Adrian could appreciate the irony of what was happening to him.

This was entirely on him. He didn’t listen to what Maria said because he believed that he could take care of it on his own. He foolishly tricked himself into thinking that there was no way that a simple meeting between him and Welt could take a sudden and violent turn as it did.

Of course it would turn violent! When did things not turn out this way?

There was no point in lamenting it. Adrian was trapped between a rock and a hard place. Marco Fisichella was waving a gun around and demanding that Welt offer up his position for summary execution, an act of revenge for the attack at the funeral by the leader of the Church Street gang. He could see him from under his hiding spot beneath the table.

Would a bolt of magical energy be enough to take him down and secure an escape route? Probably not. Too many men were breaching the building for it to be that simple. Marco would have meticulously placed more lookouts on the outside to keep interlopers from getting in and his target from getting out. All of that big talk that Maria did was starting to rub off on him.

Maria wasn’t there. He couldn’t rely on her seemingly endless font of experience to guide him out of this jam. Adrian wanted to go it alone – and that meant dealing with the complications.

The brief lull in the gunfire wouldn’t last for long. The riotous sounds of the fight faded away, leaving the sound of clattering casings on the wooden floor and the fearful screams of the onlookers on the street outside. Every window across the road now had a pair of eyes looking down onto the scene of the crime. The sour smell of it tickled Adrian’s nose.

He couldn’t see what was going on around the corner. That was where Welt and Veronica had gone to leave after she apprehended him. She was either dead already or biding her time to strike back. Knowing that she was Maria’s mother – he concluded in confidence that it was the latter.

“Is the front clear?” Marco yelled.

“Yeah! We’re coming in now!”

Marco kept his gun up and crept towards the bend in the restaurant’s main area. Adrian could feel his heart beating against the inside of his chest as the tension was slowly ratcheted up bit by bit. The explosive opening of his killer gambit had given way to a more considered set of moves. Nobody wanted to be the one caught off guard.

He peered around the edge and observed for a moment.

“Did you get all the policemen?”

“Only one!”

“Can you see them?”

The men at the front door looked through into the bar area and scanned the place for any signs of resistance. The upturned table on one side across from the bar surface was an obvious hiding place. Veronica and the assassins both knew that.

“Behind a table, near the windows.”

Marco tried to use his diplomacy, “If you come out and drop your guns, we’ll let you go.”

Veronica spoke in response, seeing no value in hiding for any longer.

“I’m not going to let you do that. If you’re here to kill Welt, you’ll have to go through me first.”

“That’s not a smart choice!” Marco declared, “We’ve surrounded you. There are fourteen guns trained on this building. I give the word and they tear that table to pieces, and you with it. Between risking my mercy and a guaranteed death – the answer seems obvious.”

“Welt’s too valuable to let go. I’m not letting you kill him.”

“Valuable? That’s what I don’t get about you police. He’s the cause of the problem, so hurry up and kill him already! I’ll even do it for you as a favour.”

Marco had never once run into a situation where killing one of his targets prevented him from completing the contract. He had other ways of getting the information he needed. Sources inside the police who liked bribes, information gatherers who were all over the city, and his own regular crew of collaborators who were excellent at finding fresh information. Welt was a key piece of the group responsible for the funeral attack. It would be idiocy of the highest order to let him slip through the cracks.

“Last warning!”

Veronica remained silent.

“Close it up,” Marco ordered. A few seconds later the men by the front door charged through the gap and stepped through the broken glass that covered the ground. At the same time, he and the two men who were following him leapt around the corner. Adrian saw his window of opportunity. He crawled out from beneath the table and ran for the back entrance while they were busy.

“Shoot to the left, I’ll take the right,” Veronica whispered.

“We really should have surrendered...”

“They’re going to kill us anyway!”

The brief argument came to a sudden end, with Veronica finally breaking cover with her semi-automatic pistol drawn and ready to fire. They were all lined up like ducks in a row. A single bullet ripped through the first man’s chest and the shrapnel kept going, striking the man behind him and forcing him down with a minor injury.

The other two behind them were not so lucky. Veronica fired another four shots in rapid succession. The man at the back of the queue ducked to the left and hid behind the end of the bar counter to stay out of the line of fire.

At the same time, her compatriot was unloading their entire magazine at the advancing group led by Marco. He and his forward guard also ran for cover behind various tables and visual obstructions. Smoke and particles of shattered wood obscured their vision.

Veronica grabbed the police officer by his collar and dragged him across the floor to the bar, leaping over it and tumbling down on the opposite side. Welt was still cowering on the floor next to the cabinets filled with glasses. Veronica found a more interesting reward than booze though, which she happily reached out to take for her usage.

“Light them up!” Marco yelled.

