Chapter 5 - A TARGET ON THE HEARTH
Two weeks after the breach, the season turned. The autumn rain hardened into early November sleet, rattling against the slate roof like handfuls of buckshot.
The house smelled different now. The stale odor of disinfectant and damp wool had been replaced by the sharp, clean bite of cedar oil, strong black coffee, and the faint, sweet scent of the vanilla lotion Fay kept in the pocket of her work apron.
She hadn't returned to her apartment.
Carmine had personally visited her landlord three days after the shooting. He hadn't brought a gun; he had brought three thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and an eviction agreement signed with a fountain pen. Carmine had watched the man pack Fay’s three cardboard boxes of belongings into the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car, handed him the cash, and told him that if he ever spoke the name *Fay Willis* within the city limits again, his dental records would become a matter of state historical interest.
Fay now lived in the corner suite on the third floor, sixty feet from my bedroom door.
Her presence had changed the gravity of the estate.
Mrs. Gable no longer lowered her eyes when she brought the linen; she consulted Fay on the menus. The two guards at the top landing—men who had survived three federal indictments and two turf wars—stepped aside when she walked down the hall carrying laundry baskets, murmuring polite, cautious greetings like schoolboys addressing a strict nun.
She had forced me into the parallel bars.
In the sunroom on the second floor, Dr. Mercer had installed two long, polished steel bars anchored into the concrete floor—a physical therapy track designed to help paraplegics rebuild core stability and prevent pelvic drift. For five months, the bars had gathered dust. I had threatened to break Mercer’s jaw if he mentioned them again.
Fay hadn't mentioned them. She had simply wheeled me into the sunroom at eight in the morning, locked the brakes on my chair, and stood at the far end of the ten-foot track.
“Stand up,” she had said.
“Go to hell.”
“You have three thousand dollars of carbon-fiber leg braces in that closet. Dr. Mercer showed me how the knee-locks work. Put them on, or I’m throwing your diner coffee down the sink and making you drink Mrs. Gable’s chicory for the rest of the winter.”
Now, three weeks later, I was standing between the bars.
The mechanical braces were clamped over my trousers from mid-thigh to the arches of my boots, their titanium hinges clicking into place with cold, surgical finality. My arms were locked straight down against the steel rails, my shoulders burning with a deep, tearing heat that made my vision blur at the edges. My legs were numb, dead weights held upright only by the metal struts, but my core—the abdominal muscles that had wasted away during months of immobility—shrieked with exhaustion.
Fay stood two feet in front of me, her arms crossed over her chest, watching my hips.
“Your pelvis is listing to the left,” she said, her voice flat, unyielding. “Correct it.”
“I can't feel the fucking left hip, Fay!” Sweat was pouring down my temples, stinging my eyes, dripping from the tip of my nose onto the gray rubber matting. “My spine is broken. Do you understand the concept of a spinal lesion?”
“I understand that your lats are twice the size of mine and you’re leaning on your triceps like an old woman with a walker,” she countered, stepping closer. She placed her small, cold hand firmly against the left side of my waist, pushing inward with surprising leverage. “Shift the weight through your rib cage. Use your back. You used to run twenty miles a week. The muscle memory is in your brain, Dominic. Find it.”
I roared—a guttural, feral sound of pure, unadulterated rage—and wrenched my torso to the right.
The titanium hinges clicked. My left foot swung forward four inches, the boot sole hitting the rubber mat with a dull, heavy thrum.
I had taken a step.
It was ugly. It was mechanical. It was entirely dependent on the strength of my shoulders and the rigid metal bracing my bones. But it was a step.
I hung between the bars, panting, my head down, my spit stringing toward the floor.
Fay didn't cheer. She didn't clap. She simply reached out with a clean cotton towel, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and rested her hand against the back of my neck. Her fingers were warm against my burning skin.
“Again,” she whispered.
Before I could answer, the glass behind her shattered.
*Crack-thump!*
A hole the size of a fifty-cent piece appeared in the double-paned window looking out over the terrace. A fraction of a second later, the heavy sound of a high-caliber rifle shot echoed across the grounds from the tree line eight hundred yards away.
The round took Fay in the meat of her upper left shoulder, spinning her around like a rag doll.
She didn't scream. A sharp, wet gasp tore from her throat as she collapsed against my chest, her weight hitting me with the sudden, terrifying momentum of a falling tree.
“Fay!”
The titanium braces locked at the knees, holding my lower body rigid, but the impact tore my hands from the parallel bars. We crashed to the floor together in a tangled heap of limbs and cold steel, hitting the rubber matting with a concussive thud.
A second round tore through the sunroom, obliterating a terracotta planter three inches above my head, showering our faces with moist earth and shards of red clay.
Sniper. Long range. Silenced or heavy-bipod suppressed.
Fay was pinned beneath me, her face pale as parchment, her teeth chattering violently. Blood—bright, arterial red—was soaking through her gray sweatshirt, spreading across the white collar in a rapid, horrifying circle.
“Dominic...” she choked out, her fingers clawing weakly at my bicep. “The window... another one...”
My paralysis was a curse, but my arms were still the arms of a man who had killed with his bare hands.
