The sanctuary of Our Lady of the Forgotten River smelled like industrial bleach, ozone, and old pennies.

  The morning sun cut through the stained glass, illuminating a scene of desperate, frantic labor. Chloe was on her hands and knees in her designer slacks, scrubbing a dark, rust-colored stain out of the checkered terrazzo with a wire brush. Her hair had escaped its perfect bun, hanging in damp strands around her face.

  Lyra was sweeping the massive splinters of the shattered oak doors into a heavy-duty trash bag. She moved methodically, her face a mask of serene, terrifying calm.

  Sean sat heavily in one of the leather boardroom chairs. He was drinking his fourth cup of black coffee, but it tasted like ash. The euphoric high of the billionaires’ belief had burned out entirely, leaving behind a brutal, bone-deep ache. His right hand was wrapped in gauze where he had bitten his own knuckles to keep from screaming during the entropy-backlash in the middle of the night.

  "The contractors get here in forty minutes," Chloe hissed, scrubbing furiously at a stubborn droplet of cartel blood. "If they see this, they walk. If they walk, the city inspector gets called. If the city inspector gets called, our occupancy permit is revoked, and we cannot open for the billionaires on Sunday."

  "It's clean enough, Chloe," Sean rasped. His throat was still raw.

  "It looks like an abattoir, Sean!" she snapped, throwing the brush into a bucket of pink-tinted water. She stood up, wiping her forehead with the back of a rubber glove. "You blew up five men! You didn't just 'optimize' a situation. You mutilated them. Do you have any idea what kind of heat that brings?"

  "I kept them alive," Sean said coldly. "I could have stopped their hearts. I just broke their toys."

  Lyra paused her sweeping. She looked at Sean, then tapped her broom handle against the floor. Thwack. She pointed a finger at him, then traced a sharp line across her own throat.

  "I know," Sean muttered. "No more cartel wars in the sanctuary. Message received."

  The crunch of tires on the gravel driveway outside made all three of them freeze.

  Chloe checked her gold Cartier watch. "It's 6:30 AM. The crew isn't supposed to be here until seven."

  Heavy footsteps crunched on the gravel, approaching the gaping hole where the oak doors used to be.

  Detective Vance stepped through the splintered archway.

  He looked worse than he had the day before. His gray suit was even more rumpled, and his eyes were bloodshot. He didn't have his gas station coffee this time. His hand rested casually on his belt, inches from his holster.

  He stopped at the threshold, taking in the scene. The shattered doors. The bucket of pink bleach-water. Chloe in rubber gloves. Sean nursing a wrapped hand.

  The "Static" around Vance was a suffocating, heavy blanket of suspicion.

  "Morning," Vance said, his gravelly voice cutting through the silence. He squatted down, picking up a twisted, melted piece of black polymer that had been kicked under a pew. He held it up to the light. It was the ruined trigger guard of Mateo’s Glock.

  "Detective," Chloe said, instantly shifting gears. She peeled the yellow rubber gloves off and tossed them into the bucket. "You're early. If you're looking for the site manager, he won't be here until—"

  "Save the PR, Ms. Graves," Vance interrupted, standing up and dropping the melted plastic into an evidence bag he pulled from his pocket. "I was at Santa Rosa ER at four this morning. Five Hispanic males walked in. They didn't want to talk to the police. The doctors called us anyway because of the nature of the injuries."

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Vance walked slowly down the center aisle. He stopped directly over the spot Chloe had just been scrubbing. He looked at the faint, rust-colored shadow in the stone.

  "Four of them had shrapnel wounds," Vance continued, locking eyes with Sean. "But not from a bomb. The shrapnel was aluminum and steel. Looked like firearm receivers. The fifth guy... his hand was melted. Third-degree burns in the exact shape of a pistol grip. They were babbling. Out of their minds with pain. Kept talking about a brujo on the West Side."

  "San Antonio is full of ghost stories, Detective," Sean said evenly.

  "It's full of cartels, too," Vance shot back. "I ran the plates on the Escalade that dropped them off. It’s registered to a shell company owned by Hector’s cousin. The GPS pinged a cell tower three blocks from this church at two in the morning."