If Adrian thought the sounds before were ear-drum destroying, then he was sorely mistaken. Eight different guns turned on the lavishly engraved wooden bar and started shooting like it was a carnival game. Bottles of alcohol exploded into a shower of glass and fluid. The wood was ripped to shreds and filled with hundreds of holes. Whatever else was left was either damaged beyond recognition or sent falling onto the floor.

The onslaught continued for almost a minute solid without rest. Marco’s men expended every bullet they could spare – staggering their reloads so that they could maintain a volley of death that would kill anything standing in the way. The formerly pristine drinking area was reduced to a pile of rubble.

“Stop! Stop, that’s enough!”

Marco’s ears were ringing, but the discomfort was something he had to ignore. As he stepped closer to the bar to check if the targets were dead, so did the other men who were still standing. They surrounded the bar and peered over the edge. What they found surprised them.

Nothing.

But Marco was already savvy to their tricks. He’d scouted the building’s exterior in detail before committing to doing the hit there. The cellar doors, which led out onto an exterior courtyard nearby, were one of the first exit points he marked as an important point to focus on. The restaurant used it to store alcohol and other supplies. It made it easier for the deliveries to go that way.

“They’ve gone through the cellar!”

He had two people keeping an eye on the exit. One of his friends hopped the bar and pulled up on the wooden slat to pursue, but a second shot of adrenaline was injected into their veins as his head exploded outwards into a visceral shower of bone fragments and brain matter. Everyone staggered back as the shotgun slug ripped his head and skull to pieces. The door slammed shut again – and Marco stood in stunned silence while blood and viscera dribbled down from the ceiling.

“They got John!”

“I noticed!” Marco barked, “You three go down there in two minutes. I’m going to cut them off on the other side.”

Marco was in such a hurry that he didn’t stop to hear any protestations from his crew. He ran through the rear staff door and into the stairwell, where another door allowed him to move out to the rear corner of the building. A set of mid-rise houses took the other half of the block, but there was also the service door that led into the cellar in the courtyard between them.

A stone archway allowed carts to pass through. The houses were constructed after the Grand Rose, so this strange arrangement continued in perpetuity even if it disrupted the residential purpose of the area. The two men attached to his position followed along, while one remained to guard the back door just in case they doubled back.

Adrian, meanwhile, hid in a nearby alleyway and counted his lucky stars. Everyone was so busy trying to murder Welt that the gunman standing at the door didn’t try to stop him when he dashed past and found somewhere to hide until the chaos ended. Again – he had to ask how Maria coped with situations like these. It felt like his heart was about to burst.

This was insanity. The police were nowhere to be seen. Veronica hadn’t put them on standby to back her up if the arrest went south, and it had very much gone south. Adrian was struck with his inability to do something to influence the outcome of events. This was all because of his hubris.

In the cellar below the Grand Rose, there was a similar tension building between Welt and Veronica.

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“This is plainly ridiculous!” Welt complained.

“A police officer died protecting you, so save your complaints for later, or I’ll gag that big mouth of yours shut!”

Veronica was still wielding the ‘borrowed’ shotgun, and her face was covered in blood too. She cut an intimidating figure. Any other person would have hesitated to launch into a debate with her about what the best course of action was.

“They must have followed you here. This is all your fault.”

“Followed us? Do you have the faintest idea how easy it was to figure out what your routine is? The first thing my contact said was that you visit the Grand Rose every other day and sit in the back booth.”

The surviving officer, Lynne, kept a firm hold on the back of his jacket and their gun trained on the stepladder that descended into the cellar. This allowed Veronica to do what she did best, dispense death to anyone who tried to interfere with what she was doing.

“It looks like he’s made a lot of enemies to me,” he commented, “How are we going to get out of here? There’s at least a dozen of them waiting for us.”

Veronica hated to admit it but their options were dwindling by the second. There were two many guns pointed at the cellar door and the angle was terrible for launching a fightback. It was like tossing a coin except both sides were a losing outcome.

The other exit posed a different problem. It was a longer stairwell that led out into a residential courtyard. It was long, narrow, and the ideal place to mount up and prepare an ambush. Veronica was in such a tight spot that she had no choice but to run for the first escape route she could find, and now it was coming back to bite her in the arse.

“Those gunshots are going to attract more officers to investigate. They won’t want to stick around here forever, if they want Welt they’ll have to make a move.”

“And the exits?”

“Death traps, both of them. We have better odds of survival by taking up a defensive position in this cellar. We can control both entrances, one gun each, and they’ll have to take a risk to come and get us.”

The cellar was deceptively large. Dozens and dozens of barrels and wooden boxes filled the area, with white plastered walls designed to keep the temperature cool all year round. They formed up into solid cover that they could use to conceal their positions.

“We’re going to wait in here like sitting ducks and let them murder us?” Welt snarked, “I thought you were the best and brightest that WISA had to offer!”

