POV: Aria
I stepped between the gun and Dez before I decided to.
Not brave. Not smart either. Just the thing my body did when someone pointed something at someone I was responsible for, and I'd been responsible for Dez since he was nineteen and running packages for twenty dollars a night and didn't know enough to be scared yet. That was six years ago and three cities ago and I still hadn't broken the habit of putting myself between him and whatever was coming.
The man with the gun didn't lower it. He looked past me at Matteo and waited.
Matteo said nothing. He was watching me the way you watched something you'd seen a version of before but weren't sure about yet. One hand in his jacket pocket. Completely still.
"Tell your man to lower it," I said.
"Why."
"Because Dez was checking on the girl, not running, and you already know that."
A beat. Then Matteo said one word, flat and quiet, in a language I didn't speak, and the gun came down. The man stepped back. Dez stayed where he was, half out of the van, and I could feel him behind me deciding whether to say something and choosing not to, which was the smartest thing he'd done all week.
I turned back to Matteo.
"The girl stays with me," I said.
"You don't make that decision."
"Someone put her in that crate without your knowledge. You said that yourself. Which means until you know who and why, she's safer with me than she is delivered to whoever is waiting at your end."
He looked at me for a long time. Long enough that one of his men shifted his weight and looked at the floor, which told me that long silences from Matteo DeLuca were not a comfortable thing to be near.
"The crates belong to my family," he said finally.
"I understand that."
"All of them. Everything inside them."
"I understand that too."
"Then you understand that by taking them from that warehouse you created a problem that now requires a resolution, and the resolution is not up to you."
I heard what he was saying underneath what he was saying, which was that he could end that conversation in a way that didn't require my agreement, and he was telling me that before he decided whether to. It was a very specific kind of warning. The kind that was also, if you read it right, an offer.
I read it right.
"Someone inside your operation hired a street crew to steal from the warehouse you've been using as a front," I said. "Someone who knew the crate would have a girl in it. Someone who needed a driver with no connection to your family to be the one holding it when everything surfaced."
Something moved through his face. Not surprise he was too controlled for that but the recognition of a thing already suspected, now being said out loud by someone who had no reason to lie about it.
"Rael," he said.
"I don't know who gave the order. I only know what the job looked like from my end, and from my end it was designed to leave my crew exposed and your family looking at an outside party." I paused. "Which means whatever problem you think I am, I'm a smaller problem than the one already inside your house."
The parking level was very quiet. The kind of quiet that had people in it.
One of his men glanced at another. Matteo didn't look at any of them. He was looking at me, and the quality of that look had shifted in a way I noticed and immediately wished I hadn't, because noticing it required me to think about what it meant and I didn't have space for that right then.
"You're not what I expected," he said.
"What did you expect."
He didn't answer that. He looked past me at the van. "How old is she."
"Young," I said. "Too young. She hasn't spoken."
"Does she have injuries."
The question was careful. Specific. It told me he was already running a scenario in his head, already working the problem, and the fact that his first question was about her condition and not about the crates said something about him that I filed away without looking at directly the way you filed things that had the potential to change how you saw a situation you hadn't finished surviving yet.
"Not that I can see," I said. "She's scared. She's been in there a while."
He nodded once, the smallest possible nod, and turned to one of his men and said something low and rapid. The man walked to one of the vehicles and made a call.
"I'm going to find who put her there," Matteo said, back to me.
"So am I," I said.
"You don't have the reach."
"I have the paper trail. I took the job, which means I have the contact chain from Rael's end back to whoever funded it. You have the inside view. That's two angles on the same problem."
He was quiet again. That silence was different from the first one shorter and with something working behind it.
"You're negotiating," he said.
"I'm pointing out a fact."
"In my experience those are the same thing."
I didn't respond to that, because responding to it meant engaging with the version of that conversation where we were two people talking instead of two people on opposite sides of a gun situation, and I wasn't there yet. I wasn't sure I trusted myself to go there.
What I was sure of was that my crew was still surrounded and the girl was still in my van and the only resource I had in that moment was whatever Matteo DeLuca thought I was worth, which right then was more than zero and could drop the other direction faster than I could manage it.
He looked at me steadily. "My men will follow you to a location I choose."
"That's not how this works."
"Aria." Just my name. No threat attached to it, no volume, nothing except the particular weight of a person who was not accustomed to being told how things worked.
I held his eyes. My hands were still at my sides. I didn't move.
He lifted two fingers, barely a gesture so small I almost missed it entirely.
Behind me, I heard four distinct sounds, close and mechanical the sounds of weapons being readied, one for each member of my crew.
Mika said something sharp and wordless from across the level.
Dez didn't make a sound at all.