Bonus scene from Shadows of the Fathers: Anastasia Basov

What follows is a bonus scene from my upcoming novel, Shadows of the Fathers. The novel is written from the perspectives of various characters, often when they have the most to learn or the most to lose. I’ll be sharing a few more of these in the coming weeks.

Anastasia Basov

Saturday - Day 4

Lomas de Chapultepec

“What a day,” Ana said to herself as she waited for water to boil.

Lots of things were going wrong that morning, and the coffee machine going out downstairs signaled the need to take a break. She volunteered to make coffee for the team, a brew that would be better than what they had been drinking in the basement. The drip coffee maker downstairs was bad enough, but she drew the line at drinking the bitter sludge that would come from the Keurig that sat on the counter upstairs. Besides the dangers of heated plastic, she’d only drink that abomination if it were the last joe on the planet. Fortunately, she found a French press and medium-roast coffee in the cupboard the day before.

Besides everything going wrong with their tasking, Ana was cold. It was freezing in every room inside the house, especially downstairs. In a bonus to getting better coffee, however, Ana found her heat oasis in the form of the glass stovetop burner. As she warmed her hands next to the teakettle, the ring of orange heat on the radiant cooktop appeared and disappeared. The heat was supposed to cycle on and off to maintain a consistent temperature and prevent overheating and glass damage, but every time it went off, she felt colder than when she started the process.

Will this water ever boil? It was taking so long for the orange ring to return with its glorious warmth. She flipped the other burners on, and nothing happened. The time on the oven’s digital display was blank. Maybe the oven was the second appliance to break today, or maybe it was a breaker or a power outage. She reached over to flip the kitchen light switch on, confirming the problem was more than the oven. Their generator would kick on at some point, but she’d go tell the team the news and make sure everything was okay.

Ana turned to face a masked figure dressed in black standing in the doorway ten feet away, and a greater chill enveloped her. She froze at the suppressed handgun aimed directly at her. Her first instinct was to fight, but she was unarmed, and the assailant was out of her reach. She could run, but by the time she turned, she might have a bullet in her back.

“Where are the others?” A man’s voice behind the mask asked in Mexican-accented Spanish.

She cleared her throat. “Out on errands. They’ll be back soon.” Ana hoped to urge a retreat and not give anyone else in the house away.

“Where are the others inside? You’re not alone.”

“What do you want from us?” Ana asked, stealing time to think. Adrenaline chilled her bones as she processed the size f the problem. This was a targeted break-in to the safehouse that had somehow been exposed to the new mega-cartel.

“Where are they?” The man raised his gun higher in a proper isosceles shooting stance.

A second figure in black appeared behind the first and spoke. “What are you doing?”

“Finding out where the others are,” the first man said.

“Quit fucking flirting. There’s no one else upstairs or on this level. They must be in the basement,” the second man spat back.

Unmoving, Ana focused on the men’s eyes and their movements. His dark eyes never leaving the first man, the taller second man stepped into the room next to the first man, who still had his gun and frightened eyes trained on her. The taller man moved to the first man’s right flank and stared down the side of the shorter man’s masked face through black, hateful eyes and a mask of his own. Now facing the second man’s profile, Ana’s gaze shifted from the second man’s eyes to his chest, which rose and fell with shallow breaths, governed by the same adrenaline dump she felt. Ana watched the second man’s eyes, which had morphed from hate to disgust. Without moving otherwise, the second man extended his right arm out to his side towards her, pointing a gun of his own.

Ana had accepted the serious possibility of someone shooting her a moment prior, but the event overwhelmed her senses. The eye, the end of the barrel of the gun, stared at her for a split second before the intense flash erupted from it. The powerful shockwave slammed her neck and jerked her head and body backward to the floor. She tasted blood as her back hit cold tile and the remaining air in her lungs propelled the salty liquid onto her tongue. Gasping, she smelled sweet copper as she tried in vain to inhale. Past the ringing in her ears, footsteps moved around her, but she could no longer see anything but a dark curtain closing and twinkling miniature imagined stars. Shutting her eyes, the scant warmth she had left in her body departed through the wound in her neck, transported by blood as it worked its way along the small canals of the grout of the tile floor, spreading in every direction until it could flow no more.

CC