The man was beaten. Blood pouring from his nose, one eye swollen shut, barely standing. Rogan appeared again, shoving him to his knees in the gravel.
“He was hiding behind the pallets, couldn’t get out because of the lock down,” the soldier explained.
The shooter looked up at me, wide eyed, terrified. He should be.
I looked at him then at Ishika. She was being loaded into the back of the ambulance. The doors were open, the clock was ticking.
I walked over to the shooter and crouched down. He flinched.
“You shot her,” I said, my voice quiet. Calm.
“It wasn’t personal,” he stammered. “Just business.”
I grabbed him by the throat, lifting him off the ground as I stood. He struggled, kicking and scratching at my hand.
“Nothing is worth more than her, not even a single strand of her hair,” I warned, tightening my grip, wanting to crush his windpipe, needing to feel his life end under my fingers.
The urge to make him suffer for every drop of her blood on my hands, mushroomed, but the ambulance engine revved. They were waiting. If I went with her, this rat slipped away. If I stayed, she went alone.
I dropped the shooter and he hit the ground, gasping. “Get him to Warehouse 16,” I instructed, turning my back on them. Rogan knew the drill. Once they loaded Ishika into the back of the ambulance, I looked at Doc. “Make sure she lives.”
At his nod I stepped back from the ambulance doors. My hand lingered on the metal frame for a second, feeling the vibration of the engine, before I forced myself to let go. The doors slammed shut and I watched until the lights flashed, once, twice, then the ambulance pulled away, tires screeching as it merged onto the main road before disappearing into the night.
Taking a moment to breath, I glanced down at myself. White shirt and black pants soaked with her blood, ticking to my skin. I looked like a monster. Good. Because I fucking felt like one.
As I turned and headed for the warehouse three soldiers wordlessly flanked me. I didn’t speak, my mind stuck in the back of that ambulance, with her. Alone. Vulnerable.
She was mine, and someone had tried to take her.
The dark warehouse reeked of oil, rot and lingering smoke. Rogan had the shooter tied to a chair in the center of the room, blood already pooling beneath his feet.
He looked up when I walked in. “Please,” he stammered. “I didn’t know. I was just paid to?—”
My brow shot up, halting his words. I wanted names, pain, blood, not excuses. Accepting the gloves Rogan held out, I pulled them on, the leather snapping against my wrists.
“You shot my woman.” I stopped a few feet from him. “You aimed at me and hit her instead, and I’m trying to decide how long you get to keep your voice.”
He spat blood onto the floor, trying for bravado and landing on desperation. “Wasn’t supposed to be you.”
That sentence detonated something in me, a colder kind of outrage that made my vision sharpen. I crouched in front of him, close enough that he could smell her blood on my clothes,
“No one knew I was coming here.” Each word remained measured, because control was the only thing keeping me from tearing his jaw off with my bare hands. “No one. Not the city. Not my family. Not even my men. So you tell me,” I leaned in until my voice was almost gentle, “how did you know where to point that gun?”
He swallowed hard, eyes flicking to Rogan as if hoping for mercy there. He found none. “They paid for a reaction,” he said, voice cracking despite himself. “They wanted to see what you’d do. How you’d move. How fast you’d bleed.”
My mouth went dry from the violence of what it implied. Ishika wasn’t collateral, she was the message.
“Who,” I barked.
He shook his head fast. “I don’t know names. I don’t. A broker. A?—”
I straightened slowly, letting silence expand until his breathing turned ragged in it. “You do know.” My gaze slid to Rogan without me needing to raise my voice. “Let’s make him remember.”
Behind him, a small burner hissed. The shallow pan of oil quivered as it heated, gold turning darker, heavier, meaner. Oil was honest, it didn’t pretend. When it touched skin, it spoke the truth men never wanted to say with their mouths.
I moved to the burner and dipped a steel ladle into the pot and when I lifted it, the oil clung to it in a trembling sheet.
The man whimpered, “Remo… please… I told you?—”
