Page 66 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

The crack rings off the concrete, and the first drop of blood hits the ground before he can shout. He stumbles back into the bollard, hands up, eyes wide like a horse that smelled fire.

“I didn’t…I didn’t sell her,” he gasps. “I didn’t—”

“You sold me,” I say. “Which is the same thing.”

He swings. It is clumsy and fueled by shock. I catch his wrist and twist. He drops to a knee. My boot clips his ribs.

“You had other choices,” I say. “You chose wrong. You did it more than once.”

I drag him by the collar behind the containers to where the camera doesn’t see. The river watches. The highway drones. I make it fast because kindness is not the same as mercy.

When he stops moving, I take his phone, his wallet, and the brass key in his pocket that isn’t his. Vale’s. The blade etched on the head tells me I’m right.

I lay Kinley face down and close his eyes. He was mine. He isn’t anymore. I do not pray. I do not count.

Back in the SUV, the wheel cuts into my palms. I send Lydia one word: Done.

Her reply comes two seconds later: I know.

I send a second: Union.

Her answer: I’ll hold the house. Get what you went for.

I aim the SUV at Union Mill and keep the needle where I want it.

Union Mill lifts its brick face out of a block of glass and steel like a stubborn bone.

The freight tower sits behind the main facade, tall and blind.

I park in the alley behind the loading dock and cross the cracked concrete on foot.

The service door has a keypad that anyone with hands can rip out, so I use the brass key instead.

It slides home with the weight of stolen trust.

Inside, the corridor stinks of dust and oil. Two men lean on a dolly near the freight elevator, caps pulled low. They don’t look up until I am close enough to see the scuffs on their boots. When they do, it is already over.

The first reaches for a pocket. My elbow meets his jaw and the back of his head hits the metal door with a sound like a pan dropped in a sink. The second fumbles for a knife. I take his wrist and drive it into the wall. Bone kisses cinder block. He screams. It stops when his face meets my knee.

I take the knife because it is there. The elevator needs the key and the thumbprint above the panel. Vale’s thumb is not available. The man with the broken wrist offers his without trying to be noble.

The cage rattles up six floors and opens into a hallway lined in concrete and silence. A glass door waits at the end with a steel frame and a discreet card reader. No name. Vale likes the idea of being faceless. It only works on people who need names to feel brave.

I knock once. It is unnecessary. The lock clicks.

Vale stands behind a desk that was expensive twenty years ago and now looks like someone’s father’s idea of power. He wears a charcoal suit that will never fit him right and a ring that doesn’t belong to him. His smile shows teeth he purchased.

“Elias,” he says. “We finally do this civil.”

“I am not civil,” I say.

He gestures to the chair. “I’ll make it brief then. Your girl is—”

I cross the room and take his throat with my left hand. The chair tips. The desk shudders. The ring digs into my palm as he claws at my wrist. His eyes go wide. Sound fails him.

“You put men outside her clinic,” I say, steady. “You texted my phone. You took money from a man who uses women like bait for sport. You are a rotting thing in a nice jacket.”

He tries to speak. I don’t adjust my grip. He points toward a cabinet. I know the game. Gun. Panic button. He’s sure backup will arrive in time because money always made it so.

“Don’t,” I tell him.

He freezes. His tongue pushes against the air that won’t come. His eyes water.

I release him enough to let his breath scrape back in. He coughs. It turns to a laugh that bleeds on the edges.

“You can’t hold every door, Voss,” he rasps. “You can’t be everywhere. The girl will be hurt somewhere you aren’t.”

I consider that truth. I acknowledge it. Then I break his nose and drive him across the desk. He collapses into the leather chair and it skids into the window with a sound that pleases me.

“Names,” I say.

“Go to hell.”

“I spend my days there,” I say. “You’ll hate the hours.”

He spits blood. “Volker said you’d make this messy. He said—”

I hit him once. Not hard. Enough to end the sentence that matters to me.

