Friday, 4:23 p.m.
"You really need to tell me what happened."
Giulano pressed Danny against the brick wall of the abandoned warehouse, three blocks from where they'd left the others. His voice was calm, but there was steel underneath—the kind of quiet authority that made men confess sins they'd never spoken aloud.
"Marcus, you're supposed to be a church boy, not so?" Danny replied, but his nervous laugh didn't quite mask the fear in his eyes.
Giulano had seen enough wars to tell an act from the real thing. What happened at Tony's Pizza was theater—elaborate, convincing, but ultimately performance. He'd felt it the moment Danny came back, the moment those bullets hit his chest, the moment Thirteen's "death" played out with just a little too much poetry. The timing was too perfect, the chaos too controlled.
Marcus Chen had no bulletproof body. Those were blanks, carefully loaded to create maximum drama with minimum lethality. And Thirteen—Sela—wasn't dead, though her performance had been masterful enough to fool even someone with his experience.
This entire heist was a setup, and Giulano González had been played like a teenager. Which, he supposed with bitter irony, was exactly what he was now.
"Calm down, Marcus," Danny said, reading the dangerous shift in his friend's expression. "I'm gonna tell you everything."
"Please do." Giulano stepped back but kept his eyes locked on Danny's face, cataloging every micro-expression.
"Okay." Danny took a shaky breath. "I work for the Life Givers."
The name meant nothing to Marcus Chen, but it sparked recognition in Giulano's deeper memory. Whispers from the underworld—organizations that specialized in making problems disappear. Not through violence, but through something more elegant.
"When a person is marked for death," Danny continued, "they pay us, and we give them a new life. Clean slate, new identity, witnesses to their demise."
"I see." Giulano released his grip on Danny's jacket, pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. This was something he'd never considered when he ruled from the top of the pyramid—the infrastructure that existed to help people escape the very system he'd commanded.
"Victor Restrepo is officially dead," Danny explained, gaining confidence as he spoke. "Everyone at Tony's can testify to that. Blood, gunshots, witnesses. But Victor Restrepo the person? He's somewhere else now, living under a name no one will ever connect to his old life."
It was elegant, Giulano had to admit. Fake a man's death convincingly enough, and he became invisible to his enemies. No more looking over his shoulder, no more midnight escapes. Just the freedom of nonexistence.
"And why," Giulano asked, his voice dangerously quiet, "did you load a real bullet in my gun?"
Danny's composure cracked slightly. "Marcus, that guard—the one you shot—he was working for the Murphies. He had to die. For real. Life Givers wanted him dead."
"And how sure were you that I was going to use the bullet on him? Not Victor, not the other guard, not some innocent customer?"
Danny didn't reply, but Giulano could see the calculation in his silence. Sometimes risks had to be taken. Sometimes you loaded a gun with one real bullet and trusted that chaos would direct it toward the right target.
These kids had orchestrated the elaborate death of Victor Restrepo, and Giulano González—once the most powerful man in Gulac—had been used as an unwitting executioner. That's how far he'd fallen.
"So the Life Givers have given new lives to three people today," Giulano said, leaning against the warehouse wall. "Why was Thirteen marked?"
Danny's face closed off immediately. Of course that would be confidential. He was just a boy being used by his bosses—no questions, just orders. But Giulano's mind was already working through the implications.
Knives and Bishop were part of the Red Serpents, and Danny had known that when he chose them for the crew. But more than that—they were also street spies for the Murphies. A three-way intelligence operation, with each faction believing they were using the others.
Bishop witnessing Victor's death meant he was officially free, his debt to death paid in full. The Life Givers had delivered their service, collected their fee, and satisfied all parties. Clean, profitable, and utterly without mercy for the pawns involved.
"So you sold a story to the Red Serpents," Giulano said as they began walking back toward the others. He was relearning lessons that couldn't be taught from the top of an empire—how the bottom truly functioned.
"Actually, fifty thousand dollars is enough for boys like Kevin to accept any story we tell them," Danny replied. Then he stopped walking and turned to face Marcus directly. "But you... you took bullets for me. Even fake ones. You didn't know they were fake."
"No," Giulano admitted. "I didn't."
"I'm forever in your debt, brother." Danny's voice carried genuine emotion now, stripped of the earlier calculation. "What you did... that was real. Everything else was theater, but that was real."
Friday, 4:45 p.m.
They rejoined the crew at the predetermined extraction point—an empty lot behind a closed auto shop. Thirteen's body lay covered by a white sheet, and the other boys stood around her in what appeared to be genuine grief. Bishop was still crying. Knives stared at the covered form with hollow eyes.
But Giulano caught the tell in Timo's expression—a flicker of something that didn't match the mourning atmosphere. Relief, maybe. Or satisfaction at a job well done.
Timo was Life Givers too. Giulano was certain of it before the ambulance even arrived. He stayed silent, watching every movement, cataloging every interaction. The way certain crew members positioned themselves. The precise timing of the medical response. The casual efficiency with which "Sela's body" was loaded and transported away.
All of it theater. All of it designed to create a reality that served someone else's purposes. The ambulance disappeared into the streets, carrying Thirteen to whatever new life awaited her. Maybe she'd get those Sunday morning pancakes after all, in some quiet town where nobody knew her street name or her reputation.
"So what now?" Bishop asked, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
"Now we disappear for a while," Guilano replied. "Let things cool down. The Murphies will want to investigate Victor's death, the Red Serpents will want to make sure we don't become a problem. Best if we're ghosts for the next few days."
The crew began to disperse, each heading in different directions with predetermined cover stories and alibis. Just another group of teenagers who'd been hanging out at the wrong time, in the wrong place.
But as Giulano walked away from the lot, he felt something he hadn't experienced in decades—the peculiar satisfaction of being genuinely surprised. Life Givers had played him completely, used his skills while keeping him blind to the larger game. It was almost respectful, in its way.
More importantly, they'd seen him take what they believed were real bullets for Danny. They'd watched Marcus Chen choose potential death over his friend's certain demise. That kind of leadership couldn't be faked, and it was worth more than any amount of money.
One day, he'd use that. The faith of five teenagers who'd seen him lay down his life for them. When the time came to build something new from the ashes of his old empire, he'd remember who had witnessed his sacrifice.
For now, though, he was content to walk through the streets of West Antiok, learning how power really worked when you weren't the one holding it. The Life Givers had given him an education worth more than the fifty thousand dollars they were expecting.