“The ring’s toying with us,” I said.
Ghost nodded slowly. “Playing cat and mouse.”
“Well, they picked the wrong fucking cats,” I muttered, gripping my vest tighter.
We swept the rest of the warehouse, but there was nothing else. Just dust, silence, and the buzz of adrenaline under our skin.
Ghost finally stood, tucking the broken burner into his vest. “Next stop—charity distro center. Ten minutes out.”
“Mount up,” I said, already moving.
We left the same way we came in. Quiet. Controlled. Ready for whatever the hell came next.
The ride to the next location was short, but my head wouldn’t stop spinning.
I should’ve been hyper-focused on the mission, on terrain, on timing, but Amanda kept bleeding through. The image of her tangled in my sheets, bare skin flushed, that desperate little sound she made when I buried myself in her. I swore I could still feel her nails in my back.
I hadn’t meant for it to go that far. Not that fast. But I didn’t regret a damn second of it.
She trusted me last night. Let herself fall apart in my arms. I’d seen her wrecked. Raw. Real. And now that I had, I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to hold that version of her again.
Brutus rode beside me, close enough to catch the twitch in my jaw.
“You good?” he asked, voice gravel.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“I said yeah.”
He didn’t push. Just nodded once and kept riding. That’s what I liked about Brutus. He didn’t need explanations. He just needed to know I was ready to handle shit if it went sideways.
The charity center was tucked behind a string of warehouses, its faded mural of smiling hands and cartoon food baskets peeling from the brick wall. It looked clean from the outside. Real clean. Too clean.
Ghost pulled the truck around back while we parked our bikes under the shadows of a collapsed awning. He gave a short whistle and Smoke leapt out again, immediately sniffing the base of the back door.
Ranger knelt, brushing his fingers over the lock. “Brand new.”
“Yeah,” Ghost murmured, stepping up beside him. “Bolt was replaced this week. Paint’s still fresh around the frame.”
I circled the side and peered through the slats of a boarded window. Inside, rows of empty shelves and folded tables. Not a single box. No staff. No lights on.
“This place supposed to be operating?”
“According to the website,” Brutus rumbled, “they serve meals three days a week.”
“Well, they’re not serving shit right now.”
Ghost moved past us and picked the lock in under thirty seconds. We followed him in—tight formation, eyes sharp.
It wasn’t just empty. It wastooempty. Shelves wiped clean. No dust. No wrappers. No evidence ofanythingever being there. The walls had patches of fresh paint covering what looked like old water damage, or maybe worse.
“This is a front,” I muttered. “Was probably never open to begin with.”
Ranger ran his light along the baseboards, then crouched. “Tire tracks inside. Someone rolled a dolly or a cart straight to that back exit. No footprints.”
“Security cams?” Ghost asked.