“Volker is a dead man walking,” I say. “You’ll not be walking at all if you say his name in this room again.”

His eyes shine with hate. “You think the girl wants you now? Wait until she sees what you do without her in the room. You can pretend you kill for her. You really kill because you like it.”

I smile without my mouth. “Both can be true.”

He lunges for the cabinet. He is not fast. I let him get the drawer open because I learned a long time ago that fear means less when a man thinks he has a chance. The gun clears the wood. My hand closes around the slide. I turn it and put the muzzle against his cheek.

He pants. “Do it.”

I think of Mara standing in my kitchen, holding a baton with hands that shook less each minute. I think of her staring me down and saying she needed me with hate and hunger in the same breath. I think of the envelope of photos in the alley. The text. The Civic in the clinic feed.

I put the gun in the cabinet and close the drawer with his face.

He drops to his knees when the edge clips his temple.

I take his wrist, turn the ring until skin gives.

I pocket it. The ring doesn’t belong to him.

It belonged to a girl who thought he was safety once.

I know because I make it my business to know.

I grind the ring under my boot, and he makes a sound I’ve heard from dogs that lost half a leg under a car.

“This is the end of your part in it,” I say.

I do not draw it out. I do not speak again. I finish it with the belt from his own trousers. I keep it clean. I make sure he looks like a man who failed to wake. I wipe prints. I pocket the USB that sits under the desk blotter because men like Vale always keep one.

Before I go, I turn his face toward the window. The river looks like a vein. He will not see it again. He never saw it when it mattered.

The elevator gives me back the corridor, and the two men on the dolly are still there. One snores wet onto the concrete. The other moans.

“Leave town,” I tell him. “Tell anyone who asks that Vale moved to the country.”

He nods so hard his cap shifts. I don’t wait for him to stop.

Back in the SUV, I plug Kinley’s phone into a cable. Lydia’s exploit runs the lock like it’s nothing, lines of code peeling back his secrets one by one. The screen wakes, and the messages spill out—thread after thread, his betrayal written plain.

The thread with the relay sits there like a throat I can crush with one thumb.

I type a single line: Union closed. New site needed.

The reply pings at once: Understood. Confirm status of asset.

Asset. They mean me. Or they mean Mara. I test the word.

Asset secure.

Another ping: Hold pattern. Await next window.

My lip curls. I kill the thread and toss the phone into the glove box. The USB from Vale’s desk waits on the passenger seat. I pocket it. It will feed me later. Right now, I want air that doesn’t smell like old carpet and dead money.

I call Lydia.

“Tell me,” she says.

“Kinley is finished,” I answer.

She is silent for five beats. “Copy.”

“Vale is off the board.”

Another pause. “You took the head before you cleared the body.”

“Sometimes the body stops moving when the head does.”

“And sometimes it thrashes,” she says. A click of keys on her end. “I’m scrubbing the Kinley relay. I’ll salt it so it points at a rival. If anyone comes sniffing, they won’t sniff here.”

“Text me if the street moves,” I say.

“I’ll do more than text.”

I end the call. My hands smell like cheap cologne from Vale’s coat. I roll the window down and let the air eat it.

At the red light by the viaduct, a man crosses with a dog that looks like a bundle of bones. The dog trots with its head held high anyway. It doesn’t realize it isn’t whole. I watch it until the light changes.

Mara will ask what happened. I will tell her the piece that keeps her steady and hold back the piece that pulls her under. I do not lie to her. I ration the truth.

The phone buzzes again. Not Lydia this time. A new number.

You’re late.

No signature. No context. No need. It isn’t Volker. It isn’t Vale. It reads like someone who knows where I would go next and wants me there faster.

I do not reply. I head for the safehouse.

The door glides open. The air inside smells like coffee and faint sugar.

Lydia has the tablet on the counter again, screens tiled, feeds moving.

Mara stands near the window with her arms folded tight under her ribs.

