Page 37 of The Wild Charge

“Fox,” Eden prompted on the other end of the line.

“Could be I’m just paranoid,” he said, as he started clicking through various camera feeds; there were a lot of them, far more than any other club he’d been inside. “But this chat I found – I took pics to send you – made it soundverysketchy. They’re keeping track of which girls are underage, and the cameras are…”

“Oh, shit,” she said. And then, when he didn’t pick his sentence back up, “What?”

“Hold on.” Fox pulled his phone back and switched it to speaker, and then camera mode so he could take another picture. The feed he’d landed on clearly showed the back of the building, all flat-faced, black-painted brick and ugly steel roof. There were several loading bays, as expected, and a heavy, metal pedestrian door at the top of a staircase. Beside it, small, but clearly visible, was an inverted, yellow triangle.

Yield.

The same sign Abacus had left them in the abandoned mill in Knoxville.

A marker for members.

And a taunt for anyone who would try to stop them.

“It’s them,” Fox said, words like lead in his mouth. His gut clenched, and hehatedthat this was related. He’d wanted it to be a coincidence, Eden letting her imagination get the best of her.

But when had she ever done that?

“What?” Her voice went shrill. “It is? You’re sure?”

“I’m looking right at that stupid tag of theirs.”

“Shit.” A beat passed. “Shit. Okay. Okay, okay. You need to–”

“I know. I’m pulling every file I can.”

“Okay, good. Okay, that’s–” She choked off with a muted sound, and Fox paused, finger hovering over the mouse.

“You okay?”

He could hear her gulp through the phone. Her voice came out thin and strained. “Fine.”

He frowned at the screen in front of him. “No, you sound like shit. What’s the matter?”

“No, it’s–” Whatever else she said – a near-whisper at this point – was drowned out by the quick beep of the lock being disengaged from the outside.

“I’ll call you back,” he said, hung up, and stood.

If he’d calculated right, and he always did, then he had three seconds to snatch every other flash drive in the place and lay the intruder out.

It was almost too easy, to be honest.

Ten

Reese ducked a clumsy punch, popped back up, and struck the man in front of him with the edge of his hand, one harsh strike against his throat. He fell back choking, stumbling over the man Reese had kicked in the face and sent free-falling backward like a felled tree, unconscious. He hadn’t meant to knock anyone out – but, well, there were eight bouncers converging on them, and while they could win, it didn’t mean they could leave everyone standing and uninjured.

The man he’d struck continued to choke, but he glared through the tears that filled his eyes. These were big men: thick-necked, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested. All of them bigger than Reese and Tenny.

But brute strength wasn’t as important as honed skill, and no matter how big, these bouncers hadn’t had so much as a quarter of his and Tenny’s training. In that sense, it wasn’t so much a fight as–

“Ha!” Tenny crowed, in his real voice, the American act dropped – not because of the heat of the moment, Reese knew, but because he’d deemed this whole adventure beneath him and wasn’t going to bother with a façade any longer. “Is that the best you’ve got?”

–a chance to let off a little steam.

The choking man surged in closer, determined, despite his streaming eyes.

Reese laid him out with a few quick blows. Pressure points were important: nerves, airways, eyes, nose. If a person couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel, couldn’t see, he could be taken out of the equation.

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