  Vance pointed to the shattered doorway. "And now I walk in here, and your front doors look like they were hit by a breaching charge, and your PR director is scrubbing the floor with bleach."

  He stepped closer to the mahogany table. "So, I'm going to ask you once, Casias. What happened here last night?"

  Chloe opened her mouth, her lawyer-brain spinning up a lie about a gas leak or a construction accident, but Sean raised his good hand, stopping her.

  He couldn't lie to Vance. The detective was too sharp. The Static was screaming that Vance was one bad answer away from calling in a crime scene unit to tear the church apart. Sean had to use the truth—just a heavily edited version of it.

  Sean stood up. He walked around the table until he was two feet away from the detective.

  "Hector sent a collection crew," Sean said quietly.

  Chloe inhaled sharply. Lyra tightened her grip on the broom.

  Vance’s eyes narrowed. "For the fifty grand from the poker game?"

  "He thought I was opening a money-laundering operation," Sean said, holding Vance’s gaze. "He wanted a tax. They kicked the doors in. They had guns."

  "And then what?" Vance asked, his voice low, dangerous. "Because you don't have a scratch on you, Casias. And those boys in the ER looked like they stuck their hands in a blender. Did you have a heavily armed security team waiting for them?"

  "No," Sean said. "Just me."

  "You disarmed five sicarios by yourself?"

  "They had defective equipment, Detective," Sean said, a cold, empty smile touching his lips. "Cheap guns. Bad ammunition. I guess the Gulf Cartel is cutting corners. They tried to fire, and the weapons failed catastrophically. It was a statistical anomaly."

  Vance stared at him. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. Vance was a cop. He believed in physics, ballistics, and motive. Five guns catastrophically failing at the exact same second was impossible. It was a fairy tale.

  But Vance also looked at Sean’s eyes. He saw the cold, utterly terrifying certainty there. He saw a man who didn't just survive a cartel hit, but broke the men who came for him without taking a bullet.

  "A statistical anomaly," Vance repeated, tasting the lie.

  "Lucky me," Sean said.

  "You didn't call the police," Vance noted.

  "They were trespassing," Sean said smoothly. "An industrial accident occurred. They left to seek medical attention. I didn't see the need to involve the authorities in a private dispute that resolved itself."

  Vance looked at Chloe, who was pale but nodding along with the legal framework Sean was building. Then he looked at Lyra, who simply stared back with blank, unapologetic defiance.

  Vance sighed. He ran a hand over his face. He knew Sean was guilty of something monumental, but he had nothing. He had no bodies. He had no cooperating witnesses (the cartel wouldn't talk). And he had a legal narrative of "defective firearms" that he couldn't disprove without a forensic analysis he had no warrant for.

  "You're playing a dangerous game, Casias," Vance said, turning back toward the ruined doors. "Hector isn't going to care about statistical anomalies. He’s going to care that you humiliated his men. He’ll come back."

  "Let him," Sean said.

  Vance stopped at the threshold. He looked back over his shoulder. "I don't care if you're a grifter, a cartel hitman, or the luckiest son of a bitch in Texas," Vance said softly. "You bring a war into my city... I'll burn this church to the ground myself."

  Vance walked out into the morning light. A moment later, his unmarked sedan crunched down the gravel driveway, passing the arriving trucks of the construction crew.

  Chloe collapsed into a leather chair, burying her face in her hands. "We are going to prison," she moaned. "Or we are going to get shot. We are not opening a wellness center, Sean. We are opening a morgue."

  "We're opening on Sunday," Sean said, sitting back down and staring at his wrapped hand. The pain was still there, a constant reminder of the limits of his flesh. "Vance doesn't have a case. And Hector is going to need time to regroup."

  Lyra walked over to the mahogany table. She picked up her notepad, wrote a single sentence, and slid it across the wood to Sean.

  We need a wall.

  Sean read it. He looked up at the shattered doorway, where the morning sun was pouring in over the cartel's bloodstains. "Yeah," Sean agreed softly. "We need muscle. Someone who believes, but knows how to pull a trigger."