Dead Man's Hand

Chapter 1 Gio First the burning. Then the blood seeping through my fingers. Always the sound of Paolo croaking my name over the c***k of more gunfire. Gio, no! Gio’s hit! It’s the horror of loss ringing in his voice that makes my heart pound. Not the pain. Not my own fear of death. I don’t think about my demise in the moment. I didn’t when it actually went down, and I don’t in the nightmares that plague me every night. And always the girl. She’s in every nightly replay. Sometimes she gets shot, too. Those are the worst. My inability to rescue her, to protect her from damage makes me want to die right there. Other times she runs to me, after I’ve been shot. She wraps her arms around me and we both fall down. Always her wide blue-green eyes lock onto mine the moment the first g*n fires. I watch the terror fill them as the bullet tears through my middle. That’s the moment that keeps her in my dreams. In that split second, in the window where I’m sure I’m going to die, hers is the face I see. My fears are for her safety, and my anguish over being shot is that I can’t protect her. In her gaze, I swear I see it all mirrored back at me. She, too, thinks I’m going to die, and her anguish is in not warning me in time. Because she tried. I remember every millisecond of that part. The five breaths before I got shot. I remember the way she tried to signal with her eyes. The way she refused to leave and get to safety, even though she had to know her cafe was about to explode in glass and wood and bullets and blood. She’s like an angel in the dreams—her pale face the beacon I use to understand my own death. Only I don’t die. I didn’t die. And you’d think that would make everything crystal clear. The whole near-death experience thing. It’s supposed to make you realize what you regret. What you desire. And then you get a second chance to make good on life. Instead, I’m trapped in a nightmare-induced fog. Trying to untangle the meaning while I go through the motions of living. The Caffè Milano girl doesn’t have the answers—I don’t know why or how my subconscious assigned so much meaning to her. She was just caught in the middle of a bad scene between the Russian bratva and our outfit. And yet I can’t get her out of my mind. The angel of my death. Near-death. Marissa. An innocent girl I have no business sullying. A girl who already saw too much. A liability.