Page 15 of Dirty Game (Broken Blood #1)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Varrick

The city’s not awake yet, but I am.

Five hours after dawn and my hands are already stained.

The fucking Kastrovs hijacked a shipment, and we are the grim reapers reclaiming what’s rightfully ours.

Not to mention, the Corsini family is causing their own mess.

What kind of luck do I have that two families are attacking me? I guess it doesn’t matter.

They won’t live out another day.

The car ride is silent, my men bracing for impact in the backseat, eyes fixed forward, weapons cradled like infants.

I drive, because I trust my own hands more than theirs.

We roll up on the warehouse, a rust-caked bunker on the south dock.

Kastrov colors, but not enough of them: someone’s trying to be discreet.

There’s a single guard at the side door, slouched in a parka, half-asleep, half-dead.

He’s the first to go.

I kill the engine and let momentum carry us the last twenty yards. Nobody dares to even breathe too loud.

When the tires kiss the curb, I pop the door and step into the breeze.

Salt air, diesel, the distant sweetness of rotten seafood.

I scan the roofline, then the windows.

Two heat signatures upstairs, three more on the catwalk, one at ground level, probably a dog.

I gesture—three fingers, then a slash.

My crew fans out, soundless.

I circle wide, coming up on the blind side of the guard.

He doesn’t see me until the barrel is pressing his temple.

He tries to talk—I cut the words with a 9mm hollow point.

His skull splits open like a peach, blood dark against the ground.

His body spasms twice, then stills and I drag him behind the dumpster and move on inside.

Inside, the warehouse is fucking chaos.

Guns, drugs, and crates everywhere.

Machinery hums somewhere overhead, a pulse that keeps time for the coming bloodbath.

My boots leave tracks, but I don’t care.

The shipment’s somewhere in the back.

I can feel it—six crates, each one packed with more firepower than some governments get in a fiscal year.

We will take their shit too, just as an inconvenience tax.

I take the stairs two at a time.

My men are machines: the first floor is cleared in thirty seconds, each target dispatched with the same economy as a light switch flicked off.

The air fills with death and fear.

The scent’s familiar, almost comforting.

I catalog the dead as I pass: one face-down in a puddle, another slumped over the guard rail, arterial spray painting the wall behind him.

On the second floor, I pause.

There’s a whisper of movement to my left—just a shoe scuff, but I don’t ignore it.

I raise my sidearm and pivot.

The shooter’s not even twenty, acne shining through his stubble, finger too tight on the trigger.

He fires first and misses by half a meter. I shoot once, twice, and his ribcage blooms red. He drops, twitching, eyes glassing over.

For a moment, there’s quiet. My heartbeat’s in my ears, heavy, slowing with each breath.

I lean against the railing and let my thoughts drift.

The echo of her voice, soft as silk but sharper than bone: I belong to you.

It’s a problem. It’s a fucking problem.

Movement down below breaks my trance.

Two men in body armor hustling a third toward the loading dock.

The third is bleeding, leaving a track I could follow blind.

They’ve got the shipment, or at least part of it, packed onto a forklift. I sight down my barrel and take the shot.

The driver’s head jerks back—pink mist against the crate. The second dives for cover.

The third man, the one bleeding, is slower.

I shoot him in the thigh, and he spins, collapsing under the weight of his own panic.

My men close in, quick and brutal.

Two on the left, one on the catwalk above, guns barking in perfect sequence.

The survivors are Hungarian, but not from around here—accent’s off, like they learned English from TV and cigarettes.

They curse, plead, one even tries to pray.

I don’t let them finish.

The firefight lasts maybe ninety seconds.

Feels like a year.

I take a round to the side… grazing, but it burns hot, tearing the fabric of my shirt and the skin beneath.

I ignore it and keep moving.

When the last man falls, I step into the open, boots crunching on spent casings and blood.

The shipment is here, intact except for a single crate punctured by gunfire, leaking straw and packing foam.

I walk the line, hands behind my back, surveying the damage like a general counting the dead.

My men watch me, waiting for orders.

“Clean up,” I say. “Bring the trucks around. Burn the bodies.”

They scatter.

I light a cigarette, drag deep, and feel the nicotine settle the tremor in my hands.

I look down at the blood seeping through my shirt, a slow ooze mixing with the residue of someone else’s brains.

I don’t bother to wipe it off.

There’s a dull ache in my ribs, nothing more.

I press two fingers to the wound and wince at the sharpness of it.

It will scar, but not badly. I’ve had worse.

The memory of her hand on my shoulder, her mouth soft against mine, flashes through.

