Chapter 28 – Silas - Blood in the Walls #2
I arch a brow. “And how exactly do you test that? Ask them to pinky swear?”
“No,” Elias says, pushing away from the table. His chair scrapes loud against the floor. “You put them under pressure. Pressure shows cracks.”
He jerks his chin toward the back of the room. “Basement.”
Jax perks up like a mutt hearing the dinner bell. Ren pales but follows. Jori doesn’t even sigh. He just stands, smooth, silent, too practiced.
I stay seated. “What, we’re giving them recess now?”
Elias’s grin is thin. “We're giving them a chance to show you what they're capable of. Or would you rather wait until Drazen’s dogs are at the door to find out?”
The man’s not wrong. Still, I hate giving him the satisfaction of being right. I drag myself up, grabbing my coffee mug just to let the last bitter swallow burn down my throat.
Lydia watches me, arms crossed. She doesn’t argue, doesn’t tell me not to go. But her eyes say it plainly: don’t prove him right about you, too.
I follow them to the basement.
The basement smells like rust and mildew, old concrete sweating damp under bare bulbs. A punching bag hangs in the corner, split at the seams, sand bleeding out like guts. Elias calls it a sparring ground. I call it what it is: an excuse.
Elias moves like he’s walking through scripture when he sets the rules.
He likes control so much he dresses it up as discipline.
“Pair off,” he says. “Two minutes each. No knives. No choking. We’re not burying anyone tonight.
I just want to see if you’ll throw yourself at something that isn’t your own wallet. ”
Jax cracks his knuckles like an animal. Ren shifts on his feet with a nervous energy that could snap a tendon. Jori stands aside, hands in his pockets, the kind of placid you don’t trust because it hides calculation.
Lydia watches from the lip of the stairs, dressed in borrowed clothes from Mara—a fitted black tee and charcoal leggings that hug her frame.
There’s a bruise at the base of her throat, pale and petulant. She doesn’t blink as Jax strips his jacket off and stalks toward the center. Her posture says she’s cataloguing facts, filing them away to use later. She’s always been better at folding chaos into a blade than anyone I know.
“Start with Ward,” Elias says. He points at me like I’m a problem he enjoys.
Of course. Naturally.
I step forward. My boots scuff small arcs into the dust. Jax's grin is all teeth and threat. He's built like a boulder someone tried to carve into a man.
We circle. He swings first—not wild, but measured.
Testing my reflexes, feeling out my training.
I dodge and counter with a jab to his ribs.
He absorbs it with a grunt, barely flinches, and comes back fast with an elbow that clips my jaw.
The impact rattles my teeth, stars blooming at the edge of my vision.
He's got power, but more than that—he's got experience. The kind you don't learn in a gym. When we break apart, both breathing harder, he's grinning wider, wiping blood from his lip.
And I work my jaw.
Elias watches from the edge, arms crossed. Lydia hasn't moved from the stairs, her expression cataloguing every move, every weakness.
Ren steps up next, gloves half on. He's nervous in a way that smells like fear of consequences rather than fear of pain. But when he moves, that nervousness disappears. He's faster than Jax, lighter on his feet, angles where Jax used force.
We trade sequences. He lands a solid hit to my shoulder that'll bruise purple by morning. I manage to sweep his leg, but he rolls with the momentum, back on his feet in seconds. My knee finds his thigh, he counters with a palm to my sternum that drives the air from my lungs.
By the time we break, we're both breathing hard. He spits to the side and nods once—respect in his eyes. He grins and steps back, rubbing his jaw.
Now Jori moves forward. He takes his turn last, and there's a small smile at the corner of his mouth like he's been expecting something he finds amusing. He doesn't put on gloves. He doesn't need them.
We touch, polite at first. He's lighter than I expect—not wiry like Jax, but compact and quick. He tries a feint. I read it and counter. He shifts, absorbs, comes back at a different angle. We're evenly matched—too evenly. Every time I think I have an opening, he's already moved.
“You’re nervous,” I say. I let the word be an observation and a needle.
He answers without sounding off. “Wouldn’t you be? Sitting in a room with a fugitive and a dead man’s future?” The joke comes out too smooth.
I bait him and I press where the men in this room won’t look. “Who are you watching for, Jori? Elias? Drazen? A mailbox?”
For the first time his smile slips. The eyes that return my stare are not amused. There’s an odd blankness there, an expense of something I can’t tax.
“None of your business,” he says. It could be a lie. It could be a confession.
I push again, because that’s what I do. “There’s always someone watching. It’s how the city stays upright. The problem is, sometimes the watchers take their pay and sell the building.”
He doesn’t answer. He shifts his weight, a small, practiced movement. It says he’s ready for an exit strategy if things get contorted. The kind of person who keeps his shoes by the door.
