Chapter 2 - Shards and Shadows
Glass rained down on the vinyl booths like hail. The deafening crack of a hunting rifle echoed through the splintered doorway, tearing through the quiet afternoon.
Gabriel didn’t hesitate. Instinct carved out of decades of violence took over in a fraction of a second. His massive arm shot out, hooking around the girl’s waist and pulling her small frame beneath the heavy oak table just as a bullet punched a jagged hole through the wooden headrest where his skull had been a breath earlier.
"Down! Everybody down!" Bones bellowed, dropping low and drawing his sidearm from beneath his cut.
Screams erupted from the waitress behind the counter. Dishes shattered. The kid didn't cry; she just buried her face into Gabriel’s leather vest, her tiny hands clutching the heavy seams as if he were an ancient anchor in a hurricane. Gabriel could feel her heart racing against his ribs—fast, fragile, terrifyingly human.
"Blackwood’s men?" Dutch shouted over the chaos, crouching low with his nine-millimeter drawn, peering toward the sunlit parking lot.
"Blackwood is dead," Gabriel growled, his hand covering the back of the girl’s head, shielding her from falling fragments. "I buried him myself."
"Then someone dug him back up, brother!" Bones fired two rounds through the broken window, forcing the shooter outside to duck behind a black pickup truck.
Gabriel looked down beneath the shadow of the table. The girl looked back up at him. Blood trickled down her cheek from a surface graze of flying glass, but her hazel eyes remained calm, holding an impossible gravity.
"Who are you?" Gabriel whispered urgently, the roar of gunshots deafening around them.
The girl reached inside her oversized grey hooded sweater. She pulled out a small, bloodstained silver locket attached to a frayed leather string and pushed it into Gabriel's palm.
May you like
Gabriel flicked the latch open with his thumb. Inside was a faded portrait of Sarah—and a birth certificate bearing the girl’s name: Maya Gabriel Vance.
A voice barked through a megaphone outside the diner, cold and familiar: "Hand over the girl, Gabriel, or none of you leave this valley alive."
