Daniel Does Not Lower the Gun
Chapter 09 - Daniel Does Not Lower the Gun
For one impossible second, I was angry at my husband for being alive.
That is a terrible thing to admit. But grief teaches the body certain habits. It teaches you where to put sorrow, which drawer to open when a memory stings, how to answer a child who asks why Daddy lives in a picture.
Then the dead man stands in the road, and all that careful grief has nowhere to go.
Daniel was thinner. His beard had grown in unevenly. His brown hair was too long at the back. The jacket he wore did not belong to him. But his eyes were the same.
They were also terrified.
“Stay in the car,” Serena whispered.
I opened the door anyway.
“Sophia!”
Daniel’s gun shifted at the sound of my name.
For the first time in three years, my husband looked at me.
The weapon lowered a few inches.
Then he saw Emma asleep in my arms.
His face broke.
Not dramatically. Daniel was never dramatic. It was worse than that. His whole body seemed to forget how to hold itself upright.
“Put the gun down,” Lorenzo said.
Daniel looked back at him, and the weapon came up again.
“You stay away from my family.”
Lorenzo did not move.
“I’m trying to keep them alive.”
“That’s what your uncle said.”
Bruno stepped out of the passenger side, hands visible.
“Daniel, Carlo sent you here to stop us.”
Daniel laughed once, raw and bitter.
“Carlo sent me here because if I don’t, he burns the room where they keep the woman from the clinic.”
Serena went pale.
“Maria is alive?”
Daniel’s eyes flicked to her.
“You.”
“Yes.”
“They told me you died.”
“They told all of us useful lies,” Serena said.
Cars idled in the cold dark, headlights cutting through river mist. Somewhere behind us, Emma stirred against my shoulder.
“Daddy?” she murmured.
Daniel heard it.
The gun trembled.
I walked forward.
Bruno said my name. Lorenzo said nothing. Maybe he knew no man on that road could stop me without becoming my enemy.
“Soph,” Daniel whispered.
“You missed her first steps,” I said.
His mouth twisted.
“I know.”
“You missed the fever when she was one. You missed the way she calls strawberries ‘red moons.’ You missed the night I threw your shirts away and then took them out of the trash because they still smelled like the life I thought I had.”
Tears ran down his face.
“I tried to get home.”
“Then put it down.”
He looked over his shoulder at the black car.
“They’re watching.”
“Let them.”
“You don’t understand what Carlo has.”
“I understand our daughter thinks you live in heaven.”
That did it.
The gun dropped to his side.
Lorenzo moved then, fast but controlled, taking the weapon by the barrel and tossing it into the grass. Daniel did not resist. He was shaking too hard.
I reached him with Emma in my arms.
He did not touch us at first.
He asked with his eyes, and that hurt me more than if he had grabbed us.
I nodded once.
Daniel put his hand on Emma’s back, and our daughter opened her eyes.
She stared at him.
Children know faces from photographs in a way adults underestimate.
“Daddy?”
Daniel made a sound like prayer.
Then the black car behind him started.
Lorenzo turned.
“Down.”
We dropped behind the open door as the car lurched forward, not shooting, not stopping, just racing past us toward the bend. Bruno shouted into his phone. Lorenzo’s men, hidden somewhere behind the trees, followed.
No one was hit. No one screamed.
The terror was quieter than that.
Daniel pulled Emma and me close behind the SUV.
“They have Maria in the summer house,” he said quickly. “Not me. They moved me this morning. Carlo told me to meet you here and make it look like I attacked Lorenzo.”
“Why?” Bruno asked.
Daniel looked at the road where the car had vanished.
“Because the real evidence isn’t on the drive.”
Lorenzo’s eyes narrowed.
“What is?”
“A copy. Enough to scare him. Not enough to bury him.”
Serena gripped the car door.
“Where is the original?”
Daniel looked at Emma.
“In the one place no DeLuca man would ever search.”
He reached into his coat and handed me a small silver charm shaped like a rabbit.
It had hung from Emma’s baby bracelet until the day after Daniel’s funeral, when I thought it had been lost.
“It’s not a charm,” he said. “It’s a key.”
Before I could ask to what, Lorenzo’s phone rang.
He looked at the screen.
For the first time all night, he seemed truly surprised.
May you like
“It’s my father’s number,” he said.
His father had been dead for seven years.
