Zajac gives an irritated snort and tenses his arm to drive the knife deeper into my body.

At that moment, a bottle comes flying through the doorway, with a smoking rag stuffed in its neck. The bottle shatters on the cement floor, the flaming liquor spreading out in a pool, and shards of fiery glass spinning outward. One catches the bouncer’s sleeve. He spins around, trying to slap it out again.

There’s another smashing sound, and then an explosion, loud and close.

“Deal with that,” Zajac hisses to his men.

The blond one splits off at once, skirting the wreckage of the Molotov cocktail and heading through a side door. The bouncer heads straight for the main door, only to catch a bullet in the shoulder the second he walks through.

“Pierdolić!” the Butcher hisses. He jumps behind me, in case the shooter is about to come through the door.

But as we wait, no one walks through. And I know Zajac is torn—on the one hand, he doesn’t want to leave me here alone. On the other, he’s now unprotected himself. He has no idea how many people are storming the warehouse. He doesn’t want to be caught in here if it’s my men who come barging through the door.

As the seconds tick by, and we hear the confusing sounds of shouting, running, and something else smashing, but it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. The Molotov is still burning—in fact, the flames are spreading across the cement floor somehow. Perhaps the paint is burning. It creates clouds of acrid black smoke that make us sweat and cough.

Finally, Zajac curses again. He strides over to the table, seizing a cleaver in one hand and a machete in the other. Then he hurries out through the same side door where his blond lieutenant disappeared.

The moment I’m alone, I start wrenching and working on those ropes. My left arm is almost totally numb now, but I can still move the right one. I pull as hard as I can. My hands, my wrists, my arms, and shoulders are all screaming. It feels like I’m going to dislocate my thumb. But finally, I twist the right hand free.

Just then, a figure comes sprinting barefoot through the door, jumping over the fallen body of the bouncer who was shot in the shoulder.

It’s Aida. Her dark hair streams behind her like a banner as she flies across the cement. She nimbly avoids the flames and shattered glass, pausing only to grab a knife off the table. She presses it into my palm.

“Cut the rope!” she cries. “It’s too high for me to reach!”

She’s got blood running down the right side of her face. Her left hand is wrapped in a rag.

“Are you okay?” I ask her, reaching overhead to saw at the rope still holding my left hand in place. “Where’re your brothers?”

“I have no idea!” she says. “Those goons took my phone. Took my gun, too—Dante’s gonna be pissed. I’m the only one here!”

“What!” I say. “What the hell was all that noise, then?”

“A diversion!” Aida says gleefully. “Now hurry up, before—”

At that moment the rope parts, and I tumble down on the concrete. My arms feel like they’re not attached to my body. My legs are throbbing, too. Not to mention the puncture on my right side.

“What did they do to you?” Aida asks, her voice shaking.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “But we’d better—”

At that moment the blond soldier returns, with another of Zajac’s men. They’re both armed, standing in the doorway with their guns pointed right at us.

“Don’t move,” the blond says.

The air is thick with smoke. I’m not sure how well he can actually see us—well enough to shoot us, I’m sure. I grab Aida’s arm and start inching backward.

We’re following the metal grate along the floor, back to the dumping spot where the butchers used to offload the blood and viscera into the river.

“Stop!” The blond shouts, advancing on us through the smoke. He raises his AR, fitting it against his side.

I hear a dull clang as I step on a hinged grate.

Keeping my eye on Zajac’s men, I press the toe of my shoe against the corner of the grate, trying to lift it without using my hands.

It’s heavy, but it starts to move upward, enough that I can get my whole foot under.

“Stay there and keep your hands up,” the blond soldier barks, closing in on us.

I kick the grate all the way open.

Then I wrap my arms around Aida and say, “Take a deep breath.”

I feel her body tense up.

I pick her up bodily and jump down through the grate, down into a pipe four feet wide, that leads god knows where.

We plunge into the filthy, icy water.

The current is swift, dragging us along.

It’s dark, so dark that it makes no difference if my eyes are open or shut. Keeping an iron-clad grip on Aida, I reach up with one hand to see if there’s air above our heads. My hand swipes the pipe, without any space between water and metal

That means we need to get through as quickly as possible. The current is moving us along, but I kick with my feet, propelling us faster.

We’ve probably been down here thirty seconds so far. I can hold my breath for more than two and a half minutes. I can’t expect Aida to manage more than a minute or so.

She’s not struggling in my arms, not fighting me. But I can feel how rigid and terrified she is. She trusts me. God, I hope I didn’t make the worst kind of mistake.

We rocket along, me kicking all the harder. And then we shoot out an outlet pipe, falling down about five feet right into the Chicago River.

The current drags us out to the center of the river, about twenty feet from either bank. That’s not where I want to be, in case any boats come along, but I’m not sure which way I should be taking us. I look around, trying to figure out exactly where we are.

Aida clings to my neck, only paddling with one hand. She isn’t a very strong swimmer, and the current is powerful. She’s shivering. So am I.

“How’d you know we could get out there?” she asks me, teeth chattering.

“I didn’t,” I say. “How in the fuck did you come find me?”

“Oh, I was with you the whole time!” Aida says gleefully. “That backstabbing bitch Jada drugged our drinks, but I didn’t actually drink mine cause it looked weird.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I was going to!” she says. “You had already slugged it down. I don’t want to make this a cultural critique, but you Irish could learn to sip a drink once in a while. Not everything is a shot.”

I roll my eyes.

“Anyway,” she says, “I tried to get you out to the car, but you were stumbling and slurring, and the bouncers closed me in. So when you passed out, I pretended like I was passed out too. I was so floppy, you would have been amazed by my acting. Even when the big one slammed my hand in the trunk, I didn’t break character.”

I’m staring at her in amazement. While I was knocked out, apparently, she was plotting and planning.

“So they brought us to the warehouse. Then they carried us inside. They took you away, and they put me in some kind of office room. The guy hadn’t tied me up cause he thought I was still out cold. He left me alone for just a second. Locked the door, though. And I didn’t have a phone—he took my purse and Dante’s gun. So instead, I went up into the air vent—”