Page 39 of Jax
Then everything blew.
Shouts ricocheted off walls, men scrambled, and weapons clattered. The first muzzle flash cracked the dark and lit up a man’s surprised face long enough for my crosshairs to find the center of it. One shot. My shot was quiet, a suppressed cough, and he fell forward into the shadows.
The room bloomed with noise. It didn’t get frantic, though. That was a lie people swallowed because it came from Hollywood. Instead, it got focused. The Kings didn’t fucking do panic. We did angles, breath, and the shortest line between a problem and its solution.
Edge moved like a knife and smiled like a lunatic. Nitro didn’t so much as blink when rounds pinged metal near his shoulder; he adjusted and answered with a pop pop pop that shut two men up forever. Fury flowed through the chaos, head down, a coil ready to strike, every shot a sentence that ended with a period.
I cut the room into zones in my head and slid across them between cover, sighting, breathing, and squeezing. One headshot. Another. No wasted motion, no noise. Just precision.
One man pivoted, gun raising, and I put two in his center mass. Another got bold and popped out from behind a crate, screaming something about “sons of—” that ended when I put him down mid-hyphen.
But even as my finger pulled and my gun kicked, my eyes scanned, hunting for one face. The man who tied it all together. The one still holding the knife over Lark’s throat.
He wasn’t there.
Two on the catwalk tried to flank. Edge lifted his gun, drew a line through the space between them, and both men dropped, their weapons clanging through the grating. He whooped soft and a little deranged as Nitro clipped a charge on a crate and sent a shock wave through a far stack for the pure tactical pleasure of making a barricade slide into a fatal angle, basically slicing through the man standing behind it.
Kane’s voice was sharp as he called. “Left! Two!”
Fury answered with a pair of bangs and something heavy met concrete. “One.” Then, almost bored, he added, “Two.”
A third man—one of the mid-tier bastards—sprinted for the loading bay’s roll-up gap, misjudged the lip, and stumbled. I caught him at the hinge, elbow to the temple. Chokehold, quick and tight. His arms flailed while he gasped like a fish tossed onto the dock. I pivoted him to the cinderblock wall and introduced his head to it twice, then his arms went slack. My zip-tie bit plastic into his wrists before I gagged him with a strip of his own shirt and hauled him by the collar across concrete.
Kane’s eyes found mine across the chaos. One nod. No words.
We dragged him out the door, gunfire still raging behind us, and shoved him into the back of the unmarked van waiting two blocks down. The driver—ours—didn’t look up when we slid the back open. We shoved the prisoner in, bent his knees, kickedthem to make space, and I slapped the door shut with the kind of satisfaction that meant the next phase had begun.
“Wrap it,” Kane growled into his mic. “Sweep and burn.” He looked at me. “You’re done here. Go.”
I didn’t argue.
The rooms beneath The Pit were not an accident. Concrete and steel. No windows. No air except the heavy hum of the vent. A drain that didn’t clog. Doors that laughed at pry bars. And a cache of tools and weapons that always made Edge grin. Especially when he added something new to the collection.
The prisoner was quickly zip-tied to a chair, head lolling, blood matting his hair where my elbow had cracked his skull. His chest heaved too fast, and his eyes fought the light until they glistened, animal-sharp and fucking stupid.
I laid out the tools. Not for show. For purpose. No theatrics. Men who called it art were lying to themselves so they could feel special. This wasn’t art. This was maintenance.
“Here’s how this works.” My voice was even as I snapped on gloves. “You tell me the name. The one that keeps the rest of you fed and paid. The one who wasn’t at the party tonight. You speak quickly, and you might have a future.” I shrugged. “Or maybe just an open casket.” As I selected a plier with a slim, serrated mouth, I continued, “You don’t, and I take things in a way you’ll regret for however long you get to live.” Another shrug. “I’d consider cremation after that.”
He tried to talk around the gag so I pulled it down. He licked split lips and coughed.
“You think—” he started.
I snipped the tip of his ring finger off before he got past the verb in his sentences.
He shrieked, high and strangled. The sound hit the concrete and bounced around the room.
“Verb choices matter.” I put the plier down and picked up a mallet. “So do knees.”
He struggled against the zip-ties as if they might give way. Idiot. The chair scraped an inch to the left before I set my boot on one foot and made him still again with my weight.
“This isn’t about vengeance, you know,” I told him, truthfully. “This is removing an obstacle in my fucking way.”
Silence.
Continuing on, I didn’t shout. Didn’t posture. Didn’t waste a word. My voice stayed low, steady, as I pressed the point of a blade just deep enough to slice nerves and bleed truth. His finger snapped under pressure, and his kneecap shattered with a crack that echoed off the walls. Each sound filed away inside me, clean and cold.
He broke. They always did.
