Three men in black masks had her boxed in on a narrow street on Chicago’s South Side. Two of them were on the ground, groaning — one cradling a wrist bent at an angle it was never meant to bend, the other pressing both hands against a thigh that wouldn’t stop bleeding. But the third was still on his feet, and his gun was still raised, the barrel aimed dead center at Brielle’s chest.
Behind her, an old woman with silver hair held a five-year-old girl so tightly against her chest it looked like she was trying to fold the child back inside her own body. The little girl wasn’t screaming anymore. She had cried past the point of sound, her small fist still locked around a crushed yellow wildflower she had picked for her grandmother only minutes earlier — back when the afternoon still smelled like sunshine instead of gunpowder.