CHAPTER 1
DARIO
Underwater. Pressure from above. Thick, gravity-defying space.
A constant beep, distorted by miles of dense space. A beacon just above the aural threshold. Louder as the pain finds its way into my consciousness. And louder with the growing pulse of agony.
I’ve been here before. The pain will push me back under water.
There’s a lost thing. I have to know.
I locate the pain. My head. The soft flesh of my right side. My heart.
For the hundredth time, I reconstruct the last events as if I’ve never done it before.
The Colonia have led me into a parking garage under one of my buildings uptown. Sergio Agosti—the man Sarah was supposed to marry before I took her—is taunting me. He’s not even Colonia, but he he’s weaseled his way in.
He’s the dangerous one. It was never Peter Colonia. Never Massimo.
It was always Sergio Agosti.
And it was always Sarah. My wife. At the peak of my priorities—she dances like an angel on the head of a pin.
Every time I make a mistake, I know it’s the last time. And it is.
It’s the last time I make that mistake, but like whores turned out while they’re still virgins, new ways to fuck everything constantly present themselves, legs spread with cunts that smell like a fresh breeze off a rose garden.
Did I make a mistake with Sarah?
I called security away from the house to fight a war over my brother as he froze to death in the back of a truck, hallucinating a song about Junktown. Leaving her with only Benny, I would trade myself for Nico, trusting I had time to negotiate while he warmed up.
Stupid. I killed Peter Colonia.
Was there ever a trade to be had?
Massimo isn’t in the underground garage. Why?
Sergio Agosti isn’t one of them, but he has a stake in their cause. I should burn in hell for being this fucking stupid. I took my eyes off her. I saw my brother in pain and forgot that I couldn’t trade my life for anyone’s. She’s dead without me. She’s hollowed and sold.
Let him go. Memory-me sounds so sure of himself. Take me instead.
Put down the guns. All of them.
Nico for all the guns.
I lay down mine. I can kill Sergio after I save my brother
There was never enough luck, time, or speed to save Nico’s life.
The second after Sergio’s demand, the Junktown song stops. My sense of proportion gets sucked into the vacuum where my brother’s voice had been.
I take my eyes off Sergio and put them on Nico—hunched in the corner of the truck. Some fucker stands over him and says, “He finally bit it,” and pushes him over with his foot. My brother lies still with skin the color of new snow. Michelangelo never sculpted anything so perfect.
Mistakes never arrive alone. They always come to the party with Miscalculation on one arm and Hope on the other.
The back of the freezer truck is slapped closed, my brother’s body still inside. It sounds like a gunshot, and that’s enough.
My men never disarmed. Connor wouldn’t surrender his revenge for Jesus Christ himself, much less one mortal man, so the song of cracking guns and whizzing bullets starts immediately. His first shot sends a man reeling back. The rest is a blur of pops and shouts.
I regain my gun. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. I hit some, but Luck is fashionably late to the party while Mistakes are dancing on the bar.
When pulling the trigger gets me click-click-click, I drop it and stand, scanning the chaos for a weapon whose use has outlived its owner’s.
Connor falls like a sack of shit. I choose to have a feeling about it later and go for his Glock.
I feel an intense pressure on the back of my head. The world is suddenly on a rocking sea. I keep conscious, but whatever hit me once hits me harder the second time with more sound than pain.
This battle slips through my fingers and the war along with it.
Sarah. The house.
She’ll be fine.
When I fall—and I will—she’ll be on her own.
The world spins like a blender. A crack in my skull.
She’ll be all right. So says Hope on the left arm of my mistake.
From the other arm, Miscalculation shrugs.
Gunshots have turned into a constant, droning beep. The spinning stops. I open my eyes.
The ceiling bulb glows behind a cage and gets farther and farther away, until it’s the size of a single star in a sky that keeps getting wider and blacker until it’s as big as the head of a pin that not a single angel dances upon.
I’m awake now.
Pain isn’t keeping me conscious, nor is the constant beeping.
It’s not knowing.
And Sarah?
And which of my men made it out?
Is Sarah all right?
When am I?
And where?
People in the room. Shuffling. Talking. Man and woman. The beeping, of course. The echo is hard and hollow. A room of solid walls. No sound from outside means no windows. Sealed door.
My eyelids resist opening all the way, showing only a horizontal blur of light crossed by lashes. Then the light is dimmed when something blocks the bulb.
“You were right, Clara.” A man’s voice. Close to my face. Older. Sixties. Stale stink of coffee on his breath. “The pain woke him.”
Sarah.
As loudly as my mind shouts, no sound comes out of me.
“Thank you, doctor.” The woman’s voice is one I recognize from another hard-walled room—a park toilet. Aunt Clara. “I’ve started the Pavulon. Should we cut the morphine drip?”
Her words aren’t keeping the scream alive.
It’s knowing.
I am trapped with the Colonia.
Nico is dead.
Sarah is in danger, and I cannot help her.
Sarah. Is she…?
“Yes. I don’t want to waste any more on him.” The light comes back when he stands away. “If I had my way, I’d just let him get sepsis.”
And why doesn’t he? Why bother healing a man they’re probably going to kill?
Sarah.
The inability to speak is a blessing. Until I know where I am and what they want, her name should not pass my lips. They’ll use my love as a weapon against her.
My vision clears. The light above me is the same bulb in the same cage. The beeping is some kind of monitor. It speeds up as I grapple for consciousness.
“I think he’s coming around, doctor.”
“Hm,” he says decisively. “I know he’s awake because he stopped bellyaching.”
“Should I fetch—?”
“You can go.” With a squeak of metal on concrete, his voice moves to my side. “Close the door behind you.”
I can’t move. Can’t turn my head or wiggle my toes.
Like a good Colonia woman, Aunt Clara doesn’t question him. She’s the kind of woman I thought I wanted. Her feet shuffle past the foot of my bed. The door closes. The doctor sits at the left of the bed. I can feel the angle and smell his breath… but I can’t turn my head to look at him.
“We started a Pavulon drip with the morphine. It’s a paralytic. For surgery. So you don’t move or twitch when a doctor cuts you open and rearranges you. And the government uses it when they send murderers into the dark night. Can’t say I’d be that gentle.”