Page 105 of Relapse

Then headlights swing hard into the parking lot entrance.

Black SUVs. Three of them.

Mina visibly goes pale beside me.

“Run.”

Chapter sixteen

Chapter Thirteen

Dagger

The warehouse feels wrong the second I walk into it.

Not the usual violent tension.

Usually when somebody gets dragged into one of our warehouses tied to a chair, the atmosphere’s obvious.

Fear. Rage. Shit, even retribution.

Everybody already knows how the night ends before I even walk through the door.

Violence hangs in the air waiting patiently to happen.

Tonight feels different.

The fluorescent lights buzz overhead casting sick white light across concrete floors stained with oil, old blood, and years of terrible decisions while half the crew stands around too quiet for my liking. Reaper leans against one of the support beams smoking slowly, boots crossed at the ankles like he’s trying to look relaxed and failing miserably. Knox stands farther back near the workbench cleaning beneath his nails with one of his knives while Saint sits on a crate pressing gauze against busted knuckles.

Nobody talks when me and Noir walk in.

Everybody just watches, the kind of quiet that feels loaded before anyone says a fucking word. Reaper stands near the center of the warehouse, smoke curling lazily from the cigarette between his fingers, while Knox and Saint hang back near the crates with their attention fixed on the metal chair.

And tied to that chair is Mikey.

Of course it’s fucking Mikey.

The same dumb bastard who sold Blair drugs outside her motel after I made it painfully clear that nobody in Severance Point was supposed to touch her. Not with product. Not with threats. Not with so much as a dirty fucking look.

He didn’t listen.

So I roughed him up for it.

A warning.

Apparently not a good enough one.

His face is already wrecked from whatever Reaper and Saint did before we got here, though some of the bruising is probably still mine. His nose sits crooked, his lip’s split open, one eye swollen nearly shut beneath dark purple shadows while blood drips steadily from his chin onto the front of his gray hoodie. Zip ties bite deep into his wrists behind the chair hard enough his fingers have started turning pale.

But the thing that catches my attention first isn’t the blood.

It’s the look on his face.

Confusion.

Real fucking confusion.

Not the kind of panic a guy wears when he gets caught doing exactly what he knows he shouldn’t have done. This is different. This is fear mixed with something messier, something that doesn’t sit right in my gut.