The Dangerous Mind

Rain came down in thin silver threads over the parking lot behind Kincaid's, the kind of rain that didn't soak you so much as coat you, slick and cold against my jacket. I'd picked up that jacket from the storage locker on Fifth an hour before, the same locker where I kept the revolver wrapped in a dish towel like it was something I'd baked. The leather still smelled like vanilla, the perfume I used to wear before I stopped wearing anything at all that might make him notice me in a crowd. Old habits. I zipped the jacket to my throat and left the locker door swinging, because I didn't plan on needing it again.

The gun sat in a holster under my ribs, snug against the wire of my bra, cold enough that I could feel it through two layers of fabric. Five years of him, and I'd learned exactly how much a body could carry before it broke clean in half. I wasn't broken tonight. I was just done.

I stood between a delivery van and a concrete pillar with a burnt-out light above it, watching the VIP door glow gold every time somebody pushed through it. Bass thudded low through the brick, a heartbeat that wasn't mine. My hands were shaking. They'd been shaking for months, ever since sleep stopped coming easy, ever since every sound in my own apartment turned into his footsteps. I told myself it was the cold.

Then the door opened and he walked out like he owned the rain too.

Lenell Kincaid in a charcoal suit with the top two buttons undone, a bouncer at his elbow laughing at something that wasn't funny, the kind of laugh men gave him because his money paid for it. He was looking down at his phone, thumb moving fast, some message to some woman who wasn't me, and for one second the whole lot narrowed down to just him and the wet shine on his Italian shoes.

I stepped out from behind the pillar.

My arm came up on its own, the revolver heavier than it had ever felt in the locker, heavier than it had felt in my hand a hundred times in the mirror at three in the morning when I practiced this exact moment. He still hadn't seen me. The bouncer saw me first, his laugh dying somewhere in his throat.

"Lenell," I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle of his name.

He looked up. For half a breath something moved behind those icy gray eyes, something almost like fear, and I wanted that half breath to last forever.

I fired.

The round tore into the wet concrete an inch from his shoe, chips of stone kicking up against his pant leg, and the sound cracked off the brick walls and came back at me twice as loud. My hand had jerked at the last second. Months of no sleep, months of my nerves running on fumes and fear, and my body betrayed me the one time it mattered. I don't know if I meant to miss or if missing meant me.

Lenell staggered back a step, more startled than hurt, and then his face did something I'd seen a hundred times behind closed doors, that particular twist of rage that came right before his hand found my hair or my throat. Except now there were witnesses, and now there was a gun between us instead of his fist.

"Aniyah!" he screamed, and he said my name like it belonged to him, like he was calling a dog that had slipped its leash. "You put that down right now."

His crew came out of the dark fast, three men peeling off the wall by the dumpsters where they always waited, and I heard the metal clatter of guns clearing holsters.

I didn't get a second shot.

Something slammed into me from the side, hard enough to knock the air clean out of my chest, and I went sideways into the wet pavement with a stranger's arm locked around my ribs. Not a stranger. I knew that jaw, that green in his eyes even in the dark, knew it from a block I hadn't lived on in fifteen years.

"Rashad." His name came out of me like a question, like I didn't believe my own mouth.

"Move," he said, and hauled me up by the jacket collar before the first bullet hit the wall behind us.

Brick exploded in a hot spray of dust an inch from my ear. Rashad shoved me into the service alley behind the club, all Dumpster stink and rain gutters overflowing, and we ran with the gunfire chasing us like something alive. I still had five rounds left in the cylinder. I could feel the weight of them even as my boots slipped on wet concrete, even as my lungs burned.

"You following me?" I gasped, because it was easier to be angry than to be grateful, easier to accuse him than to ask why his knuckles were split and bleeding, red smeared dark across his fingers from a fight I hadn't seen happen.

"Ask me later." His voice stayed even, low, like we weren't running for our lives through a rat-infested alley with men shooting at our backs. "Right now you run."

Behind us, past the mouth of the alley, I heard Lenell's voice climbing over the chaos, sharp and furious, carrying the particular cruelty he saved just for me.

"She's MY wife!" he shouted, and even from this distance I could hear the smile curling under the rage, that performance he put on for anybody watching. "Nobody walks away from me breathing, you hear me? Nobody!"

A bullet chewed a chunk out of the brick beside my head, and Rashad's hand closed around my wrist and yanked me left, deeper into the dark where the streetlights didn't reach.

"He's got his cops rolling already," Rashad said, breath ragged but steady, like he'd already run these numbers before tonight ever started. "I heard the call go out on his phone before you even pulled that trigger."

"You knew." The words came out flat, accusing, my boots hitting puddles that soaked through to my socks. "You've been watching this lot."

"Weeks," he admitted, and didn't slow down to explain it, didn't slow down at all, just kept pulling me through the maze of Dumpsters and chain-link toward wherever the hell he thought was safer than here. "Not gonna apologize for it either. Not tonight."

Gunfire cracked again, further back now, swallowed by the wet brick and the distance we were putting between us and the club. My whole body screamed to stop, to catch my breath, to make sense of the man gripping my wrist like he had every right to save me. I didn't stop. Somewhere behind us, Lenell was still shouting my name into the rain like a curse he intended to make good on, and I believed him, because I always had.

Rashad shoved me around a corner into a darker stretch of alley, flattened his back against the brick, and looked at me for the first time since he'd tackled me off my own feet. Rain had plastered his dark hair to his forehead. His eyes, when they found mine, were steadier than mine had any right to be.

"You still got rounds left?" he asked.

"Five," I said.

"Good," he said, and something in his jaw tightened like he was doing math I didn't want the answer to. "Because we're not out of this yet, not even close, and I need to know you can still pull that trigger when it counts."

Somewhere behind us, tires screeched onto wet asphalt, and blue light bled faint across the alley mouth before either of us could move.