Page 34 of Angel’s Doll

I stay in the truck.

Shapes cross the tall windows, one, two. A hand signal on the porch. Compass sits at the wheel with one ear on his radio, both eyes on the house, and gives me the news in his usual ration of words.

“Durey’s down. Your uncle shot him. Holed up in the kitchen with the gun.”

Victor killed Ian. Not for me. He erased the one man who could testify to what he is, and he did it in the panic my call built for him.

The second gunshot comes from inside the house.

Compass is out of the truck before the sound dies, radio up, running low for the porch, shouting into the rain. “Bishop, Smoke, Angel, report.”

Nothing comes back but rain.

I am out of the truck.

I promised. I break it with my eyes open, at a run.

The front hall is wrong. Familiar walls, unfamiliar quiet. A shape lies half in the study doorway, city shoes pointing at the ceiling. I give Ian Durey one glance, the exact size of what he earned. The voices are in the kitchen.

Angel’s voice, pitched to carry and to calm at once. Alive. Not shot. The relief hits my knees first, and I keep running anyway. Victor’s voice rides over his, high, torn. I reach the corner into the kitchen.

Angel and Smoke stand inside the doorway, guns drawn, held low. Bishop fills the far entrance. By the island, my uncle sways with a pistol wandering in his hand and plaster dust in his hair.

Plaster dust. A hole in the ceiling over the table.

He fired at nothing. Panic, maybe. Or some animal part of him knew the sound would bring me through that door. I’ll never know. Either way, it worked. I ran.

He sees me the same second I work it out. His shoulders come down, and he smiles. In a kitchen with a dead man down the hall, my uncle smiles at me like I’ve come home for Christmas.

“There she is.” The gun swings loose in my direction, not aimed yet, conversational, a man gesturing with a pen. “There’s the girl who ruined me. Do you see what you made me do?” The barrel tips toward the study, toward what’s lying in it. “Everything I built. You burned it down. I took you in. I fed you. I schooled you. And you fed me to Chicago. You made him come here. You made me⁠—”

“Victor.” My last word for him, so I make it count. “You sold me. You lied about my parents. You took their money, then you took ten years of my life. I’m done being a debt you invented.”

His face goes empty. This is not the answer he wanted from me. There’s only the gun, coming up, level, finding me.

One crack.

Victor folds against the island, slides down it. The pistol skates away under the table.

Angel’s arm is still extended. No warning shout, no bargaining, no speech. Victor made it lethal. Angel ended it. One motion, done.

I stand six feet from my dead uncle and wait to hate him properly. It doesn’t come. He was a terrible man. He was also the man who wore my father’s face, who signed my permission slips, the only family I had left at twelve. Both stay true at once. I shake.

“Doll.” Angel is in front of me, gun away, hands open at his sides. Even here. Even now, every door still opens from my side. “Can I⁠—”

“Yes.”

He folds me in. One hand cradles the back of my head, the other lies flat between my shoulder blades, holding me together as I’m coming apart. I can’t tell his shaking from mine.

He doesn’t say a word about the truck. It’s there anyway, in how hard he’s holding on. That conversation is coming, and I’ll stand for it.

The club moves around us. Bishop’s voice, Smoke’s, the cadence of men securing a scene they’ve secured before. Bishop’s phone lights with Cash’s name, and he takes it out into the hall.

Angel walks me out. The rain has thinned to mist.

I made the call. I climbed in the truck, then I opened the door of the truck. Every step tonight was mine, even the one that nearly killed me.

His hand is open between us, palm up.