It’s almost enough to distract me from the sting.

I walk outside, into the cold, and wait for the trucks.

The city looks smaller from here—gray skyline, flat and indifferent.

I think about going back to the penthouse, about showering the gore off and sinking into sheets that still smell like Rosalynn’s hair.

I wonder if she’ll flinch when she sees me, the blood, the wound.

She won’t.

She’s not afraid of monsters.

That’s the part I can’t shake.

The trucks arrive.

Men load the crates, efficient and silent. I watch until every box is accounted for, and then they load the Kastrovs’ cache.

When the last one is locked down, I turn to go and jam my leg into a piece of rebar.

The adrenaline is fading, replaced by the slow throbbing in my leg.

I don’t let myself limp.

I get in the car, hands still sticky with someone else’s life, and drive home.

The city watches me through a veil of snow, quiet and hungry.

I think about her words all the way there.

I head straight to the safehouse, given that the Corsini fuckers are toying with Rosalynn’s life.

The ride is so fast the air shudders in my lungs.

My knuckles are smeared with black and red, some dried, some tacky, some not even mine.

By the time I get inside the safehouse, the wound in my side has stopped bleeding, but I can feel the shirt stuck to my skin, the fabric dried into the split flesh.

It pulls every time I move, a tiny reminder that no job is ever as clean as you want it to be.

The door hisses open, and the whole place is silent.

No sign of my brothers, no guards, not even the cleaning crew.

I’m not foolish enough to think they’re not here—they’re around, waiting, watching, assessing.

Just the quiet, and the trail of footprints I leave behind me.

Mud, blood, and whatever else I picked up at the docks.

I know where she’ll be.

I head to the master bedroom and find her sitting on the edge of the bed, knees tucked in, wearing one of my shirts over the same black leggings I love on her.

She’s reading, always reading in some aspect.

She looks up when I enter, but doesn’t flinch.

Not at the mess, not at the blood, not at the fact that I probably look more like a corpse than a man right now.

“You’re hurt,” she says, before I even get the door closed.

I grin, baring teeth. “You should see the other guys.”

She stands, closes her book, and crosses to me in three careful steps.

I half-expect her to shy away at the smell, but she doesn’t.

Instead, she reaches for the buttons on my shirt, starts undoing them from the bottom up.

Her hands are steady.

I let her work.

Every movement is neat, precise, almost ritualistic.

I study her face as she goes—how her brows pull together in concentration, how she bites the inside of her lip when she hits a stubborn button.

She’s so close now I can smell the strawberry in her hair, see the tiny freckle on the bridge of her nose.

She slides the shirt off my shoulders, careful not to peel the stuck part too fast.

When she sees the wound, a crescent of torn skin, raw and crusted black at the edges, she presses her lips together.

“Sit,” she orders.

It surprises me, the command. I do as I’m told, lowering myself onto the bench at the foot of the bed.

She disappears into the bathroom, returns with a first aid kit I didn’t know I owned.

I watch her set out the supplies. Alcohol. Gauze. Tweezers. Scissors.

She opens the bottle and pours it over a cloth, then dabs at the wound.

It stings, but I don’t react. She works in silence.

“Why aren’t you afraid of me?” I ask.

She doesn’t stop. “Who says I’m not?”

I laugh, the sound a little too sharp. “You’re not shaking. You’re not running. You’re not even blinking.”

She looks up, meets my eyes. “You’re the first man I’ve ever met who doesn’t pretend to be anything but what he is.”

“What am I?”

“Dangerous,” she says, and goes back to cleaning.

For a moment, I want to argue, but I know she’s right. I’m dangerous. To everyone. Even to her.

She finishes cleaning the wound, then presses gauze to it, taping it down with practiced efficiency.

She sets the bloody cloth aside and wipes her hands on a towel.

“It will scar,” she says.

“Everything does,” I reply, not taking my eyes off of her.

She stands there, looking down at me, hands at her sides. Her breathing is tight, shallow.

There’s a tension in her body, something coiled and waiting. I can feel the heat of her skin from here.

“What are you afraid of, Rosalynn?” I ask, softer than I mean to.

She hesitates. Looks away, then back. “I’m more afraid of how I feel when you’re not here.”

The words hit like a punch.

For a second, I don’t know how to respond.

I’m used to people fearing me, hell, I prefer it, but this is different. This is honest. And it’s worse than if she had told me a lie.

I reach for her wrist, the one still bruised from her brother’s grip.

She lets me and stands perfectly still as I pull her closer.

I guide her onto my lap, one arm around her waist, the other sliding up her back.