Page 4 of The Team

He fucking laughed.

“You know Sanda,” he said. His split lip bled more when he smiled and he wiped it with the back of his hand. “I’m impressed.”

Rhett sneered at him. “Who the fuck are you?”

But then there were sirens incoming and cops on foot surrounding them.

Fucking hell.

The street fight was over, though honestly, Rhett and Jay could take down all these cops on their own if they had to. They weren’t even armed. But this was already bad enough.

“Put your hands in the air,” one cop yelled at them.

“Like you just don’t care,” Jay sang along, wiggling with his hands in the air.

Rhett shot him a look, seeing his eyebrow was cut, but he was still smiling.

Always smiling.

The big guy behind Jay chuckled, despite his bleeding mouth and scuffed cheekbone.

What the fuck was going on?

Rhett looked at the man beside him. He wasn’t smiling now. His jaw was set, eyes hard. Assessing, calculating.

“We could make a run for it,” he said, like it was a challenge. Like this was all some kind of joke.

Rhett sneered at him. “You go first.”

More cops arrived then, sirens, lights, crowd gathering, recording it all on their phones. Hell, it was probably being live-streamed to TikTok. This was a nightmare.

“Get on your knees,” one cop ordered the four of them.

Jay opened his mouth and Rhett snapped at him, “Do not say it.”

Jay snorted but he complied, going to his knees. So did the big guy beside Jay. Rhett and his new friend needed to be told twice, apparently.

They lowered themselves down like it was some contest between them to see who’d concede first.

It was a tie.

Then Rhett allowed himself to be handcuffed and manhandled down to the local police station, where, after being processed, he and Jay were thrown in an interview room.

Across the hall, he could see his two new best friends sitting in their interview room. The first guy was sitting stock-still and stoic, and Rhett was pleased to see he’d given him a shiner and a split lip. The second guy was banged up but mumbling something and smirking, laughing.

“Who do you reckon they are?” Jay asked. “Five bucks says they’re spies for the PLA.”

“That’s a safe bet,” Rhett mumbled. “My question would be what the fuck do they want with us? And how the hell do they know who we are? They targeted us. It wasn’t random.”

Just then, a uniformed Met officer escorted an older man, Chinese, wearing a long blue trench coat and a steely scowl, into the room with the two waiting men. Smiley straightened up instantly, but Stoic’s eyes met Rhett’s through the glass window. And as their visitor seethed quietly at them, Stoic simply stared at Rhett.

Jay nudged him. “I think he likes you.”

Rhett couldn’t help it. He laughed.

Stoic’s expression never changed.

Jay nudged Rhett again, leaning in close. “I think he’s in love.”