“Hey, you’ll be okay.”
I looked into his eyes. “Not if anything happens to you.”
“Oh, beautiful,” he replied. “Nothing is going to happen to me.”
“Are you sure? If you are, then why are you handing me this?”
“Just in case,” he said, pressing it into my palm. I hated the feel of it, greasy with oil and implication. “Finger off the trigger, aim low if you have to use it. Scream first.”
“So, to be clear, you’re just giving me a gun now?”
He put his hands on my shoulders. “There’s nothing just about this. Nothing. But you’re alive, and you’re carrying my child. I need you to stay alive and continue carrying my child. Got it?”
The urgency of his words splintered whatever was left of my resistance. I nodded, letting the gun settle into the side pocket of my coat, all too aware of its weight swinging alongside the awkward gravitational pull of the baby pressed against my waistband.
The bridge was uglier up close—less a romantic span of escape and more a gauntlet, lined with chain-link fencing and the echo of every news bulletin about body parts fished from the Hudson. Wind clawed through us, howling against the mesh in a way that felt like warning. We walked the pedestrian lane in silence, footsteps syncopated over the seams and cracks, the city behind us shrinking into neon blur.
Halfway across, Dante stopped. He scanned the horizon, his gaze settling on something I couldn’t see. For a moment I thought he was lost in memory, but the burn of his focus was too present, too sharp. Then I heard it—another set of footsteps, deft and soft, from the shadowed alcove behind a construction barrier.
Dante waited, not moving, while the runner ate up the distance between us with sickening speed. He didn’t raise the gun—didn’t need to. When the shape resolved just a dozen meters off, I saw the outline of a heavy denim jacket, the way the runner held his right arm tight against his ribcage.
It was Marco. Bleeding, hunched, eyes burning with adrenaline and something sharper.
“Go,” Dante hissed, barely audible. “Now.”
We ran, more animal than human, toward the Jersey side. Even three-quarters dead, Marco outpaced us, pulling up behind a row of salt trucks idling at the civic yard. His face was white as printer paper, the sleeve of his jacket soaked dark and dripping onto the cement.
Dante ducked in after him, one hand clutching the gun, the other still pulling me along on pure will. I followed, winded and too shocked to cry out, the cold smearing my vision with hard, bright tears. The air inside the utility shed behind the trucks was dense with the smell of diesel, ferrous blood, and the sharper, notorious tang of fear.
“Shit, Marco,” Dante said, voice low but steady. “Where did you get hit?”
Marco half-collapsed, bracing his back against the wall and sliding down to the cinderblock floor. His breath came ragged, but when he peeled up his coat, the wound was visible: a furrowed gouge along his left side, already clotting but still sickeningly red.
“Fuckin’ Caruso,” Marco spat, spitting a fine pink mist onto the floor. “I went to check on Sal. One of his men was there, waiting.”
“You got shot again?” Dante asked. “You’re supposed to be laying low.”
“I know this is a cliché, but you should see the other guy.”
“I’d rather see you in one piece.” Dante’s jaw twitched, every muscle in his face radiating equal parts rage and impotence. And in that moment, for once, he looked as mortal as the rest of us. He rooted around in the duffel for the first aid kit, hands moving with the practiced nonchalance of someone who’d closed a dozen bullet wounds with discount vodka and dental floss.
Marco caught my eye and tried for a smile, but it collapsed halfway through. “Don’t worry, J—” he began, coughing up the rest. The sound was thick. Wet.
I knelt beside him, reclaimed some part of my old clinical precision, and started cutting away the fabric around his wound. “Keep pressure here,” I instructed, pressing his hand to the wound. His fingers trembled, but he managed a grim thumbs-up.
“After I won the fight, Caruso sent two hitters,” Marco explained, voice catching with each shallow inhale. “Thought I could losethem by the dock. Didn’t count on one being a fucking Olympic sprinter.” He grimaced, eyes slitting against the pain as I doused the wound with antiseptic from a red-labeled bottle. The street bloomed with the sharp, cloying stink of alcohol.
“That’s when you got shot?” Dante asked.
“Yeah, even they wouldn’t be stupid enough to shoot in a hospital,” Marco said. “And they’re surprisingly fucking stupid.”
“Nothing about this is surprising,” Dante replied.
“Hold him,” I interrupted Dante, who knelt on the opposite side and pinned Marco’s legs before I even finished the sentence. “I need to stitch this or else he’s going to bleed out before the turnpike.”
Marco’s eyes rolled with a half-lidded bravado. “See, bro? You pick good women. Smart, hands steady, knows her way round the needle. My only complaint,” he wheezed, “is that she hasn’t introduced me to her friends.”
I didn’t have the energy to reply, just threaded the suture and tried, with shaking hands, to ignore the way my palms kept slipping on blood. Dante’s face was unreadable, all gravity, as if by sheer force of will he could draw the wound closed himself.
