Page 26 of You Can Run

Dante didn't realize he'd stepped forward until he was already there. For a second, they just stood facing each other. Then Santiago reached for him.

The embrace was tight and solid. Dante felt it all at once: the years, the distance, the things he'd done to make sure this man got to have a life that didn't look anything like his.

They pulled apart slowly, neither in a hurry to be the first to let go.

Santiago’s hand rested on Dante’s shoulder. “Try to survive.”

“You too.”

Julian's hand fell away and Dante turned and walked back down the path. He didn't look back again.

Jessica sat inside the car, her expression unreadable.

Dante slid into the driver's seat and pulled the door shut. For a moment, he just sat there, hands on the wheel.

Then he started the engine and pulled out of the driveway and soon the house shrank in the rearview mirror.

ELEVEN

Trent pulledhis Dodge Ram into the driveway of the duplex, already thinking about the shower he was going to take and whether Jessica had left anything in the fridge worth eating. His shift had been eight hours of nothing: a fender bender on Route 9, a noise complaint that turned out to be a dog, paperwork that bred more paperwork.

Then he saw the front door.

It wasn't just open. It was shattered, the frame splintered inward where something heavy had met the wood, and the sight of it emptied him out so fast he forgot to put the cruiser in park. The vehicle rolled forward a foot before he caught it, jamming the gearshift with a hand.

“Jessica?” He drew his service weapon. It felt heavy in his hand, but it didn't make him feel brave. He stepped over the threshold, his boots crunching on the remnants of the ceramic lamp Jessica had kept on the entryway table. He moved down the hall, toward the bedroom. The air was thick with the sharp, acrid tang of gunpowder, and beneath it, something else. Blood.

His first thought was the sick feeling of guilt that Jessica was dead somewhere inside.

Then he saw the handprint. The man was slumped against the baseboard near the closet, clutching a shoulder that had been turned into a jagged mess of red. His shirt had ridden up, and there it was—the black hand, fingers splayed wide across his chest.

He knew that tattoo because he'd seen it up close a week ago, in the basement of a gambling den while the man who owned it had made him beg for his life. And pay for his freedom with Jessica's identity.

After that incident, he'd spent the following few days on edge, tensing at every sound outside. Expecting the door to be kicked in at any moment. Then, after nothing had happened, he'd told himself that it must have all blown over.

He'd almost believed it. He'd had a whole week of almost believing it.

The enforcer's eyes flickered open, tracking Trent's movement. He let out a wet, rattling wheeze. “You...”

The word landed like an accusation, because it was one.

Trent's hand shook as he leveled the pistol at the man's head. “Where is she?”

The enforcer tried to laugh, but it turned into a cough that sprayed red onto his chin. “She's gone,Oficial. Your little bird has claws.” He winced, shifting against the wall. “She shot me. And then El Fantasma came.”

She shot him. Jessica—who flinched at fireworks, who once made him clear a spider from the bathroom at two in the morning—had shot a man.

“He took her,” the enforcer whispered, his head lolling back against the wall.

Trent stared at the man, and for a long, sick moment the only thing he felt was the full weight of what he'd done. He could see it all now, the way you could see a car accident after the fact and trace every small decision that fed into it. The gambling.The debt. The men in the back room of the poker den. His own pathetic, animal terror, and the name he'd thrown at them like something to hide behind.

The guilt sat in his chest like nausea, and for about ten seconds, he let it.

Then the rest caught up.

Because she wasn't just gone. She was gone withhim.

Castaño. Dante. Whatever the fuck he was calling himself now. The man whose name Jessica never said quite right, but with the kind of deliberate indifference that only came from something she was still trying not to feel.