Blake tracked the distance to cover, the path to the nearest column of stacked pallets by the loading dock, the angle of the door he’d just come through. His shoulders hummed with the electricity that always preceded a fight, the part of him that didn’t know fear until after. He moved low behind the sedan closest to him, using the cars as stepping stones.
The figure tilted a shoulder like checking a phone. The light didn’t catch a screen.
Something was wrong. The posture was too loose for a scout. A decoy, then. The hair on Blake’s forearms lifted.
Inside.
He pivoted hard, boots catching for a breath on slicker concrete, then finding purchase. He hit the automatic doors, and they slid open too slow, too civilized for the urgency in his body. “Move,” he muttered to aluminum and glass and prayer. He cut through the lobby in a blur that turned the volunteer desk into a smudge and the coffee kiosk into a smell of burned beans and carefully looked-away homeless. The nurse looked up, startled,mouth opening on his name or a question he didn’t have time to answer.
The corridor to Vivian’s room had never seemed longer. His breath was steady but too loud to his ears. At the far end, a door was ajar. A rectangle of light bled into the hall, too bright for the hour, wrong.
“Viv—” he started, caught the stupidity of saying it out loud, shut his mouth on the rest.
He drew the Glock with his right hand, left heel of his palm pushed the door, slow enough to keep the hinges from complaining. The gap widened.
A man stood over Vivian’s bed.
Broad back. Hoodie. Hands loose at his sides. He didn’t turn first; he looked down, a casualness that was as much a tell as any tactical move. Vivian’s eyes were open—glass-bright and unfocused. She blinked, trying to swim up to the surface, and Blake saw the moment her gaze found the stranger. Fear didn’t show in her face—it showed in the small, hard line at the corner of her mouth she only got when she wanted to hide pain.
Blake brought the Glock up, sights on center mass. “Don’t move.”
The man turned his head the way a dog does when it hears a whistle, not startled but curious. He looked at Blake like he’d expected him. A slow smile drew across a mouth that had forgotten how. He lifted his left hand an inch, palm open, not in surrender but to show nothing. The cuff of the hoodie slid back.
A laurel wreath inked himself around the man’s wrist, black leaves and stem circling bone.
Laurel Tide.
Heat slid through Blake’s chest in a clean, straight line. He stepped in, angle widening just enough that a miss would hit wall, not Vivian. “Step away. Hands where I can see them.”
“You shouldn’t have left her alone,” the man said, voice unhurried, vowels rubbed smooth by too many places. “She wasn’t the target.”
Vivian’s fingers clawed for the call button. The man’s gaze flicked down, not in warning—in calculation, mapping her movements, assessing Blake’s position.
“Back up,” Blake said, gun steady.
The man didn’t back up.
He smiled—a thin, dead curve. “I shouldn’t have pushed her in the lighthouse.”
Vivian’s breath hitched.
The man turned.
Blake fired. The man twisted, and the round tore through the IV pole instead, shearing metal, snapping tubing. The pole toppled with a metallic scream.
The man didn’t retreat.
He charged.
Blake pivoted to keep the angle clear, but the room was small, the equipment tight. The man snatched the visitor chair and hurled it—not as a distraction, but as a weapon. The lamp shattered, plunging everything into a harsh, uneven glow from the hallway.
Vivian hit the call button. An alarm buzzed somewhere down the corridor.
Blake fired again, grazing the man’s sleeve. The man barked a laugh—sharp, delighted, predator-clean.
Then he was on Blake—fast, trained, lethal. “She shouldn’t have done that. Now I need this to look convincing.”
The knife appeared like it had been waiting beneath his skin, matte black, no hesitation in the way he drove it toward Blake’s ribs. Blake caught the wrist, muscles straining.
