Chapter 42 – BANE
Chapter
Forty-Two
BANE
T he smell hits me first. Death's got this particular stench that you never forget once you've been intimate with it.
A blend of copper and shit and that sickly sweet rot that starts settling in before the body's even cold.
I've been around enough corpses to know when I'm walking into a fucking morgue.
Three guards down in the service corridor, throats opened with skill.
Not messy, not showy. Just dead. The kind of kills that speak to professional efficiency rather than passion.
My hand goes to my sidearm as I move deeper into the building, every nerve screaming that this has gone sideways, and not in the way we were planning on.
"Report," I bark into my comm, but all I get is static. "Carlisle? Elias? Anyone copy?"
Nothing. Dead air where there should be chatter, updates, Felix's dry observations about our tactical patterns. The silence makes my skin crawl worse than finding the bodies.
Another guard around the corner, this one took a blade to the kidney before getting his neck snapped.
Quick, quiet, efficient. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it without raising any alarms. The auction house has gone tomb-silent, that particular type of quiet that means something catastrophic has happened.
I push through the main doors to the auction floor, and my brain short-circuits trying to process what I'm seeing.
Bodies. Everywhere.
The entire fucking audience is down. Some slumped in their chairs like they just decided to take a nap, others sprawled on the floor in puddles of their own vomit and blood.
The rich fucks who were bidding on human beings five minutes ago are now cooling meat, their designer suits soaked with bodily fluids that definitely void the warranty.
"What the fuck?" The words come out louder than intended, echoing in the death-quiet space.
Movement across the room catches my eye, and I've got my gun raised before I recognize Elias's silver hair. He's kneeling beside one of the bodies, fingers pressed to a neck that's definitely not producing a pulse.
"Elias!" I pick my way through the corpses, trying not to step in anything that'll leave DNA evidence. "Did you—did we—what the fuck happened here?"
He looks up, those blue eyes clinical even surrounded by this massacre. "Poison," he says simply, standing. "In the champagne, from what I can tell. Fast-acting neurotoxin. Most of them were dead before they hit the ground."
"Did one of ours do this?" I scan the room again, looking for any sign of our people among the dead. "Carlisle's got access to this kind of shit, but this isn't his style. Not personal enough."
"No." Elias strips off the latex gloves he must have had in his pocket, because of course the good doctor comes prepared for impromptu autopsies. "This was planned in advance. Whoever did this wanted everyone in this room dead."
"Another vigilante group?" I ask doubtfully.
"Seems like a mighty big coincidence," Elias murmurs.
"The comm's down," I tell him, checking my earpiece again like it might magically start working. "Can't reach anyone."
His jaw tightens. "Mine too. Went dead right after I reported my position." He pulls out his phone, but I can see from his expression that it's not any better. "No signal. They're jamming us."
"Fuck." I run my hand through my hair, trying to think through the implications. "The rendezvous point. If shit went sideways, that's where they'd go."
We move together through the building, past more bodies, more evidence of systematic execution. The backstage area's been hit too. Handlers, security, all down. But no omegas. The cages where they were keeping the "merchandise" are empty, doors hanging open like someone got here first.
The collection area's worse. Blood spray on the walls suggests someone put up a fight here. A guard's missing half his face, another's got his chest cavity opened up like someone was looking for prizes inside. This is messier, angrier. Personal.
"This wasn't part of the poisoning," Elias observes, crouching beside the faceless guard. "Someone did this after. Recently, based on the blood coagulation. And I believe the guards were already dead when they did it."
"Felix?" I suggest, though it doesn't feel right. Felix kills clean unless he's making a point. Unless he's furious.
"Possibly." Elias stands, and I can see the gears turning behind his eyes.
"Bane."
Carlisle's voice makes me spin, gun raised before I register it's him. He looks uncharacteristically disheveled, his perfect suit jacket torn, knuckles bloody like he's been introducing his fists to someone's face repeatedly. Probably whatever guard managed to survive what happened here.
Behind him is Felix, and fuck, I've never seen him look like this.
My immediate relief at the sight of him is tempered by the realization that Juniper isn't with them, and he looks haunted.
Gone is any pretense of control, any mask of indifference.
