus released his arm at my command and stood over him anyway, breathing hard, eyes locked. Not a monster. A witness.
Enzo came to stand beside me. Close enough that our shoulders touched. Silas begged. Offered names. Offered money. Offered information that would have bought him another week in another man’s court. Enzo did not blink. You were outsmarted by a waitress and a dog, he said. That’s the only ending you deserve.
When they dragged Silas away in zip ties, I finally started shaking. Not from fear. From the crash after. The body always collects its debt. Is it over, I asked. Enzo turned to me, cupped the back of my head, and kissed me like he had run out of reasons to pretend. There was gunpowder in the air. Blood on concrete. Cerberus still panting beside us. And somehow that kiss felt cleaner than anything else in the room.
May you like
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine. It’s over, he said. You’re safe. He’s safe. And I am so far gone for you it’s beginning to humiliate me. I laughed. Too breathless. Too stunned. That has to be the adrenaline talking. No. That’s eight days of watching you terrify men who usually terrify cities.
Cerberus shoved his nose between us and ruined our dignity completely. I dropped to my knees and wrapped both arms around him. Good boy, I whispered. The best boy. You’re free now.
