20. Threx Gregorian Chant
twenty
Threx: Gregorian Chant
“I fucking hate clearouts,” Jessie murmured, the wool mask catching in his mouth. “Why aren’t level twos stuck with this bullshit?”
“Because we’re already on Marianne’s shit list, and she asked for us,” Wolfe explained from the back seat, his face barely visible beneath the cracked dome light. “Plus, I want to see how squirmy these motherfuckers are. Rinley’s been with them lately, and I don’t like the smell.”
“And we’re just what?” Blade laughed. “Going to make him clean up his new friends?”
“Exactly,” Wolfe said, staring into nothing.
“Why would her men work with Cross?” Nathem asked. “I mean, the guy’s green as hell.”
Yes. Tyrian’s nephew, Shade, was a different breed from his uncle, and that only meant chaos. We all knew he had it out for Marianne, but I had a sneaky suspicion he was coming for all of us. Maybe not tomorrow, but Shade was inevitable.
“Marianne inspires about as much loyalty as Karsten,” Wolfe said, tossing a piece of wintermint gum into his mouth and chewing until it popped. “Honestly, those two should just fuck. But it doesn’t matter. We don’t offer traitors amnesty.”
I stayed quiet, replaying the conversation with Daphne until it bled down the back of my throat.
The way she went silent after I told her she was mine didn’t feel the way I thought it would.
Not that she should trust it. I’ve spent our entire lives pushing her away from the kind of intimacy I could never come back from.
Still, the way she just sat there and said nothing made it feel too real.
I told her to choose Maine, but even then, I didn’t believe it.
Ever since I uttered those words, the only thing I’ve been waiting for is… her.
“Hear from Daph?” Nathem asked, trying to cut the tension.
None of us liked kill jobs, even if the assholes were traitors.
Not because of the moral implications, and believe me, I know how fucked up that is.
But we’ve done this too long to let it ruin our appetite or mess with our sleep.
No, it was the pacing. The chaos. How unclean it felt.
The image of a man who’d been eating half a sandwich, now dead at the table.
I pulled an earplug from my pocket to blunt the sensation from creeping into my head.
“Yeah. She’s okay,” I mumbled, tasting my breath.
“She sent me a joke yesterday,” Nathem said, gripping the wheel.
“I’m sorry,” I choked on the air, grinning under the mask.
Daphne was witty, clever, but intentionally funny? No. Her jokes were the worst, and everyone knew it.
“What did she say?” Wolfe asked, leaning forward to check the time. We always ran contracts eleven minutes past the hour. Superstitious, maybe. But no one questioned it.
“What happens when an Irishman walks into a bar?”
We all turned.
“Everyone walks out pregnant.”
“Fuck’s sake,” I groaned, rolling my eyes while Blade and Jessie snorted. “I told her to give up, but she doesn’t listen.”
“I don’t know,” Nathem answered under his breath. “I was proud of our princess for taking an interest in my heritage. Because facts.”
“Fuck,” Wolfe huffed, pinging a folded piece of paper off his shoulder. “You’re who she learned it from.”
That might actually be true.
There was something about those two giggling in the corner of the common room over nonsensical shit that warmed my chest. He was her person in a way Wolfe and I could never be, and I’d always appreciated that.
She didn’t lean into others easily, especially women, but something about Nathem clicked.
Out of all of us, he was the most human.
“It’s time,” Jessie said, and we fell silent, the car doors opening without so much as a whisper when we stepped into the black streets of forgotten Seattle.
The building was jagged, with boarded-up rusty nails, warped wood, and moss that came pretty standard for drug runs.
The city knew the Underworld controlled most of the dilapidated architecture and looked the other way.
Some were paid off by Karsten, others by Marianne, but all of them sat in Cross’s pocket, which, strangely enough, held most of the Reapers these days too.
Suffice to say, we wouldn’t go to jail for what we were about to do. Only hell. Always hell.
Jessie gave a slow nod, and I brought my weapon up.
Blade and Jess would take the center room, while Wolfe had the kitchen and the basement beneath it.
Nathem and I would handle the back of the house.
We were the biggest, and in close quarters, you had to be able to absorb a hit and keep fighting.
Plus, the noise always gave them time to either break through a window or put on their hero pants and fire off some asshole shots that never struck a goddamn thing. Either way, it was messy.
Wolfe nodded, his glassy eyes every bit as controlled as the man behind them, and we crept to the door.
“What the fuck?” was the last sound I heard before screaming and gunfire swallowed the room.
