Page 251 of Fractured Loyalties
I step back to the safe. The hard drive slides into my coat. The passports follow. The cash I ignore. The trophies I pocket one by one—not for me, but because they don’t belong rotting in his den. They’ll be burned or buried, given back to silence.
Volker slumps sideways in the chair, head lolling, marker still jutting. His body stinks already. It’s not death. It’s the rot that lived in him long before.
I don’t pray. I don’t spit. I don’t grant last words.
The phone in my pocket buzzes once. Lydia.
Her text:House steady. Mara is steady. No street heat yet.
I answer with one word:Done.
Then I look back at Volker one last time. His smile is gone. His trophies are gone. His name will rot with him.
I leave the safe open, its guts hollow. A warning for whoever thinks they can fill it again.
The hall smells like copper and fear. I walk through it clean.
The freight stairwell hums with dying echoes. Every step down smells of rust and gunpowder, a flavor of endings. My hand rides the rail, streaking it with someone else’s blood. I don’t bother to wipe it.
The stairwell empties into a side corridor lined with rusted lockers. A figure crouches there, trying to make himself invisible. Jori.
His hands tremble around a half-empty pistol he hasn’t fired. His eyes find mine and flood with the same truth I’ve seen in every pawn abandoned by the man who moved them: he knows Vale never cared. He knows Volker used him like a spare part.
He swallows hard. “I didn’t—” His voice cracks. “I only did what they told me. They said you’d keep her safe if I kept you busy.”
Pathetic. Honest. Both.
I step closer until the pistol dips on its own. He flinches, but he doesn’t run. He’s too worn out even for that.
“You think they’d have saved you?” I ask.
His jaw works. He can’t answer. He already knows.
I take the pistol from his limp hand and set it on the floor between us. “Vale is dead. Volker is dead. If you want to live, you leave this city and never speak her name again. If you don’t, I’ll find you.”
His nod is frantic, desperate. The kind men give when they’ve already chosen exile.
I leave him there, shaking in the dust, and walk on.
The loading dock is empty when I slip through the side door. Good. Fear works fast when it spreads without orders. Vale’s men. Volker’s men. They scatter the same way: with panic in their lungs.
I take the alley back to the SUV. The engine wakes clean. No tails. No curious eyes.
The hard drive sits on the seat beside me. Its weight feels wrong, heavier than the metal it’s made of. The trophies in my pocket are worse. A bracelet, a ring, a hair tie still bent from use. I can almost hear the girls they belonged to. Not their voices—just the silence of them.
I drive with the window down, air clawing through, trying to strip me clean. It doesn’t. Nothing ever does.
By the time I hit the viaduct, the phone vibrates again. Lydia.
Her text:You’re being followed.
I glance at the mirror. Black sedan, two cars back.. Patient. Wrong kind of patient.
I don’t swerve. I don’t change speed. I let it grow comfortable. Then, three blocks later, I hook left into a service lane that hugs the river. Dead end. That’s the point.
The sedan follows. Predictable.
I kill the engine, step out, and let the pale morning swallow me. Gravel shifts under my boots. The river moves, slow and thick, carrying a greasy shimmer in the first light.
