Jade nodded and flexed her fingers, rolling the gun between her palms like she was warming up a pipette or a stress ball. There was a little pride there, and more than a little shame at the pride, which was so her I had to fight the urge to take her face in my hands and kiss it out of her system.
She set the gun down on the bench, barrel pointed judiciously away from both of us, and folded her arms over her knees. Her eyes clung for a while to the battered rental car out in the dirty snow, inscrutable and somehow noble in its anonymity.
“I keep thinking about the gala. The first one,” she said, voice soft and just a hair above the static hum of the range’s ancient vent fan. “I didn’t know it then, but that was the only day I was ever just...me. Before the Moretti thing, before the lab, before you. It’s like that night was the last time I wasn’t part of someone else’s story.”
I twisted to face her fully, my own hands slack over my knees. “You’re not ‘part’ of anything,” I said. “You’re the story now. From here on, everything else is orbit.”
She looked at me sidelong, skeptical and flattered both. “You have a way of saying shit that would make a Hallmark exec weep.”
“Only comes out around you,” I said, and let it be a joke. But I meant it more than I could say, so I grabbed her shoulder andsqueezed. She leaned her head into my hand, just for a second, and for a second I felt the world settle.
We cleaned up in the range’s icy bathroom—she made a disgusted face at the flaking soap dispenser and wiped her hands on the inside of her sweatshirt—and by the time we got back to the car, she was quiet again, riding shotgun with her newly clumsy hands folded in her lap. I drove us in a wide loop through backroads and strip malls, half to clear our heads and half to be sure no one was following.
She didn’t speak until we hit the turnaround for the water access and the sky flashed open: sudden cobalt, river ice spattered with sunlight, a sweep of wild geese arrowing the far bank.
“I thought I’d feel worse about it,” she said, almost to herself. “But I don’t.”
“You did good,” I told her.
“That’s not why I don’t feel worse.” She looked out on the water, letting the cold inside through the half-cracked window. “I keep waiting for the old version of myself to show up—the one who would throw up or make a speech or start a spreadsheet about the ethics. But she’s not here.”
“You’re adapting,” I said.
She glared at me with this scientist-chastising-a-student stare. “Don’t call it that. It’s not adaptation. It’s—” She shook her head, lost for words.
“Survival.”
She closed her eyes. “I keep thinking about the baby. Like, what kind of world am I bringing him into, if this is just normal now?”
“That’s not how it ends,” I said, and if I sounded more sure than I felt, maybe that was enough.
She wanted to believe me. I could tell by how she leaned just a little into each of my words, like catching drafts under a falling body. “Dante?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“If something happens to you,” she said softly. “I think I’m going to have to kill Caruso myself.”
She said it, and the cold wind off the river made the honesty of it sharper than any threat. I watched her profile in the glass, ducked against the chill, and saw that she was dead serious. Maybe more serious than I’d ever been.
“You’re going to be a fucking force,” I said, and it wasn’t a compliment—it was a prophecy.
She smiled, the tiniest purse at the edge of her mouth, and I knew that if push ever came to shove, she’d do it. Maybe not for herself, but for the tiny heartbeat we’d conjured into the world.
And that made me love her so much more. But it made one thing even more clear: I had to protect her at all costs.
Chapter 7: Jade
Ineeded a plan. Beyond just “learn to shoot and hope it goes well”.
The trick to surviving was simple: memorize the rules, then break them, one at a time, until they bent to you. That’s what I’d learned as a kid—school, home, even the sterile world of research. Nobody warned you that chaos was the baseline. Perfection? Just a story you told yourself to keep from drowning.
It wasn’t some revelation, but lying on the cheap foam mattress in the Airbnb, listening to Marco snore and Dante breathe steady and quiet, I realized I’d been trying to force this fugitive life into the shape of something normal. Like if I kept the kitchen clean, or made enough checklists, or arranged my prenatal vitamins in alphabetical order, I could pretend the old version of me was coming back. Reconstituted, DNA and all. Just with better stories.
Now the university labs were gone, and I had a safe house on an iced-over lake. The only thing left was to engineer a new set of rules and enforce them like my life depended on it. Because it did.
First order of business: stop being the girl who let her boyfriend and his stitched-up brother make all the plans. I needed intel. Not just how to load a gun or mask my digital trail, but how to think like someone who expected to survive. I needed to know Dante’s world—the signals, the codes, the Mob’s invisible gravity.
But before any of that, I had to call my family.
