He was close enough that I could feel the way he loomed over me, could feel his hot breath, could smell the body odor that said he had worn the same clothes for more than a few days and hadn’t bothered to clean them or himself.
I didn’t have time for drunk losers.
And my patience was teetering on a knife’s edge.
So I leaned down, grabbed the gun, and turned.
Was it smart to pull a gun on the street where anyone could see and call the cops? Probably not. Was it always heartwarming to see the way a would-be sexual assaulter went wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and raised their hands in surrender? Absolutely.
“What part of ‘fuck off’ is so hard for troglodytes like you to understand? It was all of two syllables.”
“Crazy fucking bitch,” the man mumbled, moving back a step, keeping his gaze on me.
I always loved an accurate nickname.
I waited until he ducked back into the bar, re-holstered my gun, then took off at a run before he decided to come back with his friends. Because when it came to survival, it was important not to just be a fighter. You had to know when to get out of Dodge too.
By the time I closed in on my destination, I was not only tired and annoyed, but good and sweaty.
“Assholes,” I mumbled to myself as I wiped my forehead before sliding into the shadows as I drew closer to the strip of warehouses.
Most of them acted as temporary housing for items pulled out of shipping containers at the port.
And that was exactly what the one I’d temporarilyborrowedfor storage was usually used for. But thanks to a greased palm, I knew that the usual customers were away for three months to visit family in Greece. So the whole building was just sitting empty.
One set of security cameras set on a loop so the owners wouldn’t be any the wiser, and a picked lock, and the place was mine for the week.
It was supposed to be an easy freaking job.
Child’s play, really.
Until I got that damn alert on my temporary security system I’d set up.
Then got to watch as those morons cut my lock and made their way inside.
They hadn’t even bothered with masks.
Like I wasn’t going to track down every single one of them and teach them why I had the reputation I did in this business.
To be fair, they truly were just… idiots. A group of early twenty-somethings dressed like skaters and reeking of coconut after-sun lotion and extra skunky weed. They might not actually be in the know enough to realize who they were screwing with.
Not just me.
But the men on the other side of this deal.
Which meant not only a notorious outlaw biker gang but an international arms dealer who might have a sunny outward demeanor, but had one of the most ruthless souls I’d ever met. And that wasn’t even mentioning his bodyguard, who was the kind of man who burned off his fingertips so his past couldn’t be traced to him.
These guys would be lucky if I could stop them before they got themselves on the radar of any of those guys. What I would do to them might hurt, sure, but it likely wouldn’t be of the deadly kind of retribution. Unless they shot first. I couldn’t say the same of the bikers, Zayn, or Daniyal.
The one downfall to these damn warehouses is there are rarely convenient ways inside. They were just big cinderblock boxes with a garage door and a single door. The windows were long rectangles, but placed up near the ceiling so no one could peek inside. Convenient when you were hiding crates packed with guns. Not so convenient when you were trying to sneak in unseen.
Oh, well.
It was what it was.
I rolled my neck, reached for my gun to stick it in my waistband for easy access, then reached for the door.
The inside was cavernous—just a long, wide space with absolutely nothing inside save for the metal shelving along three walls… and the rows of crates near the back of the room.
