Chapter 1: Sweetest Cover
The alley breathed.
It was a wet, shuddering thing, slick with a rain that had just eased into a miserable drizzle. Neon from the bakery’s flickering Open sign bled pink through the grime, painting the puddles at his feet. The scent of yesterday’s warm bread fought with the damp earth and the sharp, coppery truth of his own blood. Sandro pressed a hand harder against his side, the fine wool of his suit jacket sodden and heavy. It wasn’t a fatal shot. It was just loud, and inconvenient, and the reason he was currently listening to the slap of dress shoes on wet pavement—two pairs, at least—echoing from the mouth of the alley.
He needed to stop moving. He needed to not be a man alone.
His eyes, accustomed to parsing shadows for threats, caught the movement farther down. A figure, hurrying, head down under a dark umbrella, a cloth tote bag swinging from one arm. The figure paused under the single, broken streetlamp, its erratic buzz the only sound now besides Sandro’s own controlled breathing and the nearing footsteps. The light caught the curve of a cheek, the spray of freckles, the confused, gentle frown of someone realizing they’d taken a wrong turn into a much darker world.
Sandro moved.
It was less a decision and more a calculation of pressure and survival. He crossed the distance in three long, silent strides. One hand snaked around the man’s waist, the other clamped over a mouth that opened to gasp. He spun them both, pinning the stranger against the cold, rough brick of the bakery wall. The umbrella clattered to the ground.
“Don’t scream,” Sandro breathed into his ear, the command a low vibration. He felt the man’s heart hammering against his own chest, a frantic bird caged behind ribs. “Be still. Look at me.”
The man’s eyes, wide and warm brown, locked onto his. There was terror there, yes, a clean, bright panic. But underneath it, a startling focus. He wasn’t fighting. He was assessing, his gaze flicking from Sandro’s eyes to the sheen of sweat on his temple, to the desperate set of his jaw.
The footsteps entered the alley. Slower now. Searching.
Sandro did the only thing left in his arsenal of deception. He dropped his hand from the man’s mouth and crushed his lips against his instead.
It was meant to be a prop. A bit of street theater for the passing audience. Two lovers stealing a moment in the rain.
But the man’s lips—they were soft. Startlingly so. And they yielded, not with passion, but with a shocked, pliant stillness that was somehow worse. Sandro tasted rain, and the faint, ghostly hint of mint tea, and something else, something clean and sweet that had nothing to do with the pastries cooling on the other side of the wall. He felt the delicate shudder that went through the body pressed against his, a tremor of pure, undiluted shock. His own blood, hot and insistent, throbbed in time with it against his palm where he still clutched his side.
The footsteps paused. A low chuckle. “Forget it, just some fag getting his kicks,” a voice muttered. The footsteps receded, fading back into the hum of the distant street.
The immediate danger passed. Logic said to shove away, to vanish into the network of shadows that belonged to him. But Sandro didn’t move. He broke the kiss, but only by a fraction, his forehead resting against the other man’s. He was drowning in those brown eyes, which were no longer just terrified, but filled with a dawning, outraged comprehension.
“You,” the man whispered, his breath mingling with Sandro’s. It was warmer than the rain. “You’re shot.”
Sandro almost laughed. Of all the things to say. Not who are you or let me go or I’ll call the police. An observation of his damaged state.
“It’s nothing,” Sandro murmured, the rasp in his voice betraying the lie. He finally forced himself to step back, his hand leaving a dark, wet print on the man’s light jacket. The separation felt like peeling off a layer of skin.
The man—boy, really, he couldn’t be more than mid-twenties—staggered a half-step, his back still against the wall. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a gesture that sent an irrational spike of anger through Sandro’s gut. His tote bag had spilled, books splayed in a puddle. A thin volume of poetry, a thick history text, a novel with a cracked spine.
A librarian. Of course. Sandro’s mind, always cataloguing threats and assets, filed it away.
“You’re bleeding on my library books,” the man said, his voice gaining strength, edged with a hysterical sort of indignation.
“I’ll buy you new ones.” Sandro reached for his inside pocket, a wad of cash always at the ready for inconveniences.
“I don’t want your money.” The man shoved away from the wall, kneeling to gather his soggy books, his hands trembling. “I want you to not be in this alley. I want to go home.”