In situations like this, you’re aware of everything: the pattern on a sofa dragged in from some backshit alley, or the way your boots move across a broken floor. And yet you hold on to none of it. You don’t look. Don’t think. You simply aim, pull the trigger, and go the fuck home.
Nathem nodded at me and vanished down the hallway when we entered. Half the shouting had already faded, but for real? There was no way to know. You got good at not paying attention to it.
I stepped into the cramped space. While the drugs were in the front, the sex was in the back, and everyone knew this was Marianne’s favorite part.
She liked to trade sex for drugs, funneling people with an addiction into houses like this to get high before they turned tricks was job security at its finest.
She received a cut off the sex and then got paid when they needed their medicine.
But fuck Marianne. Nathem and I always let them go. Wolfe knew, and he never said shit. Traitors were one thing, but sad girls with needles in their arms? No fucking way.
I moved forward, pushing past the scent of piss and rot, and didn’t pay attention to it. Not to the way the drab flowers peeled off the old wallpaper, or the crumpled yellow sheets lining the floor. I dimmed my eyes and kept moving, opening one door at a time.
Empty.
Then another.
Empty again.
Fuck. God must’ve been on my side tonight, because I did not have the headspace for this. With Daphne so far away, I might as well have been bathing in gasoline for how raw and unregulated I felt.
Food sucked.
Sex did not exist.
And I couldn’t sleep worth a shit.
Another door.
Empty.
Finally, I made it to the last one. People were still fighting behind me, the sounds of furniture breaking and gunfire blurring together. It did not matter. We were almost done! I took a breath, pushed on the knob, and flung the last door open.
At first, the room looked bare, but only the way ghosts are right before they say boo.
The dank, crusted space yanked me straight back to the mattress in the middle of Daphne’s room, and my stomach roiled.
Maybe from memory. Maybe not, but it smelled wrong, like rotting scabs that never saw daylight.
I nearly slammed the door shut when a shivering bundle of shadows dragged my eyes to the middle of the floor.
Bang.
Whatever was huddled there stayed so quiet you’d think it believed that if it remained silent enough, I wouldn’t see it. That shit was kid logic and… Something broke behind my eyes. Hot at first. Then burning.
“Shit,” I whispered, stepping inside and shutting the bedroom door, reaching for the light on my phone. I was never one to tremble, but there wasn’t a shred of safety left in my body to keep my hand steady. This was a nightmare. My literal fucking nightmare.
Another gunshot cracked closer, sending red spray under the slit in the door when I saw two small bodies frozen in terror, bundled up in a mesh of skin and bones.
From what I could make out, there was one boy, maybe six, and a girl, no older than five.
Oversized shirts hung off their frames, which sat lifeless under clumps of matted hair.
“Please,” someone begged from somewhere else in the house. “Please don’t. I’m not a part of this. I just… I just needed the drugs.”
There’s such a thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sex workers got a pass, but there was no way to know if that plea was lying.
Bang.
“Asher,” the little girl whimpered when the boy wrapped his hands over her ears, pulling her close to shield her.
“Stay still, Emm,” he whispered. “Maybe he doesn’t see us.”
But I did see them. Was seeing them. Could never unsee them.
“Get up,” I growled, swallowing the bile crawling up my throat and moving when I realized Nathem had changed direction. “Now.”
They didn’t. They only stared at me from their huddle.
“Is your family out there?” I asked, unsure why, because there was nothing I could do to stop this moment from hurting them. Absolutely fucking nothing. Just like I couldn’t keep Karsten from knowing Daphne’s face, or Wolfe from exposing it.
They blinked, their hollow eyes remaining still.
“Emm,” I whispered, crouching toward the girl. “I know I seem scary, but I will not hurt you.”
It was strange to be feared this way, recalling the warmth in Daphne’s eyes whenever I entered the frame. To her, there was no safer place than me, but for this hollowed-out, starving little thing, I was the devil in a face mask.
“We don’t have family,” the boy answered quietly, throwing up an arm over her chest as if that would stop me. “We’ve been hiding since the bad men came. This used to be our house. I mean, we found it first.”
Flashbacks of Daph and me sleeping in an outhouse one winter sat broken in my spine. There were tons of unclaimed children in this city, hiding in dumpsters, eating off the street, disappearing forever, and you would never know it because kids are resourceful, and they understood how to hide.
“Okay,” I urged. “Get up.”
Bang.
“NOW!”