I didn't try to stand. I couldn't. I wrapped my left arm around Fay’s waist, hauling her small body against my ribs, and used my right elbow and the heels of my locked braces to drag both of us across the floor toward the low brick knee-wall beneath the windowsill.
*Crack-thump!*
A third bullet chewed a four-inch trench through the hardwood floor where her head had rested two seconds earlier.
I dragged her behind the brick partition, pulling her back into the corner of the room where the line of sight from the eastern ridge was cut off. I propped her against my chest, my legs splayed uselessly across the floorboards, my hands tearing at the fabric of her sweatshirt.
“Look at me, Fay. Look at me!”
Her eyes were rolling back, the river-water brown turning glassy. Her skin was losing its color with terrifying speed.
The bullet had entered two inches below her collarbone, passing through the soft tissue and exiting out the back of her shoulder blade. It had missed the carotid artery by an inch, but the venous bleeding was heavy, dark blood pumping out in rhythmic spurts with every beat of her frantic heart.
“Carmine!” I bellowed, my voice tearing through the empty sunroom. “CARMINE!”
The alarm began to wail—the high-pitched, warbling siren of the estate’s outer perimeter defense. Shouts echoed from the courtyard below, followed by the deep, rhythmic *thump-thump-thump* of a heavy semi-automatic rifle returning fire toward the ridge.
Fay’s head lolled against my shoulder. Her lips were blue.
“I’m... I’m getting blood on your shirt,” she mumbled, her words slurring together like a drunk’s. “Mrs. Gable... will be mad...”
“Shut up,” I snarled, tears of pure, blinding fury burning behind my eyelids. I stripped off my heavy flannel overshirt with one violent jerk, balling it into a tight, dense knot. I jammed the wad of wool directly into the entry wound on her chest, pressing down with the entire weight of my torso.
Fay screamed—a raw, agonized shriek that cut through the sound of the sirens and the distant gunfire.
“I know, baby. I know,” I muttered, my voice breaking. I had never called a woman *baby* in my life. The word felt foreign, ancient, torn from some buried part of my soul I thought had died in the wreckage of my town car. “Hold on. You stay with me. You hear me? You don't quit. You told me you don't quit!”
She reached up with her uninjured right hand, her fingers trembling violently, and grabbed the lapel of my undershirt. Her grip was surprisingly strong—the desperate, instinctual clutch of a drowning person catching a spar of wood.
“Don't... let them... take you,” she whispered.
“Nobody is taking me,” I said, leaning down until my forehead touched hers, our breaths mingling in the cold air blowing through the shattered window. “And nobody is taking you. If you die, Fay, I will burn this entire city to the water line. I will put every Valenti in a mass grave and salt the earth so nothing ever grows again. You stay here. You breathe.”
The double doors of the sunroom burst open.
Carmine skidded across the floor on his knees, an assault rifle slung across his back, a black trauma kit in his hands. Two armed guards followed him, setting up a perimeter near the doorway with their weapons leveled at the shattered windows.
“Sniper’s down,” Carmine barked, his face covered in soot. “Leo took him out with the .338 from the guard tower. How is she?”
“She’s bleeding out,” I said, my hands locked over the pressure dressing, my knuckles white, my voice trembling with an emotion Carmine had never seen in me in fifteen years of service. “Call Mercer. If Mercer isn't here in eight minutes, shoot him and bring another surgeon. Move!”
Carmine didn't argue. He ripped open a package of hemostatic gauze, shoved his hands beneath mine, and began packing the wound with military-grade clotting agents.
Fay’s grip on my shirt loosened. Her fingers slipped down my chest, leaving five red streaks across the white cotton. Her eyes closed.
“Fay!” I yelled.
“She’s in shock, Dominic,” Carmine said, his voice grim as he wrapped an emergency pressure bandage around her torso. “The bleeding is slowing down from the Celox, but she needs whole blood and an operating table. We’re moving her to the basement infirmary.”
Two guards stepped forward with a folding canvas stretcher.
They reached down to lift her from my lap.
“Don't touch her roughly,” I snarled, my hand flashing out to grab the lead guard by his tactical vest, pulling him down until his face was six inches from mine. “If you drop her, I will put a bullet through your knee. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Boss,” the man whispered, terrified not by the threat, but by the wild, unhinged madness burning in my eyes.
They lifted her onto the canvas.
I sat on the cold floor among the clay shards and the pool of her blood, my titanium braces locked and useless, unable to follow her down the stairs.
Carmine stood over me, extending a hand to help me up.
I didn't take his hand. I reached out, grabbed the parallel bar, and using only the sheer, murderous power of my shoulders and back, hauled myself upright until my locked braces clicked against the floorboards.
I stood there, swaying, covered in Fay’s blood, looking down at the long red smear she had left on the floor.
“Carmine,” I said. The rage in my voice had cooled, turning into something infinitely more dangerous: pure, absolute zero.
“Yes, Dominic?”
“Bring Lucian Valenti’s brother to the warehouse.”
Carmine paused. “Julian? Julian is a civilian, Dominic. He runs the art gallery on Madison.”
I looked at Carmine.
The lieutenant took one look at my face, swallowed hard, and lowered his eyes.
May you like
“I’ll have him in the basement by nightfall,” Carmine said.
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