Chapter 12 - Glass Everywhere
Everyone hit the floor.
Ricardo pulled me behind the booth. Victor covered June. A second impact shattered the front door.
No one inside was hit.
That felt less like luck and more like a warning.
Torres’s officers flooded the block within minutes, but the shooter was gone.
June kept repeating, “I knew this would happen.”
I squeezed her hand. “You’re alive.”
“For now.”
Ricardo’s face was stone.
“This ends today.”
“No revenge,” Torres warned him.
He looked at Leo’s photo on his phone. “I’m done burying people.”
That sentence surprised everyone, including him.
Back at the townhouse, Leo ran to me and wrapped around my legs.
“You came back.”
“I said I would.”
He looked at the cut on my cheek from flying glass.
“Bad man?”
“Maybe.”
Leo’s expression changed. He pulled me toward his room and crawled under the bed.
From beneath a loose floorboard, he produced a tiny memory card.
“Mommy hide.”
Ricardo stared at it.
“Leo, when did she give you that?”
“Before car.”
Victor found an adapter.
The card contained three videos recorded by Sofia.
In the first, she named shell companies.
In the second, she named Marco.
In the third, she looked directly into the camera and said, “Ricardo, if you’re watching this, the person who ordered it is not Marco.”
May you like
After the glass shattered, Leo became silent in the way children do when fear is too large for sound. I sat with him on the kitchen floor while adults argued security upstairs. He lined up crackers on a napkin, then gave me the unbroken one. It was such a small gesture that I nearly cried. He was still trying to take care of people while everyone else was trying to protect him.
The video froze before the final name.
