Blood on the Canvas

Chapter 10: Crossfire

The second gunshot came almost on top of the first, then a third, a fourth, the sound bouncing off brick and glass until it was impossible to tell which direction any of it was coming from.

"Move!" Aaron grabbed both girls by the arm, dragging them backward, away from the intersection ahead where the street had exploded into chaos — people running in every direction at once, someone screaming, a car alarm shrieking to life somewhere close.

Bianca's ears were ringing, her body moving on pure instinct, Elizabeth's hand locked in hers as they scrambled back the way they'd come. Somewhere behind them, glass shattered — a storefront window, maybe, or a car windshield, she couldn't tell and didn't stop to look. Aaron shoved them both toward the recessed doorway of a shuttered pharmacy, shouting something Bianca couldn't fully process over the pounding of her own heart, his hand a vice around her wrist as he half-dragged, half-carried them both forward.

More shots. Closer this time. Bianca felt the sound of them in her chest more than her ears, a physical pressure that made her whole body flinch on instinct.

"This way—" Aaron was pulling them further down the block, away from the worst of it, when Elizabeth's hand suddenly wrenched out of Bianca's grip.

Bianca turned. Elizabeth was already falling.

There was no slow motion, no cinematic clarity — one second Elizabeth was running beside her, and the next she was down on the pavement, and the sound she made hitting the ground was worse than any of the gunshots had been.

"Elizabeth!"

Aaron was there instantly, on his knees beside his sister, hands already moving to find the wound, his voice cracking apart into something Bianca had never heard from him before — raw, animal, nothing like the steady, protective older brother he'd been all night.

"No, no, no — Liz, look at me, look at me—"

Bianca dropped down on Elizabeth's other side, her hands joining Aaron's against the spreading dark stain on Elizabeth's side, the streetlight overhead throwing everything into the same sickly orange wrongness she would remember for the rest of her life.

"We need to move her," Aaron said, voice shaking, "we need to get her out of the open—"

Between them, they dragged Elizabeth toward the recessed doorway, Aaron's hands never leaving the wound, Bianca gripping Elizabeth's hand so hard she'd later find bruises from her own fingers, and the whole time Elizabeth's eyes stayed open, fixed somewhere between the two of them, her mouth moving without sound.

"Stay with us," Bianca said, her voice breaking. "Stay with us, please, we've got you—"

Somewhere behind them, more shots rang out — further away now, moving off in another direction, chasing some other target down some other street — and Bianca registered it only distantly, a fact happening to someone else's night, because the entire world had narrowed down to the wet, dark warmth under her hands and the fading pressure of Elizabeth's fingers still curled weakly around hers.

---

Half a block away, crouched behind an overturned trash bin with his gun still raised, Fernando's whole body had gone cold.

He hadn't meant to fire. Or he had — he'd fired because six other men were firing, because Marcus's silence in his ear had left him with no plan except survival, because the man who'd briefed them was watching from somewhere close enough to notice hesitation. He'd fired toward a shape moving fast across the intersection, aiming for nothing and no one specific, the way he'd been trained to when everything happened too fast to aim for anything at all.

He didn't know yet whose body had gone down on the other side of that intersection. He only knew, crouched in the dark with his own hands shaking around a gun he'd sworn he was done using, that something in the pitch of the screaming that followed sounded different than the rest — younger, closer, wrong in a way that settled into his stomach like a stone.

Around him, muzzle flashes still lit up the dark in short, ugly bursts, the other men fanned out along the edge of the depot, none of them slowing down long enough to register what they'd hit or who. This was what Marcus had never fully warned him about, not really — not the danger itself, which Fernando already understood better than most, but the specific, sickening indifference of it. Nobody around him was going to stop and check. Nobody was going to ask.

"Fall back," the man in charge was shouting, somewhere to his left. "We're done here, fall back—"

Fernando didn't move at first. Something was pulling his attention back toward the chaos at the intersection — a girl on her knees over another girl's body, a young man beside her, both of them screaming for help that wasn't coming fast enough.

"Fernando! Move!"

He moved. He had to. Every instinct he had left, buried under three months of trying to be someone else, screamed at him to run, and he ran, following the others into the dark maze of alleys behind the depot, leaving the intersection and everything in it behind him.

He didn't look back. He told himself, running, that he couldn't have looked back even if he'd wanted to.

He didn't yet know that some part of him already had.

---

The ambulance took four minutes to arrive, though it felt to Bianca like the entire length of her life had passed in that time. Aaron never stopped talking to Elizabeth, a steady, desperate stream of stay with us and you're okay and I've got you, I've got you, his voice fraying more with every repetition, until the paramedics finally arrived and pulled them both back, hands too slick with blood to let go easily.

The street around them had gone strange and unreal in the aftermath — police lights strobing red and blue against the same brick walls the gunfire had bounced off minutes earlier, bystanders clustered at a careful distance, someone's phone held up recording something Bianca couldn't bring herself to look toward. A police officer tried to ask her questions she couldn't answer, her mouth forming words that came out disconnected from anything she actually felt, her whole body still braced for a threat that had already moved on to some other street, some other lives it hadn't finished ruining yet.

Bianca stood frozen on the sidewalk afterward, staring at her own hands, at the blood already drying under her nails, while Aaron stood beside her in a silence so total it felt like its own kind of scream.

Neither of them said what they were both thinking.

Neither of them needed to.