I grabbed it, tipping it over. The contents spilled onto the granite: a few old copper coins, a faded receipt from a hardware store, and a heavy, tarnished brass key with a leather fob marked with the logo of an old logistics company.
Carlos’s secret truck.
As my fingers closed around the metal, a heavy hand grabbed my hair from behind.
I was jerked backward with a violence that made my neck snap. The brass key flew from my hand, skittering across the floor into the darkness beneath the refrigerator.
“Where is the ledger, bitch?” a voice growled in my ear. The breath of the man smelled of cheap tobacco and stale coffee. He dragged me against his chest, his forearm crushing my throat, cutting off my air. “Carlos said it was in the safe, but the safe is empty. Where did the cripple hide it?”
I thrashed against him, my heels scraping fruitlessly against the kitchen floor. My hands clawed at his forearm, but it was like trying to move a bar of solid iron. The world began to gray at the edges, the sound of the rain fading into a distant, muffled roar.
“Tell me,” he hissed, tightening his grip. “Or I’ll open your throat right here and go find the old lady next.”
Elena. She wasn’t just away; they had probably caught her first. The realization gave me a final, desperate burst of strength.
My hand flailed across the counter behind me, my fingers brushing against the wooden block of kitchen knives. I didn’t look. I didn’t choose. My fingers wrapped around a handle—the heavy, serrated bread knife I used every morning to slice loaves for breakfast.
I drove it backward with everything I had left.
The blade found soft tissue. The man let out a sharp, wet grunt as the steel sank into his thigh. His grip on my throat loosened just enough for me to drop to the floor, gasping for air, the oxygen rushing back into my lungs like fire.
He cursed, reaching down to pull the knife from his leg, his face contorted in rage. He raised his suppressed pistol, leveling it directly at my forehead.
Bang.
The shot didn’t come from his gun. It came from the doorway.
The man’s head snapped sideways, a dark spray hitting the white tiled backsplash of the kitchen. He fell forward like a felled tree, his heavy body pinning my legs to the floor.
I looked up through the darkness. Alejandro was sitting on the floor of the kitchen entrance, his bare chest smeared with soot and blood from his old scars, his arms extended, holding the Sig Sauer with both hands. He had dragged himself down the entire flight of stairs, stair by stair, using nothing but his elbows and his teeth to carry his body and his weapon.
“Are you… alright?” he gasped, his chest heaving, his face completely gray from exertion.
“I’m alive,” I choked out, pushing the dead weight of the gunman off my legs. I scrambled on my hands and knees under the refrigerator, my fingers frantic until they found the brass key. “I have it. I have the key.”
“The basement,” Alejandro said, his head dropping against the doorframe for a brief second before he forced it back up. “We have to go through the basement tunnel. It connects to the old carriage house where the truck is. They don’t know about the sub-level entrance.”
The Ghost in the Mirror
I helped him again, our movements now a synchronized dance of survival. I didn’t care about the mud, the blood, or the cold rain that was now flooding the lower level of the house. We descended into the basement—a dark, concrete cavern that smelled of old papers and damp earth.
