Chapter 3: When The Mission Goes Wrong
1448 Words
Rome smelled like rain and old stone.
Lucia had forgotten that.
She'd forgotten a lot of things about this city — the way sound bounced off narrow streets, the way streetlights turned wet cobblestones gold, the way it looked almost gentle at night, like a city that had never done anything wrong.
She pressed her cheek to the rifle stock and slowed her breathing.
Target: Ciro Bianchi. Marchetti soldier. His records connected three child trafficking routes directly to the family's upper command. Viktor's intelligence said he walked Via Margutta every Thursday at ten-fifteen. Alone. On his way back from a card game he'd been winning at for six years.
Men with comfortable routines never saw it coming.
Ten-twelve.
She waited.
Ten-fourteen, Ciro turned the corner.
Heavyset. Unhurried. A man who'd spent years being feared enough that caution felt unnecessary.
Lucia tracked him through the scope. She measured the distance, the wind coming off the street to her left, the way he leaned slightly on his right leg when he walked.
Evidence of an old injury. He'd drop left.
Her finger moved to the trigger.
The restaurant door flew open.
A child shot out of it — six years old, maybe, dark curls bouncing, red coat, one shoe already half off her foot. She hit the street running with her arms pumping and her face wide open with the kind of joy that only exists when you're small and fast and nobody's caught you yet.
She ran straight into Lucia's line of fire.
And stopped.
Looked up at Ciro towering above her.
Then looked down at something on the ground — a bottle cap — and dropped to her knees to pick it up, completely forgetting the large man in front of her, completely forgetting everything, the way children did.
Lucia's finger stayed on the trigger.
Move, she thought. Just take one step. Left, right, anywhere. Please.
The girl turned the bottle cap over in her small fingers.
Ciro's body language changed. His eyes moved up to the buildings around him, then along the street, then back down. A child stopping in front of him out of nowhere — that was the kind of thing that made a man like him nervous. A man like him didn't like anything he hadn't planned for. His hand drifted slowly toward his jacket.
If he ran, she lost him.
‘Move. Girl move!.’ she screamed inwardly.
The girl looked up.
The streetlight caught her face.
Wide eyes. Small jaw. That expression — open, unafraid, curious about everything — the expression of a child who had no idea yet that the world could be cruel.
Lucia had worn that face once.
She knew the exact moment she'd stopped wearing it.
Twelve years old. A sewer. Three days in the dark.
Her finger came off the trigger.
She was off the rooftop before she'd finished thinking.
Fire escape, three floors, alley, street. Her body moving the way it had been drilled to move, fast and quiet and certain, even while something in her chest was pulling in a direction that had nothing to do with the mission.
She stepped into the street with her hands loose at her sides.
"Hey… sorry." She made her voice light, breathless, a tourist who'd taken a wrong turn. "Is this Via Margutta? My phone keeps…"
Ciro's eyes snapped to her.
The girl looked up at the new person with fresh interest.
In the half-second that his attention moved, Lucia closed the distance, wrapped her hand around the child's arm, and stepped between them.
She watched his face change.
Watched the tourist story die in his eyes the moment he looked at her properly and saw someone who wasn't lost at all. His jaw tightened. His hand came up.
She had just enough time to turn her body sideways.
The bullet went into her left side, just below the ribs.
The impact slammed her into the wall.
Her shoulder hit stone and she used it, pushed off, one hand clamped to her side, the other still holding the girl's arm and she moved. Into the alley. Half-running. The child stumbling alongside her, too shocked to cry yet.
Behind her, Ciro's voice cracked open the quiet street — sharp, urgent, calling for backup.
She reached the end of the alley. A wider street. People further down, walking, oblivious.
She stopped.
Let go of the child's arm.
Got down to her level, her side punishing her for the angle, she looked at the girl's face.
The child stared back at her. Eyes so wide they took up half her face. Lower lip starting to tremble now, the shock wearing off, the tears getting ready.
"Hey." Lucia kept her voice soft. "Look at me."
The girl looked at her.
"The restaurant you came from. Can you find it?"
A small nod.
"Then go." Lucia straightened. Too fast — the street tilted slightly. "Run straight back. Don't stop for anything."
The girl looked at Lucia's hand pressed against her side.
Looked at the dark red seeping between her fingers.
Her mouth opened.
"Go." Lucia said it firmly. "Right now, sweetheart. Go."
The red coat disappeared around the corner.
Lucia turned and walked the other way.
Not running.
Every step she ran, she'd pay for in blood.
Four blocks.
She counted them.
When her legs stopped working properly she found a narrow alley — dark, quiet, smelling of rain and old stone — and sat down against the wall because there was no longer a conversation to be had with her body about it.
She pulled her hand away from her side.
Blood. More than she wanted to see. Dark and steady and completely indifferent to how inconvenient this was.
She pressed her hand back hard.
Breathe, she told herself. Viktor's voice in her head, clipped and cold, the voice he used during training when she wanted to quit. ‘You've had worse. Breathe and think.’
She wasn't sure she'd had worse.
She breathed anyway.
Somewhere behind her — boots on wet cobblestones. The crackle of a radio. Two voices, maybe three, moving through the streets in the specific unhurried way of men who'd found a trail and knew their target was running out of road.
Marchetti soldiers.
Ciro hadn't wasted a second.
Get up, she told herself.
Her legs didn't move.
She sat in the dark in Rome — the city she'd crawled out of at twelve years old, the city she'd come back to with fifteen years of rage and training and one photograph in her jacket pocket — and she looked at the blood on the cobblestones between her knees and felt something she hadn't felt in a very long time.
Scared.
Not of dying. She'd made her peace with dying years ago.
Scared of dying before it was finished.
Scared of her parents waiting fifteen years for nothing.
Her mother's voice came, the way it only ever came when Lucia was too exhausted to keep it out.
‘You're meant for more than this.’
"I know." Her voice scraped out of her throat, barely a sound. "I know, Mama. That's why I can't die here."
The boots were closer now.
One street over, maybe less. A soldier said something low to another and the footsteps picked up pace — they'd found something. The trail she was leaving on the stones behind her.
She looked down the alley.
Warm light at the far end. Old stone walls. A cross on the roofline, small against the dark sky.
A church.
She started moving.
Hands on the ground first. Then knees. Then — slow, humiliating, completely beside the point — one palm flat against the wall and upright.
Every step cost her something.
She paid it.
Behind her, one of the soldiers' voices sharpened — louder, certain now, pointing something out to the others.
They'd found the blood on the cobblestones.
She didn't look back.
Twenty meters. Ten.
The church door was old wood with an iron handle, heavy and solid, the kind of door that had been opened by desperate people for five hundred years and had never once turned anyone away.
Her hand closed around the handle.
She stood there for a moment with her forehead pressed against the cold wood and her eyes shut and her hand bleeding against the iron and her whole body shaking with the effort of still being upright.
I can't die yet.
The words came out of her like a confession. Like something she was saying to God, to her mother, to the twelve-year-old girl who'd made a promise in the dark.
Not before I finish this.
She pushed the door open.
And went inside.
- Writer
