“Kill him!” Julian screamed, lunging backward into the darkness.
The warehouse exploded into gunfire.
The two men beside Julian drew their weapons, but Ryan was faster. Two suppressed shots cracked through the gloom, and both men dropped like stones, their blood pooling on the concrete floor.
I sprinted forward, my boots splashing through puddles of dirty water. Julian was scrambling toward a metal staircase that led to the upper catwalks. He turned, firing wildly behind him. A bullet grazed my shoulder, tearing through the fabric of my coat and leaving a hot, searing line of pain across my skin.
I didn’t even flinch. The adrenaline was a numbing tide.
I fired twice. The first bullet caught Julian in the thigh. He screamed, his leg buckling beneath him, and he tumbled down the iron stairs, crashing heavily onto the concrete floor.
I walked up to him slowly, the barrel of my gun pointed directly at his forehead. He lay there, gasping for air, clutching his bleeding leg, his white coat stained with grease and his own blood.
“Wait… Jack, wait!” he wheezed, his eyes wide with a sudden, pathetic terror as he looked up at the barrel of my gun. “We’re brothers. Same blood. You can’t just execute me in cold blood. The council—”
“The council doesn’t know you’re here,” I said, looking down at him with no more emotion than a man looking at a cockroach. “And as for our blood? You drained whatever love I had for you a long time ago.”
“Please,” he whispered, his hands shaking as he held them up. “I’ll leave. I’ll go to Europe. You’ll never see me again. Think about your kid, Jack! You want to be a murderer the day your child is born?”
I stared at him for a long, agonizing moment. The silence in the warehouse stretched until the sound of the rain outside seemed to deafen us both.
“My kid,” I said softly, “is the reason you can’t breathe the same air as us anymore.”
Pop.
The sound was small. Decisive.
Julian’s eyes went wide, then blank. He slumped back against the bottom step, the manic energy finally leaving his body.
I stood over him for a minute, waiting for the feeling of triumph, or guilt, or relief. Nothing came. Only the cold reality of what I had to do next.
“Clean it up,” I told Ryan, who appeared at my side, his gun already tucked away. “Burn the whole place down. Leave nothing but ash.”
Part 5: The Sunrise
The sky over Manhattan was turning a soft, bruised purple when I walked back into Room 347. The rain had finally stopped, leaving the city streets gleaming like wet slate below.
I had changed my shirt in the car, but I still smelled faintly of cordite and rain. I washed my hands three times in the hospital bathroom, scrubbing until the skin was raw, terrified that the taint of the night would somehow touch her if I didn’t.
When I stepped back into the room, Hannah was awake.
She was propped up on the pillows, a tray of broth sitting untouched beside her. Her color looked slightly better, a faint hint of pink returning to her cheeks. When the door clicked open, she flinched, but when she saw it was me, her whole body visibly relaxed.
“Jack,” she whispered.
I walked over and sat down in the chair, suddenly feeling all ninety-three days of exhaustion catching up to me in a single, crushing wave. I leaned my head against the edge of her mattress.
“It’s over,” I said, my voice barely audible. “Julian won’t ever trouble you again. He’s gone, Hannah. For good.”
She didn’t ask how. She knew who I was; she had always known the darkness that lived inside me, even when she tried so hard to pull me into the light.
Instead, she reached out and ran her fingers through my hair, her touch incredibly soft, incredibly warm. “You look terrible,” she said, a tiny, fragile smile appearing on her lips.
“I’ve had a long night,” I murmured, closing my eyes, letting the rhythm of her heartbeat on the monitor soothe the lingering fire in my veins.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Jack?” she asked softly, her voice trembling slightly. “When you signed those papers… why didn’t you just tell me the truth? Did you really think I was so weak that I couldn’t handle the danger?”
I opened my eyes and looked at her. “I didn’t think you were weak, Hannah. I knew I was weak. Every time I looked at you, I knew that if anyone ever used you to get to me, I would burn the city down to save you. And look what happened. I tried to push you away, and I almost caused the very thing I was terrified of.”
I placed my hand over her stomach again. This time, she placed her hand over mine, locking our fingers together over the tiny life growing between us.
“Sixteen weeks,” I said, looking into her eyes. “You hid it well.”
“I was angry,” she admitted, a tear escaping and slipping down her cheek. “I wanted to hate you. I wanted to raise this baby far away from New York, far away from the docks and the guns and the Callahan name. But then Julian’s men found me at my apartment in Queens. I realized… I couldn’t outrun your world alone.”
“You’re not alone anymore,” I said, leaning up to press my lips gently against hers. It was a brief, desperate taste of the life I had thrown away, and it felt like coming home after a lifetime in the desert. “We’re leaving Tribeca. We’re leaving the city. Marcus is taking over the operations. I’m out, Hannah. I’m selling my shares, transferring the titles. I’m done with the shadow play.”
She stared at me, searching my face for any sign of a lie. “Can you really leave it all behind, Jack? The power? The empire?”
I looked out the window as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon, painting the glass towers of Manhattan in brilliant gold and amber. The city looked beautiful from up here, but it was a beauty built on graves.
I turned back to the woman I loved, and the child I hadn’t even known I was waiting for.
“The only empire I care about,” I said, kissing her knuckles, “is sitting in this room.”
