The Phantom and the Viper

No Clean Way Out

Dante had been in enough gunfights to know the sound of a man who was good at his job, and whoever was up in that choir loft was good.

Three shots. All close. All aimed like the shooter had already walked this room in his head before he ever pulled the trigger. That was not luck. That was planning, and Dante did not like what it meant that someone had planned for both of them to be standing in this exact spot tonight.

He kept his body between Sienna and the loft, one hand still locked around her wrist, and he did not let himself think too hard about how right that felt, her pulse jumping under his fingers, five years gone like they had never happened. There would be time to hate himself for that later. Right now there was a shooter reloading above them and exactly two ways out of this cathedral that he could see.

"Side door," he said. "Behind the confessionals. On three."

"I don't take orders from you."

"Then take a bullet instead."

She didn't answer that, which from her was as close to agreement as he was going to get.

They moved together low behind the pews, and it should have felt strange, running through gunfire with a woman his own father had ordered him to kill on sight if he ever saw her again. It did not feel strange. It felt like the five years in between had been the strange part, and this, ducking behind a pew with Sienna Korolev breathing hard next to him, was the only thing that had ever made sense.

A fourth shot cracked into the pew above his head, close enough that splinters caught in his hair. Dante pulled Sienna lower without thinking, one arm across her shoulders, and felt her go tense at the contact before she let herself stay there anyway.

"He's not trying to hit us," Sienna said. "Not really. Not from that angle."

Dante looked up at the loft for half a second, just long enough to catch the shape of the shooter shifting position, deliberately loud about it, a boot scraping wood where it did not need to.

She was right. That was not the shot of a man trying to end this fast. It was the shot of a man buying time for something else to happen, and Dante had been in this business long enough to know that when someone bought time, it was never for a reason you liked.

"He's herding us," Dante said.

"Toward the side door."

"Toward the side door."

They looked at each other for exactly one second too long.

"I don't like being herded," Sienna said.

"Neither do I. But I like being shot even less, so we're taking the door and figuring out who set the trap after we're not standing in the middle of it."

The side door was locked when they reached it, which told him everything he needed to know about how carefully this had been arranged. Sienna had it open in under ten seconds anyway, working the old lock with a thin piece of metal she pulled from somewhere in her sleeve, hands perfectly steady even with a man still firing down at them from the loft.

"Where did you learn that," Dante said, mostly to keep himself from thinking about the fact that he was still holding her wrist.

"Where did you learn to run a cathedral escape route without flinching."

"Practice."

"Same."

The door opened onto an alley behind the cathedral, narrow and dark and smelling like rain that had not fallen yet. Dante pulled her through it and shut the door behind them, and for one breath, one single breath, there was no gunfire and no shooter and no five years standing between them, just the two of them pressed into a doorway barely wide enough for one person, her back against the stone and his hand still flat against the door like he could hold the whole night shut behind it.

She was close enough that he could feel her breathing slow down, forcing itself steady the way he remembered her doing before, back when she used to hate letting anyone see her rattled. Some habits, apparently, survived being declared dead.

She looked up at him. He looked down at her. Neither of them moved.

"This doesn't mean anything," she said, quiet.

"I didn't say it did."

"You were thinking it."

"I'm always thinking something. Doesn't mean it's true."

Her eyes dropped to his wrist. He knew exactly what she was looking at before she said a word, because he had felt her freeze the second she saw it through whatever window or scope she'd been using to line up her shot before he ruined her night by turning around alive.

"You still have it," she said.

Dante did not pull his sleeve down. There did not seem to be much point in hiding it now.

"Would you believe me if I said I forgot it was even there," he said.

"No."

"Good. Because I'd be lying."

Something moved across her face, gone before he could read it properly, and he almost asked her the question that had been sitting under his ribs for five years, the one about why she let him believe she was dead, the one about whether any part of what they had been to each other survived whatever happened after that night. He almost asked. And then a car engine turned over somewhere at the mouth of the alley, headlights sweeping across the wet stone, and every soft thing in her face closed shut like a door.

"That's not backup," she said.

"No. It isn't."

Two men stepped out of the car, unhurried, guns already drawn, and Dante recognized the jacket on the taller one immediately. Valenti colors. His own family's men, sent to finish a job someone had given them, and judging by the way both men's eyes went straight past him to Sienna, the job was not about protecting him at all.

He knew both their faces. Rossi and Marchetti, men who had eaten at his father's table more times than Dante could count, men who had once taught him how to strip a pistol down and put it back together blind. That was the part that turned his stomach. Not that they had come. That it felt like nothing to them at all.

"Dante," the taller one, Rossi, said, almost gentle about it. "Step away from her. Your father's orders."

Dante did not move. Every instinct he'd spent five years sharpening told him to obey, the way he'd obeyed every order his father ever gave him without asking what it cost. He did not move anyway.

"Funny thing about my father's orders," he said. "The last time I trusted one blindly, it cost me the only person who ever mattered. Not the way you'd think. Somebody made sure of that, somebody who wanted me broken and never bothered explaining why. I'm not making that mistake twice, not for a man in a jacket I used to trust with my life."

The taller man's mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile.

"Wasn't a request," he said, and raised the gun.