The hallway went silent.
Two of Nico’s men stepped forward. Nico lifted one hand, and they stopped.
Frank Hart was not a fool. He knew who Nico was. The whole city did. He also knew why Leah had taken the tutoring job, and he had argued against it from the first day.
“That man puts roofs over schools and bullets through witnesses,” Frank had said.
Leah had replied, “That man’s daughter needs somebody to teach her phonics, Dad, not testify at the Hague.”
Now Frank took one step closer.
“If she dies,” he said, voice breaking under the words, “you do not get to be sorry.”
Nico did not flinch.
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t.”
That answer took some of the force out of Frank’s anger, not because it comforted him, but because it was the truth.
A younger man came running down the hall then—Leah’s brother Owen, twenty-three, an EMT student with Leah’s eyes and none of her patience. He looked from Frank to Nico to the blood on the floor and visibly fought the urge to throw himself at somebody.
“What happened?” Owen demanded.
Frank could not answer.
Nico did.
“She saved my daughter,” he said. “She was hit six times.”
Owen stared at him as if trying to understand whether this was a confession or an apology.
Then he said the one thing no one in that hallway expected.