His silver eyes are wild, feral, like something inside him has snapped and what's left is pure predator.
His hands are shaking—not with fear, but with the kind of rage that needs to tear something apart or it'll turn inward and devour him whole.
Yeah, he's definitely the one who mutilated those bodies. I know a man whose sanity is hanging by a thread when I see one.
"Where's Juniper?" The question tears out of him before I can speak. "Have you seen her? Found any sign?—"
"No." The word hits him like I just stabbed him. "Felix, what happened?"
Carlisle answers when Felix just stares at me with those haunted eyes. "She's gone. His brother has her."
The words land like grenades in my chest. His brother. Evan. The sick fuck who ran the Serpents' Den, who tortured them both, who Felix has been planning to kill since the day they escaped.
"He left a note," Carlisle continues, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. "Knew exactly where we'd be, exactly how to get to her. This whole thing was a fucking setup."
I take the note, recognizing the kind of taunting that comes from someone who thinks they've already won. The handwriting's neat, controlled, nothing like the chaos he's caused.
"Where's Archer?" Elias asks suddenly, and we all freeze.
"His last check-in was about a suspicious person near the back exit, right before the comms went dead," I say, already moving. "Southeast corner."
We find evidence of a struggle at the loading dock. Blood on the concrete, not enough to be fatal but enough to mean someone got hurt. Archer's earpiece crushed under a dumpster, his sidearm abandoned behind a stack of pallets.
"They got him too," Felix says, and his voice is so empty it makes my chest ache. "Evan has them both."
"We don't know that for certain," Elias says, but even he doesn't sound convinced. "Archer could have?—"
"No." Felix picks up something from the ground—a silver ring I recognize as one of Archer's. There's blood on it. "I know my brother. He probably took Archer as insurance, just in case you decided an omega you've just met isn't worth your time."
I bristle at the very thought that Juniper doesn't mean the world to us. But fine. Let the bastard underestimate us. He'll pay for that, along with all his other cruelties.
"She's not alone if Archer's with her," I say firmly. "He'll protect her until we can reach them."
Felix laughs, but it's the sound of something breaking.
"You don't understand. The Serpents' Den isn't just a brothel.
It's a fortress. Evan's had years to perfect his security, his methods.
And he knows exactly what buttons to push, what fears to exploit.
He made us who we are, and he knows how to unmake us. "
"Then we unmake him first," Carlisle says simply, and there's something in his voice that reminds me why we keep a psychopath on the payroll. "We go in, we get our people, and we paint the walls with anyone who gets in our way."
"It's a trap," Felix says flatly. "He's expecting me to come. Wanting it. And he wants you, too, if he took Archer. Two birds with one stone and all that."
"Good," I growl, feeling my own rage crystallizing into something useful. "Let him expect you. He's not expecting us."
Elias nods, already shifting into tactical mode. "We need weapons, medical supplies, a way in that doesn't announce ourselves?—"
"I know the building," Felix interrupts. "Every entrance, every blind spot. I helped design some of the security when I was—" He stops, swallows hard. "I can get us in."
Elias is already pulling out his phone, typing rapidly. "I'll call in favors, get us everything we need. We can be ready to move in three hours."
"Too long," Felix says immediately. "Every minute we wait?—"
"Every minute we wait is a minute to plan, to prepare, to make sure we don't get them killed by charging in half-cocked," I counter. "Your brother's had years to prepare. We get three hours."
Felix looks like he wants to argue, but Carlisle puts a hand on his shoulder. "Three hours to arm ourselves properly. To make sure when we walk in there, we walk out with everyone breathing. Everyone who matters, anyway."
The parking garage is exactly where we left it, our vehicles untouched. Whatever clusterfuck happened inside, it was targeted. And I can't help but feel that although we got suckered into doing Evan's dirty work tonight, the game is about to get turned against him.
"The Serpents' Den," Felix says as we load into the SUV. "It's outside Vegas, built into an old casino that went under. Looks abandoned from the outside, but inside..." He trails off, and I can see him getting lost in memories that probably taste like blood and helplessness.
"Inside is where we're going to end this," I finish for him. "Once and for all."