Sandro watched him. The careful way he tried to dry the covers on his dry sleeve. The stubborn set of his shoulders. The way the pink neon caught in his messy, rain-damp hair. He was ordinary. He was entirely, devastatingly ordinary. And Sandro, who owned streets, who commanded fear with a glance, who had never wanted for anything he could take, found himself utterly disarmed.
“What’s your name?” The question left him before he could cage it.
The man looked up, hugging the ruined books to his chest like a shield. “A thing you definitely don’t need to know.” He stood, eyeing the distance to the alley’s open end, calculating his escape.
“I’ll find out.”
“Great. Super. You do that.” He took a step. “I’m going now. Don’t… don’t follow me.”
Sandro should have let him go. This was a complication, a splash of color on a grayscale ledger. A witness, however harmless. But the memory of his mouth, that soft, shocked yield, was a brand. The clean, mint-tea taste was still on his tongue, cutting through the iron of his own blood.
“Leo.”
The man froze.
Sandro tilted his head, a predator sensing a correct guess. “Your library card. It’s tucked in the history book. Leo Maxwell.”
Leo’s face paled, making his freckles stand out. He looked, Sandro thought, like a lost fawn caught on a motorway. Beautiful and doomed.
“Please,” Leo said, and the word was a stone in Sandro’s throat. “I just want to go home.”
A new sound intruded. Not footsteps, but a wet, gurgling cough from a deeper recess of the alley, a nest of discarded pallets and overflowing bins. Leo jumped, his eyes widening further. Sandro’s hand went to the weight at his hip beneath his jacket, his focus snapping back to the environment. The wounded man one of his men had been chasing. He must have been hiding there, listening to everything.
Before Sandro could react, Leo took a hesitant step toward the sound, his innate, foolish compassion overriding his fear. “Is… is someone else hurt?”
“Leo, don’t.” Sandro’s voice was a whip-crack.
But Leo was already moving, peering into the darkness. Sandro followed, his steps silent. A man was slumped against the brick, clutching his stomach, blood seeping through his fingers. His eyes, glassy with pain, found Sandro and widened in recognition and terror.
“Moretti,” the man choked.
Sandro saw Leo make the connection. Saw the name slot into place in his mind, the fairytale horror of it clicking with the real, bleeding man before him. The gentle librarian now knew exactly who had kissed him in the dark.
The wounded man’s pleading gaze shifted from Sandro to Leo. “Help. Call an…”
Sandro drew his pistol. The sound of the slide racking was obscenely loud in the narrow space.
“No,” Leo breathed, turning, stepping instinctively between Sandro and the dying man. “No, you can’t.”
He was standing his ground. Shielding a stranger. For the second time in five minutes, Sandro was utterly, breathtakingly stunned. No one stood in his way. Not ever.
“He’s a liability,” Sandro said, his voice flat. “He saw you. He heard your name.”
“So did you!” Leo’s voice broke. “Are you going to shoot me next?”
The question hung in the damp air. The wounded man whimpered. Sandro looked at Leo—really looked. At the tears of fury and fear mixing with the rain on his cheeks. At the way he still held his pathetic, soaked books. At the furious, principled defiance in a spine that should have been broken by terror.
He saw the treasure he’d accidentally found. Not in a vault, but in a rain-soaked alley. A treasure that looked at a gun and said no.
Sandro lowered his weapon, just slightly. The calculus had changed. Irrevocably.
“No, Leo,” he said, the name feeling foreign and essential on his tongue. “I’m not going to shoot you.”
He raised the pistol again, over Leo’s shoulder. The shot was a short, sharp thunderclap that swallowed the wounded man’s final gasp. Leo cried out, flinching, squeezing his eyes shut.
In the ringing silence that followed, Sandro stepped close again. He didn’t touch him. He just let Leo feel his presence, the heat of him, the solid, immovable fact of him.
“You’re coming with me now,” Sandro said, his tone leaving no crevice for argument. It was the voice he used to settle territory disputes, to end lives, to command empires. He was using it to tell a librarian he was getting a new life. “Your old one is finished. It ended when you turned down this alley.”
Leo opened his eyes, staring at the body, then at Sandro. The horror there was complete, but so was the understanding. He wasn’t stupid. He saw the walls close in.
“I’d rather die,” Leo whispered, but the words had no steel, only the tremor of a coming storm.
Sandro finally allowed himself the ghost of a smile. He reached out, brushing a stray, damp curl from Leo’s forehead. Leo recoiled as if burned.
“Unfortunately for you,” Sandro said, the promise settling around them like the night itself, “that’s not your choice to make anymore.”