Novels by Emí Otunba

“Down,” Enzo shouted.Matteo pulled Sofia beneath the dashboard as the second round shattered the mirror. Steam rose from the hood.“Crane,” Sofia said. “Top catwalk.”“I see it,” Matteo said.In back, the boy coughed, the woman prayed, the man wheezed.“Left, container row,” Enzo said.They slid between blue steel. Flags snapped. The crane loomed over the quay.“She is climbing for angle,” Matteo said.“Clip the angle,” Enzo replied.Matteo blew two catwalk bulbs. Glass fell. The visor glinted, steady. A round starred the window beside Sofia’s cheek.“Close,” she whispered.Matteo’s phone vibrated. Unknown number.He answered. “Speak.”A woman’s voice arrived, calm. “Good evening, Rossi.”“Name.”“Agata.”“Terms.”“Leave the patients,” she said. “Leave the woman. Drive away.”Sofia whispered, “Speaker.”Matteo tapped. Enzo said, “You work for Luca.”“I work for outcomes,” Agata said. “Luca is an outcome with legs.”“He bleeds,” Matteo said.“So do you,” she answered, and stitched a h

“Buy a ticket or step off my ramp.”The deckhand barely glanced up. Rain ticked his cap. The ferry rumbled like an animal in a cage.Luca held a boarding pass. “Paid in full.”Matteo looked through the truck window. “He is not riding with us.”Sofia kept her tone flat. “Then we end it here.”Enzo checked mirrors. “Three vans behind, two bikes. Clerics on the left. If we stall, they box us.”Luca came to the passenger door. “Let the sick ride. Let the brothers talk.”Sofia cracked the window. “Talk then.”“You cannot outrun a tide,” Luca said. “It waits at the next shore.”Matteo opened the door and stepped to the wet deck. “You followed the wrong tide.”“I followed blood,” Luca answered.The deckhand waved. “Truck, lane two. Passenger inspects.”Enzo rolled. Matteo walked beside. Luca paced like a familiar shadow.“Tell your priest to stop being brave,” Luca said. “Good men drown.”“Rinaldi bought minutes,” Matteo replied. “Sometimes minutes are the world.”“Sometimes minutes are debt

“Move aside, Eminence.”Luca’s voice came from the dark at the stairs. DeLaurentis froze.“Pick a side, Cardinal,” Matteo said.“I serve order,” DeLaurentis answered.Sofia squeezed Matteo’s wrist. “He is buying time.”Enzo shifted the wounded man. “Two with him.”Luca stepped into weak light. “Lower the gun, brother. Eden has had enough blood.”“You sell mercy like bait,” Matteo said.“Mercy is a discipline,” Luca replied.Rinaldi called from below. “Doors will not stay blind. Decide.”“Open the path,” Matteo told the Cardinal.“Leave the patients,” DeLaurentis said, “and walk out alive.”“They are not inventory,” Sofia said.“They are debts,” Luca said. “Debts feed the world.”“Between us,” Matteo said. “Not him.”DeLaurentis spread his hands. “This is between God and function.”The lights flickered. The rescued three huddled behind Enzo, barefoot and blinking.“You will not shoot first while someone watches,” Luca said.“Then stop watching,” Matteo answered.Luca fired. Plaster jum

“On my left,” Enzo said. “Two, maybe three.”“Count four,” Matteo answered. “Short bursts, then move.”“You are surrounded,” Luca’s voice floated from the ceiling speakers. “Lay down your weapons and you will be treated with mercy.”Sofia tightened her grip on Matteo’s wrist. “Your mercy looks like a locked door.”“Mercy looks like a second chance,” Luca replied. “You brought none to Naples.”“Lights,” Matteo said.Enzo snapped a glow stick and threw it down the corridor. Boots rushed the decoy. Muzzles flared. Matteo and Enzo answered with clipped fire. Two silhouettes dropped. A third folded into a cart.“Right side,” Sofia warned. “Door moving.”Matteo fired through the glass. An alarm wailed, hungry.“Eden does not judge,” Luca said softly. “Eden only harvests.”“Wrong season,” Enzo muttered.They slid to the corner at a crouch. A red thread cut the hallway at ankle height.“Stop,” Sofia breathed. “Trip laser.”She angled a pocket mirror, found the projector, slid a scalpel under

“Do not let me die in front of them.”Luca’s whisper reached Matteo through the sirens and the screaming. The square had fractured into panic. Candles lay crushed under rushing feet, wax smeared like pale blood across the stones. The cathedral bells kept ringing, cold and relentless.Matteo lowered the rifle and moved. Enzo’s voice barked in his ear, but the words were only noise. He slipped through the riot like a shadow, down a service stairwell, through a side door. The world tasted like copper and smoke.Inside the sacristy, the air smelled of incense and bleach. Two priests huddled behind a cabinet. One tried to stand. Matteo held up a hand and they froze. He crossed the nave as paramedics shouldered through the front doors. The cameras were still rolling. A city watched its new saint bleed.Sofia’s voice cut into his head again. “Matteo, answer me. Where are you?”“Inside,” he said. “Keep the car running.”“You shot him.”“Keep the car running.”He reached the altar as the param

“Your hands are still shaking.”Sofia’s voice cut through the sound of rain hitting the safe house windows. Matteo sat hunched over the table, blood drying along his knuckles, the medallion from his father gleaming beside an untouched glass of whiskey.He didn’t look up. “It’s just the storm.”“It’s not the storm,” she said. “It’s the fire still burning in you.”Matteo gave a small, humorless smile. “Then maybe it’s keeping me alive.”Sofia crossed her arms, studying him. “No. It’s what’s killing you.”Matteo finally looked at her. His eyes were distant, colder than the rain outside. “You still think there’s something left to save.”“There is,” she whispered. “But you keep setting it on fire.”Before he could answer, Enzo stepped into the room, wet from the downpour. “You both need to see this.”He dropped a newspaper on the table. The headline screamed across the page:“LUCA ROSSI — THE SAVIOR OF NAPLES.”Matteo stared at it in silence. The photo showed Luca standing in front of a cr