Officer Lynne took a length of rope from one of the wine barrels and held it up.

“Would you like for me to gag him, Ma’am? He’s driving me up the wall too.”

“If you put that dirty thing in my mouth I’ll make sure that you never work as an officer of the law again!” Welt barked.

“You sure love throwing your influence around,” Veronica said, “Just so you know – we’re the only people between you and an early grave at the moment, so I would appreciate some cooperation.”

Welt shook his head and allowed himself to be pushed away into the wine caskets, out of sight of both entrances. Lynne tried pulling one of them in front of the ladder to obstruct the way, but the frames were bolted down tight. If Marco’s crew were going to attack in numbers, they were likely to focus on the service entrance instead of the one behind the bar.

“Are you good for ammunition?”

Lynne patted down his left pocket, “I only used one magazine. I have two left. I’ll be careful.”

Veronica checked the shotgun’s chamber and tried to estimate how many shells were in the tube. It was loaded when she picked it up, presumably so the bartender could use it to ward away any would-be robbers. She didn’t have time to grab any extra shells from the box that was next to it. It was a miracle that a stray bullet didn’t hit it and cause it to detonate in her face.

Three or four shells, by her trained eye. She would have to keep her pistol close at hand and switch over when it no longer proved useful.

“I’m starting to think that the proliferation of weapons in the hands of civilians is more problematic than helpful these days.”

Lynne shrugged, “There was no helping that after the war. Too many guns around to keep track of and bigger priorities to worry about.”

It was a common adage among foreign observers that Walser had something of a long, lurid love affair with being armed to the teeth. At one time it was common for every individual in a community to have a shotgun or rifle hidden somewhere in their home. This practice was pushed to near uniformity by the Civil War – in which violence could break out at any time and in any place. Millions of new weapons were manufactured and handed to militias on both sides, with no concern for where they would end up.

But Veronica’s job wasn’t to advocate for gun reform. She was the type of government agent whom those firearm bearers feared the most. All of those high-minded ideas about making a real difference had been beaten out of her years ago. The game was rigged; the faces and the names changed, but never the forces that drove them.

Welt thought he was the hottest property in town. Veronica had seen it all before, and this was the type of entitled lunatic that she hated the most. She could barely withhold her contempt for the fool while trying to appear professional and keep the arrest moving along. WISA agents could do a lot – but they could also get criminal charges thrown out by forgetting to respect the suspect’s rights in a public setting.

If it was someone nobody cared about or could see? They could go nuts and do as they liked. Veronica was not going to criticise that way of operating, because she knew she was one of the people who benefitted the most from it. The three men she questioned at the slaughterhouse were a perfect example.

Welt was too influential for that.

Veronica got into position and allowed Lynne to watch the ladder. Welt cowered in the corner, and the group settled in for a long, anxious wait. She could still hear them stomping around in the restaurant upstairs. The sights of her stolen shotgun remained trained on the door, from an angle where they couldn’t shoot through it to hit her, but she could see their legs on the way down.

She waited and waited, and then waited some more. Veronica was starting to suspect that they had called the whole thing off, at least until a loud explosion shook the foundations of the Grand Rose and sent dust billowing down from the previous undisturbed caskets.

“What was that?” Officer Lynne asked.

Gunfire. There was another fight happening outside.

“I doubt that’s our backup,” Veronica murmured, “Stay here. I’ll risk it.”

Veronica hurried up the steps and tried to keep quiet. The cellar was latched shut from the inside to keep people from breaking in and stealing the valuable alcohol that was hidden within. They’d tried to break through using brute force to no avail. It wasn't easy to dislodge too.

The noises were loud, but they didn’t sound like they were coming from the courtyard. Veronica recognized the blasts. They weren’t explosions – they were spells. Spells that were thrown by the people who attacked the funeral. There was only one reason for them to be at the Grand Rose at that moment. They were here to protect Welt.

She pushed through the door and tumbled out into the courtyard proper, where three dead bodies lay strewn across the area, one in a pile of brick rubble. He’d been blown clean through the wall and left in a heap. They were working fast. Veronica estimated that two minutes had gone by since the second battle started.

“Lynne, bring him up here!” Veronica shouted. The area was clear for the time being and there was no reason to sit around.

Another blast. More gunshots.

Lynne dragged Welt with him and into the courtyard whilst keeping his gun up and ready to use at a moment’s notice. He grimaced at the damage and thought the same as Veronica. How had they done so much in such a short timeframe?

“This way!”

Veronica led the charge, taking them away from the Grand Rose and through one of the large stone arches that granted access to the middle square between the buildings. At one time it would have been an important logistical hub for the businesses inside – but the Grand Rose was the only one left to use it as intended.

But as they broke out onto the main road, it became evident that there was already another group of gunmen waiting for them in ambush. A bullet grazed the sidewalk in front of her. Veronica staggered back and into a safer position.