The fight goes quick after that. We trade more sequences—he's slippery, all angles and elbows that bite. I give ground where it matters, take it where it counts. We end in a grapple, neither giving ground, chests heaving, until Elias calls time.
"Enough," Elias says.
We break apart. Jori extends a hand, that odd smile back.
I take it. His grip is firm.
Elias claps once, pleased. "Good. That's what I needed to see. They can handle themselves." He looks at me. "Question is—can you work with them?"
Lydia watches with an unreadable expression from the stairs. Ren rubs his jaw. Jax bounces on the balls of his feet, already telling himself a story about the rematch.
I look at each of them in turn. Bruised, capable, still standing. "Yeah. I can work with them."
Elias nods. "Good." He points at Jori. “You. Stay.”
Jori swallows. His hands go to his pockets, then drop. He looks like a man who has been told to keep his eyes open for a light that will not come.
We head up the stairs in a line that smells like sweat and caution. Lydia is waiting at the top, arms crossed, expression flinty. Her lips curve just once when she sees me climb the last step. Not a smile. A measurement.
“You could have killed one of them,” she says, voice carrying a cool little admonition.
“You mean Jax?” I answer. “He’d apologize for stealing oxygen.”
She shifts on her feet, the leggings hugging the line of her hips. A bruise blooms across her forearm where my hand must have pressed in our last encounter. She catches me watching and doesn’t look away.
“You set them up,” she says. Not a question, not a demand. A fact she’s handing to me.
I let silence be my answer long enough for Elias and Jori to pass us by. Then I say, “Elias wanted pressure. He got it.
She nods, not entirely convinced. “Tests make things break.” Then she glances back at the others before she continues, her voice low enough that it doesn't carry. "Something's off about Jori."
I glance back toward where he's standing with Ren and Jax, laughing at something. "What makes you say that?"
"The way he fought you." She crosses her arms, the borrowed black tee pulling tight across her shoulders. "He was testing you, not trying to prove himself to Elias. Every move was about reading you—your speed, your patterns, where you leave openings."
I turn to face her fully. "Could just be smart."
"Could be." Her eyes stay locked on Jori across the room. "Or he's cataloguing intel for someone else."
The weight of her words settles between us. I've been in this game long enough to know the difference between paranoia and instinct. And Lydia's instincts have kept her breathing through Drazen's hell.
"You think he's a snitch?"
She doesn't answer right away. When she does, her voice is careful. "I think he moves like someone who's always got an exit plan. And men with exit plans don't usually bet everything on one employer."
I watch Jori for a brief moment, his posture relaxed, easy. Too easy.
"Keep an eye on him," I say quietly. "If he twitches wrong, I want to know."
She nods once, then her hand brushes mine—just a moment, fingers grazing knuckles—before she moves away and I follow her.
The basement door closes behind us with a small, final sound. It is an ordinary noise that in this house feels like something else. A seal.
Elias takes a step back to the table and points at the map again. “Petrov’s still the target.” He taps the building image like a promise. “We will move soon. Coordinate. Cover. We don’t walk in like fools.”
Lydia leans forward, hand on my sleeve. The contact is brief, just a ghost of a touch. No declarations. Nothing to hang a future on. But it’s charged in the way the flash before a storm is charged.
“You’re not the only one who thinks he’s clever,” she says under her breath. “Drazen won’t play checkers with us.”
The phone on the counter vibrates. Everyone turns. The tiny red light on the screen is an intrusion. Ren answers and listens like someone reading bad news in a foreign language. His face loses color. Elias's expression hardens.
“What is it?” Lydia asks.
Ren’s hand is a little shaky. “Drazen’s men. They’re circling an old front of Elias’s. The warehouse on Bellamy. They’ve been watching for a day. Looks like a probe.”
Elias stands up so fast his chair knocks the tile. He looks at us, at Lydia, at me. That look says the chessboard we thought we were moving on just tilted.
“Bellamy?” I say. “That’s a token front. What would they pull there?”
Elias doesn’t answer at once. He folds his fingers together like a man praying for the right sin.
“They’re testing doors,” he says finally.
“Finding weak hinges. If they pry Bellamy, Petrov’s next.
We move now.” His eyes flick to Jori with a long, slow assessment.
Something in his face says he’s remembered the way Jori watched the room.
The air thickens. The map under Elias’s finger looks suddenly like live fire.
Lydia folds the file and tucks it under her arm. Her posture is the kind you get when you’re moving from defense to offense. She meets my gaze, and there is no softness in it, only a shared weight.
“You coming?” she asks.
I shoot her a wink, grinning darkly. We pack in silence. The house breathes. The basement remembers our footsteps like a bruise.
Outside, the city keeps pretending it doesn’t know how to fall apart. Inside, we move toward the next page in a book that will not end politely.