Page 46 of The Boss
“No,” Leif said, and the word was like a door slamming. “You get no last things.” He turned his head an inch, enough to take in the kitchen tableau without looking away from the man across from him. “Switch,” hesaid.
The restaurant didn’t see anything. It didn’t see the pair by the window stand and block the view. It didn’t see the bored woman at the bar set down her martini, pivot, and lift her hand in a small signal. It didn’t see the back hallway fill. But Rocco’s man sensed it. Something changed in the gravity of the room and his eyes went wider.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t come closer or—”
The fire alarm screamed.
Sprinklers burst alive with a hiss and a sheet of cold. Women shrieked. Men swore. The pianist shouted and shoved the cover down on his instrument. Water hammered the room in a strobe of silver. The blade at the server’s ribs jerked reflexively away. The pistol dipped. It was enough.
Magnus moved like a switch flipped. His hands went to the man’s wrist, twisting, bone cracking, gun skittering. The server dropped and crawled. Magnus’s knee hit the man’s spine and his shoulder went the wrong way. He screamed, high and thin. Someone else cut the alarm. The sprinklers kept their storm.
“Oops,” Mariah said sweetly to Rocco, “look at that.” And slid the knife two inches into his thigh.
He howled and went for her, hand flashing. Leif was faster. His fingers snapped around Rocco’s wrist and slammed it into the table. The remote under the cloth jumped free—black, wet, ugly—and Leif’s other hand came down on it, palm crushing plastic. Sparks. Nothing.
“Remote,” Leif said, voice even. “Cute.” He shoved the ruined device into Rocco’s chest, hard enough that it left a square wet shape on his shirt. “You brought a deadman switch?”
Mariah’s head jerked up. Adeadman switch?The kind of trigger that sets a bomb off if it isn’t activelyheld?
Rocco’s face twisted with pain, then curved into something smug and awful. “Not dead. Not here.” He jerked his chin toward the front glass, toward the sedan across the street. “There.”
Leif’s eyes went colder than she’d ever seen them. “Magnus,” he said. “Car.”
“On it,” Magnus called from the floor, almost bored. Someone else was already running past the bar door, slick with water, into the alley.
Rocco’s breath ragged. He tried to wrench his wrist free. Leif didn’t let him. Mariah left the knife where it was and moved her hand to Rocco’s wired sleeve, pinched the line between two fingers, and tore. The tape gave. The wire slid free and hit the wet table like a drowned snake.
“You really wore a wire into a room with me?” Leif asked, amused despite the cold of his eyes. “You thought I’d let you keep the recording?”
Rocco hissed, pain and fury braided. “It’s uplinked.”
The room had become panic in expensive shoes. People surged for the exit, then balked at the wall of rain from the sprinklers, then surged again. Leif’s people moved through it like sharks through fish—quiet, unbothered, turning bodies toward doors, slipping the terrified past the worst of it, making sure none of Rocco’s men escaped in the press.
A gunshot cracked outside. One. Then silence. Mariah’s body said run. Leif’s hand on Rocco’s wrist said stay. She stayed.
“Do you know what you made me do?” Rocco panted, shaking, blood running hot down his leg and mixing with the sprinkler water on the floor. “You made me choose between you and your brother, Stellan.” He bared his teeth. “I chose you.”
“Bad choice,” she said, and meantit.
“You’ll thank me when the city’s ours,” he said, fever-bright. “When your brother’s on his knees. When the river runs with—”
Leif’s hand tightened. “Say her brother’s name again and I’ll break every finger you have, make you beg while I do it.”His tone was lethal calm, the kind of promise that left no room for doubt. His eyes never moved from Rocco’s face. “You touch women to make a point—grabbing them, threatening them, using their pain to prove something that only makes you look weak. You put bombs under tables. You hide behind a girl in an apron. You think a wire makes you brave.” He leaned closer. “You’re not brave, Rocco.”
Another shape appeared in the doorway, dark against the hallway glare. Tomas spoke, his voice low: “Car’s clear. Trunk had a device, homemade, timed, not remote. We neutralized.”
“Copy,” Leif said, never looking away from Rocco. His palm slid from the man’s wrist to his throat. He didn’t squeeze. He just set his hand there like a suggestion and Rocco went very still. “Call your men off,” Leifsaid.
Rocco tried to laugh and made a sound that was mostly breath. “They won’t listen.”
“They’ll listen if they want to walk,” Leif said. “Say the words.”
Rocco’s eyes fluttered. His hand flailed for the table, for leverage, for pride. Leif lifted two fingers, and Mariah took the hint. She grabbed Rocco’s chin and forced his gaze to meethers.
“Say it,” she told him. “Tell them to stand down.”
He stared at her like something he couldn’t have. His throat worked under Leif’s hand. “Stand down,” he croaked. “All units. Stand down.”
“Good,” Leif said. “Now apologize to the server.”