“They’re still watching us?”

She only caught a glimpse of where they were positioned. It was a bad idea to try and fire back with them holding the line of fire under their control. It did not last for long. The corner of the building from where the shot came exploded outwards into a shower of rubble, crushing him to death. A cloaked figure emerged in their place and marched down the street with no regard for their own safety.

“Back up! Back up!”

Veronica led Lynne and Welt to the other exit, which was her second choice, but she wasn’t willing to chance another encounter with one of those mad mages.

“I take it that they’re here to protect you, Mister Welt?” Veronica queried.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an odd coincidence that they chose to appear here during your arrest.”

The situation was spiralling out of control. Another group was joining the fray and dispatching many of the warm bodies who were on the scene to either protect, arrest or murder Welt. There were signs of damage wherever Veronica looked. They passed through onto the opposite road and witnessed three dead bodies slumped against one of the far walls.

“Move your bloody feet!” Lynne demanded. Welt was being obstructive and trying to get behind him. The mage was closing in on them, and the more time they wasted the sooner he could attack them and release Welt.

But it was all wasted effort. Veronica barely had time to react as another of the mages appeared from a nearby alleyway and threw a magical attack in their direction. It was weaker than the others – designed to separate her and Officer Lynne from Welt. They flew backwards and onto the paved stones. The shotgun was flung from her hands and into the gutter out of arm’s reach.

His emphatic denials rang hollow as he quickly got back to his feet and staggered over to his saviour. Veronica rolled over and crawled to where her gun had fallen. Just then, from the bottom end of the street, Marco rushed around the corner with his weapon drawn. He fired six shots in their direction, but the mage placed his body between his line of sight and Welt, taking the bullets for him and allowing Welt to escape down the alleyway.

Veronica rolled over and pulled the trigger, but only succeeded in blowing the brickwork by the entryway to pieces. Lynne was down for the count having struck his head against the floor, so she struggled back to her feet and gave chase. Marco could wait for later.

That was the plan anyway. Veronica used what strength remained in her legs to hurry through the alleyway and break out onto the main street, but she was tackled to the ground by one of Marco’s gang members. She promptly hit him across the skull with the stock of the shotgun and pushed him away.

Marco was behind her. She swivelled on her heel and aimed the shotgun at him.

Against all odds, Welt managed to escape the clutches of both the police and his would-be killers. The chaos served him perfectly. He could slip away in the mayhem and wash his hands of any responsibility.

Veronica was furious, and there was only one still breathing man at arm’s length for her to take it out on. Marco was still on the floor with his hands held in the air. For all of his caution when dealing with her – she still found a way to turn the tables on him. But being under her heel only left him with one thought which he couldn’t help but verbalize.

“Ha. I suppose the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree, did it? You look exactly like her.”

It was when Veronica’s eyes turned into daggers that Marco discovered that he was treading on extremely sensitive ground. She was a WISA agent. WISA agents didn’t have children, they weren’t allowed to. This was the raven-haired, ruby-eyed stone-cold bitch who he’d been warned about. Her reputation was gigantic. A ruthless phantom who dismantled criminal conspiracies in an instant, and often left piles of dead bodies in her wake.

There were three commonalities to those tales. Her affiliation with a discrete domestic security force, her beautiful appearance, and her almost supernatural capability to deliver death en masse. Some criminals even gave her stupid nicknames to go along with them.

But Marco knew that she was a living, breathing woman. A deadly one, but a woman nonetheless. His discovery that Maria Walston-Carter was her biological daughter put everything into a new context. They looked so similar that it was impossible to ignore.

“I suggest you choose your next words very carefully, Marco.”

“I’m honoured that you know who I am.”

“Only you could put together an operation as slapdash as this. Did your trigger finger get too itchy? A smart man wouldn’t leap into the belly of the beast because he risked missing his deadlines. Robert Van Gervan must have paid a lot to make you throw your caution to the wind. You never like dealing with the police.”

“Then it’s a lesson learned. One of the rare times that I break my own rules and I end up in this situation. I understood the game when I signed up, always have, and always will.”

“Hands behind your back, against the wall.”

Outgunned, outnumbered, and already injured from another spell-based attack, Veronica had no choice but to call it quits and give up on the pursuit. She cuffed Marco and his unconscious accomplice. It was not much of a consolation prize given the man who slipped through the net.

“You and me, we’re going to have a very long talk about what you know.”

Marco walked over to his companion and sat on the curb to await his transport to the nearest cell. The assassins were gone, as was Welt, and there was a deceased officer in the Grand Rose to call in too. The cat was out of the bag for Welt. There was no use in him ordering his lackeys to kill all of the witnesses, so they ran the first chance they got.

This case was starting to piss her off.