Page 259 of Fractured Allegiance

He snaps his head toward me, eyes wide with something between fury and nausea. “He wasn’t…” He swallows hard, corrects himself. “He didn’t deserve—”

I cut him off. “He gave names. He deserved every ounce of it. You want to play in this world, you don’t get to choke when the blood gets on your shoes.”

Jax looks back at the road, lips pressed thin, but I see it, the crack. The boy hasn’t fully decided if he belongs here, and Elias saw it too. That’s why he made him drive. Nothing teaches you the rules faster than hauling a body while it cools a foot away.

The morgue is tucked behind an industrial district, where the streetlamps hum but never shine bright enough. Elias picked the place because men like us don’t need paperwork, just a door that opens and shuts without comment.

Jax pulls the sedan into a narrow alley, cutting the engine. For a second, no one moves. Then I pop the trunk.

The stench hits first. Blood and plastic. The body is heavier now, dead weight settled and unforgiving. We grab the tarp by the corners, hauling Ren corpse out, his head lolling with each step. Jax’s face is pale as chalk, sweat clinging to his hairline. He nearly gags when the tarp brushes his leg.

I smirk at him. “Don’t puke on him. That’s disrespectful.”

Lydia is standing a few paces away, arms crossed, heels clicking against the pavement as she shifts her weight. Watching, always watching.

The morgue door opens with a metallic groan. A man in scrubs stands there, eyes flat, face pockmarked, hands tucked into latex gloves that glisten under the yellow light. He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t even look at Ren’s face when we shove the tarp across the threshold.

He just nods once. “Room six.”

We follow him down a corridor that smells of bleach fighting a losing battle. The lights flicker overhead, buzzing like flies circling carrion. Every drawer we pass whispers a truth: men vanish here every night, and the city never notices.

As instructed, we drop Ren on the slab in Room six. Jax stumbles back, wiping his palms against his jeans as if the filth will come off. The man in scrubs takes out a clipboard, scribbles something down, then looks at us with all the warmth of a locked door. “Same as last time?”

Elias’s voice echoes from behind me. He came in without me hearing, which means he’s angrier than he looks. “Same as last time.”

The man nods, no more words, and wheels the body away.

It’s that easy. One man executed, erased, filed into oblivion.

Jax looks like he might vomit on the floor. Lydia doesn’t blink.

I can’t stop watching her.

Her face is unreadable, but when the door closes and the body disappears, she exhales through her nose, subtle, a release she doesn’t want noticed. And I know. She’s fighting the memory of every betrayal carved into her skin, the way trust always collapses into blood.

She catches me staring.

“What?” she asks, voice sharp.

The ride back is heavier than the body we left behind. Jax doesn’t say a word, just grips the wheel like the steering column owes him money. The city blurs past—empty streets, glowingwindows, the occasional siren in the distance—but none of us are watching it.

Lydia sits behind me at the back this time, her reflection caught in the window glass. Eyes fixed outward, but not really seeing. She’s too still. Too calm. The kind of calm that only lives on the edge of something breaking.

When we reach the safehouse, Elias wastes no time, he moves, phone pressed to his ear, pacing in front of the table littered with maps and weapons. His voice is low, clipped, calculated. “I don’t care how many you pull, I want loyal men, and I want them ready by nightfall. Yes. Petrov Station. No, there’s no delay. You’ll be compensated.”

He hangs up without a goodbye, snatches another phone from the table, dials again. His tone doesn’t rise, but it cuts deep, steel grinding steel. He’s summoning men, gathering muscle, moving pawns across a board that only he can see.

Jax sinks into a chair, rubbing his palms against his thighs. He looks drained, hollowed out. That’s what moving bodies does to men not yet sure if they belong in the dark.

I don’t sit. I lean against the doorframe, watching Elias call one ghost after another into play. His control is unshakable, the kind that makes men like Jax obey, makes rooms still themselves when he walks in. But I see the crack. Just a hairline fracture in the steel, left behind by what we almost lost —Mara watching Ren’s blood splatter across the floor.

Elias would gut a city for her, and everyone here knows it. I bet he hates that he had to do that while she was here.

Lydia pours herself a drink, amber liquid catching the light as it swirls into the glass. Her hands don’t shake. She tips it back, swallows like it’s water. When she sets the glass down, her eyes find mine.

She doesn’t look away. Neither do I.

Her lips tilt, barely a smirk, more like a test. “What are you looking at?”