“Do not let the horses taste that wind,” Vael said.A door hung in the air ahead of them, a perfect bar of pale light set upright on the salt. It did not gleam. It absorbed. Heat slid toward it and went quiet. Sound pressed close to the ground. Every grain of the desert seemed to wait for permission.Lyra shifted Aren higher against her side and felt the faint hum of the Ember Crown through cloak and leather. The ring’s small coal breathed like a steady child. Kael rode behind her knee, one hand on the mare’s mane, the other resting on the edge of her saddle, counting the beats of hooves as if they were notes he could name.Karan eased forward until Kor’Vareth’s shoulder was even with the door’s shadow. The stallion’s coins clicked once, then stilled. Salt air lifted and dried the sweat at Karan’s temples, leaving a thin crust that stung. The light-bar widened until it matched a city gate. The desert in its frame did not move.Rael’s column took the right. Serah drifted left with two

“Hold him,” Lyra said.The softened pane stiffened, cold biting the gums. The winter lion reeled from the crack’s blow, claws carving frost. The gate began to knit. Beyond it the litter juddered on light-ropes, half in the mirror’s world, half in the ash camp where brass and geometry posed like weather. The child blinked into borrowed brightness.Karan set his hands beneath Lyra’s elbows without taking the lamp, steadying her bones. The Ember Crown stayed itself—a refusal given shape. In the ring a coal glowed like a saved breath. Vael held a low horn-note. The wedge kept hunger behind bit and knee. Serah watched the seam where snow fell straight.Kor’Vareth stamped; coins stilled. The lion held, frost unraveling from the round wound.“Make the invitation louder,” the smith said.Lyra lifted the lamp so the gap faced child and sky. She formed the word her mouth knew without lips: come. The plate turned a breath toward lion, then boy, a compass testing two norths. The ember clarified.

“Touch him and I burn,” Lyra said.The crack above the basin bent like a finger and reached down through the cold, a straight line of angled light that was not weather. It wanted to write Kael’s name without asking. At the lion gate, the mirror brightened. White silk stirred. Ash banners rose. The litter slid forward, ropes taut, geometry humming.Karan stepped ahead without lifting his hands. He kept them open and low, the way Vael had taught him to handle a stallion that remembered wounds. Lightning gathered in his breath but did not show.“Stay small,” he said. “Breathe with your mother.”Kael leaned into Lyra. She felt his heartbeat through her cloak. His head tilted, listening under the noise. The ropes on the far side were singing to him, promising weight to carry so others could rest.Vael raised her horn and did not blow. She watched riders, not sky, found the places fear might borrow their hands, nodded once. The herd moved as one. Hooves placed softly. Spears lowered to thig

“Walk when it opens,” Vael said.The glass did not shatter. It softened and parted, a winter curtain drawn by an invisible hand. Cold air rolled through the gap and laid a clean taste on every tongue. A frost-white lion stepped forward, quiet, the horn on its brow shining as if it had stored a season under skin. Coins in Kor’Vareth’s braids chimed once, then fell still. The riders lowered their spears to knee height and waited for the stallion to move.Kor’Vareth went first. He tested the edge with a forehoof and placed weight without hurry. The world held. Karan followed on the smoke stallion, then Lyra with Kael in her arms, then Serah and Vael and the Dortracy line behind them. They crossed their own reflections into air that smelled of pine and stone.Beyond the gate lay a narrow basin roofed by iron sky. The glass ribs ended at a shelf of dark ground scattered with white grass. A thin stream ran with the sound of wire brushed by careful fingers. The winter lion stood on a low ris

“What’s on the lake?” Serah asked.“Not ash,” Vael said. “Not riders.”The black glass field shivered as if a fingertip tested its skin. Far out, something pale slid beneath the crust, a shadow traveling under a mirror. The forge breathed slow.Karan did not reach for lightning. He stood in the doorway with his hands open, letting the desert pass through him. Lyra lifted her mantle so the open circlet rested where any archer could see it. Kael leaned at her hip, listening to a song only he could hear.“It swims,” he whispered. “Not in water. In words.”The smith wiped her palm on leather and watched the lake. “If it favors glass, it favors reflection. It will try to turn you back into yourselves.”“Then we don’t look,” Serah said.“You look,” the smith replied. “And you don’t blink.”Three billets lay on oiled cloth, dark as river stones. Oathsteel was still a promise.Outside, Kor’Vareth stepped onto the nearest ribs and put weight down carefully. Coins in his braid clicked as hair b

“What’s on the lake?” Serah asked.“Not ash,” Vael said. “Not riders.”The black glass field shivered as if a fingertip tested its skin. Far out, something pale slid beneath the crust, a shadow traveling under a mirror. The forge breathed slow.Karan did not reach for lightning. He stood in the doorway with his hands open, letting the desert pass through him. Lyra lifted her mantle so the open circlet rested where any archer could see it. Kael leaned at her hip, listening to a song only he could hear.“It swims,” he whispered. “Not in water. In words.”The smith wiped her palm on leather and watched the lake. “If it favors glass, it favors reflection. It will try to turn you back into yourselves.”“Then we don’t look,” Serah said.“You look,” the smith replied. “And you don’t blink.”Three billets lay on oiled cloth, dark as river stones. Oathsteel was still a promise.Outside, Kor’Vareth stepped onto the nearest ribs and put weight down carefully. Coins in his braid clicked as hair b