CASSIAN

It was the only part of him that was still working properly. For one tiny split second, something bright flashed behind his pupil, a small, quick spark like a match being struck inside a house with all the windows blown out.

"Julian—" I choked out.

The name came out of my throat completely ruined. It was too loud, too raw, my voice cracking in a way it had never done in front of another living person since I was a child.

Julian tried to move toward me. He lurched his shoulders forward, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate, his boots just shuffling an inch through the dust before his head dropped down toward his chest from the sheer effort of trying to stand.

I threw myself against the men holding my arms, pulling with everything I had left in my back and legs.

I strained against five pairs of heavy hands, the leather of my jacket tearing as I tried to rip my wrists free.

"Get your fucking hands off me!" I screamed, my vision turning red at the edges. "Julian! Look at me! Just look at me, Julian!"

Emilio watched me struggle, his eyes crinkling at the corners with the pleased expression of a man who had paid a fortune for front-row theater tickets and was thoroughly enjoying the performance on stage.

"He’s been very quiet," Emilio said, his voice muffled by the bandages around his mouth. He spoke conversationally, as if we were discussing the weather over coffee. "Mostly, anyway."

He let out a wet, whistling chuckle that rattled against his wired teeth. "Had to teach him the consequences of provoking men he doesn’t have the sense to understand."

I stopped fighting for one second and looked straight at his wrapped face. "I am going to kill you," I said. I didn’t shout it. There was no heat in my voice, no anger, no performance for the men in the room.

It was the flattest, most honest thing I had ever spoken in my life, a simple statement of fact that I intended to carry out if I had to crawl through fire to do it.

Emilio didn’t even flinch. He just smiled under his linen wraps, which meant he still hadn’t understood the kind of animal he had trapped inside his house.

Before he could answer, the heavy door at the back of the room creaked open.

Don Aldo Vincenti walked into the light. He didn’t look at me, and he didn’t look at Julian; the first thing he did was pull back the sleeve of his heavy overcoat to check his watch.

He had the sharp, impatient energy of a businessman who had a dozen more important appointments on his calendar and was only tolerating this stop because it was on his way to the highway.

"Your sister’s wedding," Aldo muttered to the room, though no one had asked him. "We have to be back at the estate before the reception starts."

He finally looked down at me where I was pinned to the concrete floor. His assessment was brief, his gray eyes moving over my torn clothes and the blood on my face with an expression that looked almost bored.

"You hit the wrong family, boy," the old man said, and he let out a dry, rattling chuckle that sounded like stones rolling around in a tin can.

"You really did." He turned his back on me, already walking back toward the exit before his boots had even dried. "Wrap it up, Emilio. We’re losing the light."

"Right behind you, Papa," Emilio said.

He lowered himself into a crouch right in front of me, bringing his face down until our eyes were perfectly level.

Up close, the smell of his medical ointment was thick and sour, and the smugness in his stare was wider than he probably intended it to be.

But underneath that satisfaction, I could see something else... a pathetic, desperate need to make sure I knew that I had lost, that he had taken everything from me and there was nothing I could do to balance the ledger.

"It’s a shame we have to wrap things up so soon," Emilio whispered, his voice dropping so the men by the door wouldn’t hear.

"Julian’s very..."

He stopped, picking the next word with a slow, deliberate cruelty that made my stomach turn over. "...vocal. When he finally decides to stop being stubborn."

What that sentence did to the inside of my chest cannot be written down in any language spoken by men.

It felt like someone had reached through my ribs, gripped my heart with a pair of rusty pliers, and twisted until the muscle tore away from the bone.

I stopped pulling against the hands on my shoulders. I didn’t stop because I had given up or because I was afraid of what they would do next; I stopped because the rage inside me had gone past the point of noise.

It dropped down into a dark, freezing place below movement, below sound, into a cold emptiness that had no temperature at all.

Emilio stood up, reaching down to pick up a black automatic pistol from the folding table behind him.

He did it casually, the way a man reaches for a glass of water at dinner. Then he walked over to the metal chair.

He reached out with his left hand, caught a fistful of Julian’s dark, bloody hair, and yanked his head back with a sharp jerk.

Julian’s face was forced straight up toward the construction lights. His split lip was bleeding again, a fresh drop of red sliding down his chin, but his one good eye was still searching the room.

It found me again. Even with his head pulled back, he kept his gaze locked onto mine, refusing to look at the metal in Emilio’s hand.

The barrel of the gun was pressed right against the soft skin of his neck.

"Don’t," I said. "Please...I beg of you."

The word came out of my mouth without any armor, completely naked and small. I didn’t have any threats left to make, no cards to play, nothing to protect myself with.

"Emilio. Don’t do this. I’m asking you. I’m begging you, please. Let him go. Do whatever you want to me. Put me in the dirt, cut me into pieces, I don’t care. Just let him walk out of this yard."

Emilio looked over his shoulder at his father, his eyes wide with a mock surprise. "Look at this, Papa. The big man is begging."

Don Aldo didn’t even turn his head. He was already at the heavy iron door, his hand resting on the latch as he checked his watch for the third time.

Julian’s eyes never left mine. His mouth moved, his split lips stretching painfully as he tried to form the sounds, but almost nothing came out against the noise of the trucks outside.

Then, in a tiny, ruined whisper that was barely audible above the hum of the lamps, he spoke.

"I’m sorry," he breathed. I heard it perfectly, every syllable cutting straight through the distance between us. "For all of it, Cassian. I’m sorry I—"

"Shut up," I choked out, my voice breaking completely on the words. "Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say sorry to me, Julian. Look at me. Just keep looking at me."

Emilio let out a fake sigh, shaking his head as he adjusted his grip on the gun.

"Touching," he said, his voice flatting out as he pulled the hammer back. "Genuinely touching. But you cost me a good amount of my time, Cassian. My jaw, my hands, my nose, my reputation with the captains. Every single thing you broke has an invoice attached to it, and I’m here to collect the first installment."

He shrugged his shoulders, the motion easy and unbothered. "Seems fair to me."

Bang.

The gunshot didn’t announce Itself. There was no warning, no dramatic pause in the room; the sound was simply there, a deafening crack that shattered the quiet of the warehouse and left my ears ringing with a high, silver whistle.

And then Julian’s body was simply on the ground.

The bullet hadn’t been instant. That was the worst part of it. It was the choice Emilio had made when he aimed the barrel, wanting it to go through the side of the neck so it would take its time, and he knew exactly what that looked like when he pulled the trigger.

The blood came fast. It spread across the gray concrete in a wide, dark river, the white tile of the floorboards doing what stone always does, holding the red liquid indifferently, letting it pool around his shoulders without absorbing a drop.

Julian’s eyes were still open. They were wide, perfectly still, staring straight across the dirty floor as they remained on me through the glare of the lights.

The distance between us felt unbearable, astronomical, a thousand miles of cold concrete that I couldn’t crawl across no matter how hard I pulled against the hands on my back.

Emilio started to laugh. He turned toward his father, who was already out the door and stepping into the gravel yard, and his wet, rattling laughter filled the empty corners of the room until there was nothing else left to hear.