Page 108 of Ruthless Daddy
The round went past my left ear so close that I felt the heat of it on my cheek and the wall beside my head took a punch of stone dust that came back into my eye. My ear went white. The world tipped sideways.
He had me still by the arm.
I drove the elbow back again, lower this time, into his sternum, and this time he let go.
I went down the rest of the stairs.
Not gracefully. The first three steps I took on my feet, and then my socks lost the stone and I went the last six on my hip and shoulder, and I hit the floor of the cellar at the bottom in a tangle that was bruising and bad but that was also faster than walking and away from him.
I rolled. I came up on hands and knees.
The cellar was dim. There was a single window high in the wall that gave a weak grey light, and there was a passage at the far end of the room that opened into deeper dark, and there was—yes—a flight of three steps at that far end going up to a door, and the door had a strip of brilliant blue daylight under it.
Enzo was at the bottom of the stairs.
He had caught the wall with his free hand and saved himself, and the gun was up again and the gun was on me, and his face was wild now, the mask gone all the way off.
“Do not move.”
I did not move.
The flame at the base of my sternum had gone very small and very steady. Wendell sat beside it. Pietro sat beside Wendell.
There were only three meters between us. He would not miss at three meters. There was no chance.
Above us, through the stone of the ceiling, very faint, the sound of a door coming off its hinges, and feet, many feet, coming down the corridor I had just been walked along.
Enzo heard it too.
His eyes flicked, fast, to the ceiling, and back to me. The pistol stayed up. His chest was working hard. The wine and the years and the elbow to the sternum were doing something to his breathing he had not budgeted for.
“Get up,” he said. “Slowly. We are leaving.”
I got up.
Slowly.
Three meters. The passage behind me. The cellar window above. The door at the far end with the blue light under it. The pistol in his hand and the tremor back in his other hand and the footsteps in the ceiling now almost over our heads, almost at the small door at the top of the stone stairs, almost—
The door at the top of the stairs came off its hinges. It came down in one piece.
It did not splinter. It did not crack along its long edge. The hinges had been old iron set in old stone, and the men on the other side had not bothered with finesse. The whole door pivoted off the jamb in one heavy slab of wood and came down the stone stairs end over end and hit the cellar floor flat, raising a slap of dust that hung in the grey light.
At the top of the stairs, a man stood in the empty frame.
I knew him before I could discern any of his features. I knew him by the way he held his weight. I knew him by the way his head was tilted a quarter inch. I knew him by the absence of all hurry in a man who had cleared a corridor at a run and had stopped at a doorway because the next move was a thing he wanted to do correctly.
Pietro.
He came down the first two steps.
He came carefully. He did not call my name. He did not shout. He did not lower his weapon, which he had up and braced in both hands. The barrel was on Enzo, and the barrel did not waver.
Enzo had turned a quarter into the wall, putting me between him and the stairs.
The pistol that had been on me went off me by the breadth of a thumb. The barrel hooked behind my ear now, and his free arm came across my chest the way it had in the corridor upstairs, and his fingers closed on my opposite shoulder so hard I felt the bone of my collarbone register the grip.
“Sicilian,” Enzo said.
