19. Cyrus
CYRUS
We arrived just as the truck was pulling into the warehouse.
“Much trouble?” I grumbled as the driver hopped down to meet us.
“The usual. Made it,” she murmured, taking a look around the loading dock. “Where do you want it?”
We made quick work of unloading the sixteen-wheeler: not the boxes of furniture stowed in the cargo area, but the 160 kilos of drugs hidden in its custom retrofitted fuel tanks. Each package was worth a small fortune depending on its contents: fentanyl could fetch $200 per gram on the street.
But I didn’t touch that shit. Instead, we focused on the party drugs that Atwood University’s highstrung students demanded: weed, adderall, acid, and molly.
I’d made myself a promise when I got into this business.
If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right, which meant making sure as few people got harmed as possible.
Drugs were going to flow into Valemont whether I put my hand on the scale or not. And as much as this place probably despised me, it was the home of my first real sanctuary from the world. It kept Feverpoint safe, and in exchange, I’d do what I could to keep its people safe.
Which meant sweating my ass off on this warehouse floor. I probably could have hired any old grunt to move the load, but then there was the matter of testing it.
I didn’t like anyone else to get their hands on the shipment before I could test it. If people were going to get high anyway, the best thing I could do was make sure their shit wasn’t cut with something worse.
It didn’t stop bad shit from slipping in through the cracks. Valemont still saw the occasional overdose death — usually from hard shit we refused to sell, stuff bought elsewhere in Greene County and brought back into our streets.
But we did our best. And Valemont, especially downtown, was much safer over the last five years than it ever had been during my childhood.
As we cleared out and counted the last of the bundles, I moved to grab the cash for our driver.
Her brow furrowed as she fanned through the bills. “That’s more than I’m owed. You bad at counting?”
“Consider it a tip,” I shrugged. “For whatever the usual trouble was this time.”
She puffed her chest out defensively. “What kind of game is this? Your boss—”
“I am my boss.” I frowned. “And yours too.”
She narrowed her eyes, glancing down at the stacks in her hand before looking back up at me. “I don’t know how you run things here, but the boss doesn’t usually receive the shipment…”
“Today she does. Now take the tip and go before I stop feeling so generous.”
That was enough to light a fire under her ass. With the shipment unloaded, she pocketed the extra money and drove off toward whatever store was awaiting their furniture shipment.
It was the safest way to run our shit — hiding it in larger, legit shipments. Keeping the papertrail on our trucks clean.
Normally, it would have been hard to coordinate.
But that was before I’d used our first big payout from The Oracle to buy the trucking company.
Now, we had a leg up on the other cartels that made it nearly impossible to compete.
The only opening that existed there was because we had morals, and because we were realistic.
We could cut the head off that hydra; get rid of the people bringing meth, heroin, and fentanyl into town, hunt down every last street dealer. But knock down one enemy, and something far uglier would emerge from the power vacuum they left.
We were better off sharing some leg room with a weaker cartel that could be knocked out if need be rather than inviting in someone who’d try to step on our turf.
Besides, any attempt to knock out our neighbors would be a bloody mess. And as fun as that sounded, I knew that Valemont had quite the PR battle ahead of it now that those Violence bikers had taken over.
Dom Dumont isn’t interested in more blood on the streets. She’s already spilled plenty of it herself.
Still, it was clear that something was brewing. Lately, whenever our street dealers arrived to pick up their shares, they all had the same question. And tonight was no different.
“Got anything stronger? These kids won’t stop complaining. Some of them are starting to look outside of Valemont.”
“They won’t have any luck. I’ll make sure of that.” I shook my head. “Keep it clean — the semester’s hardly started yet, and the last thing I need is a bunch of co-eds tweaking on Main Street.”
“You’ve got it, boss,” the dealer sighed, handing over the cash and heading out with her parcel of party drugs.
Before I could address her hesitation, a ping from my phone drew my attention. I’d been waiting on this for days: Ragdoll’s background check finally came back.
“Who would have guessed,” Nash murmured sarcastically, peeking at the email over my shoulder. “Mary” had lied about her name — obviously. Her background check came up completely blank.
Now, not only were we back at square one, but someone was going to have to punish her for lying.
I scrubbed a palm over my face. “How the fuck are we supposed to ID the world’s most obstinate Jane Doe?”
“I mean, what if we already know who she is?” Nash crossed her arms over her chest, eyeing me carefully. But I peeled away from her with a scoff.
“Would you cut it out with that already?”
“I’m just saying, there’s one really simple explanation for all of this…”
“It’s not her…”
“She recognized my eyes today, Cy.”
“It’s not her.” I wheeled around, lip curling. “We would know if it was her. I would have felt it. The cards would have shown us.”
I held Nash’s gaze, willing her to stop bringing up my worst fucking nightmare.
Eventually, she looked away with a shrug. “Okay, so maybe it’s not her. But it’s been years. What if she never comes?”
That thought hit harder than her initial suggestion, a spike of acid ripping right through the pit of my stomach. “She will, when we’re ready. And when she does, we’ll get our vengeance. But this…”
I pictured the toy waiting back in our playground.
Her soft skin, her pouty lips, the fire burning behind those stubborn little eyes.
This Ragdoll was nothing like the cowardly traitor the prophecy had promised me.
I would have my fun with our little prisoner, but the hellfire I waited to rain down was reserved for one person and one person alone.
Still, even as I tried to convince myself, doubt wriggled at the back of my mind. Taking a deep breath, I looked up at Nash once more. “That’s actually part of what I wanted to talk to you about — away from the girl’s prying ears.”
Nash and Blade had noticed as well as I had that the girl listened to every fucking thing that happened in her vicinity. She was constantly watching, cataloguing every piece of data, every weakness she could exploit for the next Fright Night.
But this was something holy — something I wouldn’t let her vacuous curiosity defile.
“The cards… when we get home, when you’re sure that the girl won’t see… I want you to ask them for the truth.”
Nash raised an eyebrow. “I thought you just said—”
“It’s time we got an update on the prophecy.” I shook my head. “That’s all.”
Her sigh told me that she saw right through the pretense. But Nash was never one to push. “You’ve got it, Cy.”
I didn’t want to believe that Nash was right. But the woman who had stumbled in through the fence… the sacrifice in blood… it was exactly what Nash’s prophecy had promised all those years ago.
It was the reason why I insisted on changing the rules, keeping her in the park. And it was the reason why I wouldn’t let her win, wouldn’t let her leave until the cards had given us their answer.