The baton sits between them like a line they could both step over in the next second.

Both pairs of eyes find me.

Lydia’s scan my face. Her gaze drops to my hands. She nods once. She has always been fluent in what blood dries like.

Mara steps toward me and stops herself after one move. “Well?”

“Vale won’t touch you again,” I say.

She studies me. “Dead?”

“Yes.”

Something in her eases and tightens at once. Relief. Guilt. A shard of approval she will judge herself for later. She closes the distance and rests her palm against my sternum like she is making sure I am solid and not a story I told her.

Lydia slides the tablet into her bag. “We’ll have visitors at some point,” she says. “The kind who don’t know who their head is anymore and want one fast. I salted the line. It will buy us wiggle room.”

“Good,” I say.

“And Kinley?” Lydia asks, even though she already knows.

“He gave me what I needed.”

“Did he get to keep anything?”

“His last minute,” I say.

Mara’s eyes flash to mine. She hears the shape under the words. She doesn’t flinch. She just nods, once, slow, like she knew the answer before she asked.

“Who’s left?” she asks.

“Jori,” I say before I can decide to keep it. “I haven’t decided what he is yet.”

She swallows. “He looked at me like he wanted to help.”

“That doesn’t make him safe.”

“What does?”

“Fear,” I say. “Or love. Anything in between is a leak.”

Lydia snorts. “Poetry hour.”

“Find me a map of Volker’s last known place,” I tell her. “Union files might give us a rabbit trail. We cut it now, we don’t bleed later.”

“On it.” She tucks the bag where she kept the tablet under her arm and heads for the hall. “I’ll take first watch outside your door. Shout if you need a witness or a wall.”

We are alone when the door clicks shut behind her. The room feels larger and smaller at once.

Her spine is iron. Her mouth is soft and furious. I touch her face with both hands and feel the shake in her jaw. Not fear. Not only. A tremor that belongs to a woman who learned in one day how to hit and how to stand.

“You’re not bait,” I tell her again.

“I know,” she says. “I’m a fuse.”

She’s right. I don’t say it.

Her arms go around my neck, and the nightclub in my chest goes quiet. I hold her until my hands calm. When I let go, she does not step away.

“Shower,” she says. “Then we talk.”

I nod. “After that, we plan.”

Her mouth tilts. “After that, you sleep.”

“I don’t—”

“You will,” she says.

The word lands like a command I didn’t know I had been waiting to obey. I head for the bedroom with her quietly following me.

In the bedroom, I strip the jacket and shirt and head for the bathroom. The mirror catches the red across my knuckles and the smear of Vale’s ring on my palm. I wash it until the water runs clear.

When I step back out, Mara sits on the edge of the bed with the baton across her thighs. She looks up and gives me a look that isn’t surrender and isn’t a challenge. It’s something new. Partnership with teeth.

“Tell me everything you can,” she says. “Not the half you think I can carry.”

I sit beside her and start with Kinley. I give her the river wind and the bollard and the brass key.

I give her the words he used. I give her the way his eyes changed when he realized his choice was not a shield but a blade that came back for him.

I give her Vale’s office and the cabinet and the ring I broke under my boot.

She listens without blinking. When I finish, the room stays still, like the air is thinking.

“Thank you,” she says. Not for the deaths. For the truth.

“You hate me,” I say.

“Sometimes,” she answers. “Not now.”

My shoulder knocks hers. “Good.”

Her head tips against my arm and stays there. The baton lies still across her lap like a promise that can be kept.

Outside the window, the night sky stretches out. The city keeps its own counsel. Lydia’s shadow shifts under the door. My phone buzzes once on the nightstand with a new text from the same number as before.

Window soon.

I turn the screen face down. I will open it when I decide to go looking for the next throat that needs my hand. Not before.

Mara’s fingers find mine. They’re steady.

“Tomorrow,” she says.

“Tomorrow,” I answer.

We sit in the calm I made at a cost I will pay again.