Page 65 of Retaliation

“There must be something you can do!” Her throat tightened, and she loathed herself for pleading with the brute in front of her.

“Poison, there really isn’t. Go to work, take the day, and calm down. I’ll get Dennis and we’ll go look for him.” His voice softened slightly, but his eyes remained hard.

“Fine,” she muttered, her voice barely audible. “But if you don’t find him, I will.”

Knowing it didn’t help to argue, she turned to her bike but stopped in her tracks. She turned to Gunnar and asked: “Why are you helping me when you clearly don’t like me, and Scorpion wants me dead?”

He studied her for a moment before he answered.

“You’re right. I don’t like you,” he said without a trace of emotion. “But Scorpion does. Heaven knows why.” He gave her a once-over as again. He always seemed to be looking her over. “But his judgment is clouded by vengeance at the moment. I know he’ll regret it and hate himself if he does anything. So this has nothing to do with helping you but everything to do with helping my brother.”

She couldn’t help but respect Gunnar for his loyalty.

“Noted,” she mumbled and, with a nod, turned on her heel and got onto her bike.

She made it to work twenty minutes late. Traffic had been a nightmare. Rushing up the stairs to her office, not bothering to wait for the elevator, she was met by almost deserted halls, which made her slam a palm to her forehead. They had a staff meeting, and she was late. Turning back to the stairs, she took them two at a time to the conference hall.

In front of the door, she took a deep breath and braced herself for the onslaught that would follow once she opened it.

So, with a grin on her face, she plucked the doors open, making an entrance as every head turned to face her. Topaz’s eyebrows nearly touched his receding hairline as she took a seat at the back.

“Miss Sloan,” he called into the microphone. “Do you care to explain to the rest of the staff why you are late to work?”

Her smile grew sinister as she rose to her feet again and looked him in the eye.

“Someone told me to go to hell,” she explained. “I couldn’t find it at first, but I’m here now.”

A few people snickered, and she bowed at the hips for her audience.

“Sit down,” Topaz ordered.

His cheeks burned red, and she couldn’t help herself. She saluted him with a “Yes, sir”, just like he did to her at the launch, before sitting again.

The rest of the day crawled by in slow motion. The moment the clock struck five, Poison rushed to the parking lot and sped off.

She didn’t want to go home and didn’t want Scorpion to follow her to Nina’s place, so that wasn’t an option, but she wanted to confront him. She was on her way to his factory again when Gunnar’s voice rang in her ears. So, she changed course and found herself in the neighborhood she grew up in.

The familiar sights and smell hit her right in the heart as she parked her bike in an alley behind a dumpster. She covered it with cardboard boxes she found nearby, concealing every part from wandering eyes. In this neighborhood, a machine like hers would be stolen in the blink of an eye.

Car alarms and screaming had been the backtrack of her childhood, and gunshots had echoed through the air more times a day than the school bell.

Stuffing her hands into her pockets, she walked down the road. Nothing had changed since she had left—everything had just deteriorated. Big Al’s was still the only convenience store for miles, and Pam’s Pizza was the best slice in the neighborhood.

She wandered the streets until she stopped in front of her childhood home. Memories flooded her mind and threatened to spill through her eyes. Her foot hovered over the steps to the basement apartment, the moss overtaking the concrete.

How many times had she slipped on those steps in the icy winter months? How many scraped knees from running away from Jonathan? And how many times did she sit on those steps, tucked under her brother’s arm, when their mother hadcompanyas she had called it?

Her mother was only seventeen when Jonathan was born and eighteen when she had her. They never knew their father. Their mother had insisted that it had been the same man, and Poison wanted to believe it. They had the same green eyes and dark hair.

Turning away from the memories, she walked down the street again. Exactly as she had done on her eighteenth birthday, when her mother had kicked her out.

She knew her mother didn’t live there anymore. She had come here on her twenty-first birthday looking for her, but the new tenants had been there for two years already.

It was completely dark when the sound of a crowd cheering drew her to the entrance of an alley. On the other side of the alley was a hoard of people, and in the middle, she could make out the silhouettes of two fighters going at it.

Unorganized street fights outside of a ring only meant one thing—a power struggle, a crew broken apart over leadership.

She wanted to run and kick the shit out of them. No crew worth their salt would fight among themselves. But she just shoved her fists deeper into her pockets and moved on. Jumping into another crew’s fight would be suicide. She didn’t have backup, and even though they were already divided, they’d have each other’s backs when a stranger threatened.

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