Chapter Six
Veda
I gasped awake with a start. The nightmare left me in a cold sweat.
I saw Carl’s face hit the desk, the man in my kitchen with the knife, the moment I pulled the trigger and the man’s head snapped back, and the wall behind him looking like a piece of modern art that I would carry around inside my skull forever.
I sat up. My ribs ached where I’d hit the pavement in the alley.
The cut on my palm pulsed under the fresh gauze, a hot insistent throb that matched the beat at my temples.
I’d slept maybe twenty minutes on the ride back from my apartment, and that was questionable.
My body wanted rest. My head simply refused to cooperate.
The overhead lights had been dimmed and the empty hallway lit by safety lights at floor level.
I padded to the lift and rode it down to the ground floor.
The path outside ran between two warehouses and disappeared under the camo netting that I now understood covered every walkway in this place.
The netting turned the security floods into a green-tinged muck, broken up by patches of darker shadow where the light could not punch through.
I moved along the path, taking in the sights and scents around me.
The compound smelled like diesel and gun oil and the faint vegetal funk of the river a few blocks off.
I didn’t know where I was going. I told myself I needed air and that was true enough.
But my feet kept moving outward, away from the inner ring of warehouses where the apartments were, toward the perimeter where the fence ran along the property line.
I wanted to see the edges of this place.
I wanted to know how thick the walls were between me and Iron.
A voice carried on the cold air and I stopped walking.
I knew that voice. I’d been listening to it for the better part of twenty-four hours.
I tucked myself against the back wall of a low storage shed and waited.
The voice came again, closer, a quiet exchange of words I couldn’t quite make out.
Then Griffin stepped into the wash of one of the flood lights, and a step behind him Inferno.
The two of them moved along the fence line at a measured pace.
Griffin walked a few steps ahead. Inferno flanked him on the left shoulder. They didn’t speak again, whatever they had been saying when I first heard them had ended, and now they walked in silence.
I pressed flatter to the wall of the shed.
I felt the cold metal through the hoodie and shivered.
I knew I should go back. Griffin had told me to rest, and I was out here in the dark watching him with what was likely “club business.” If he caught me, I had no doubt any discussion we’d have wouldn’t be pleasant.
But I didn’t move. For some reason I couldn’t explain, even to myself, I had to see what happened next.
I told myself I needed to understand what kind of men I had agreed to stand behind.
The truth lay a little to the side of that.
I wanted to see Griffin when he didn’t know I was watching.
They turned the corner and the flood lights caught the side of Griffin’s face for a moment. I saw the set of his jaw, the way his mouth held a hard, flat line. He looked more like the man who’d put a bullet in a Steel Serpents rider without hesitating.
The fence rattled, a single sharp clank, metal on metal like something with some weight to it settling against chain-link. Griffin and Inferno froze in the same instant.
I looked up and saw a man, mid-climb, one leg already hooked over the top rail of the fence, the other still planted against the chain-link below.
He’d managed to cut away a section of razor wire so he could use his small, wiry frame to slip through the narrow opening.
A knife rode in a sheath on the intruder’s thigh.
I couldn’t quite read the back of his cut at this distance, but I didn’t really need to.
The way Griffin’s shoulders settled told me everything.
The man saw Griffin and Inferno, too. He scrambled, trying to swing his leg back over to the outside. Unfortunately, he’d already committed his weight to climb over the fence to land inside the compound. He fell but still scrambled to his feet.
Griffin moved faster than a man his size had any right to move. He reached down and grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair in his right hand and yanked. The man scrambled up with a yelp. I hadn’t moved, still standing with my back against the nearby warehouse.
Inferno spoke quietly into his phone while Griffin stood over the smaller man. Then he turned his head and looked back at the fence the intruder had come over, up and down the line in both directions, likely checking for a second climber.
“Hands,” Griffin said. His voice carried just far enough for me to catch it. It didn’t have any heat in it. It sounded like a man asking for the salt.
The man raised his hands and laced them behind his head.
Griffin frisked the guy from top to bottom, pulling the knife and tossing it backward without looking.
The blade landed five feet away with a soft chunk against the gravel.
He unclipped the phone from the man’s belt and turned it over in his palm, thumbed it once, then slid it inside the back pocket of his jeans.
In the wash of the security floodlight, I could see the patch on the back of the man’s cut clearly now. A coiled serpent with the name Steel Serpents on the rocker above the emblem. The name of that club chilled me to the bone since I’d figured out I was on the right track at Enclave éclipse.
Inferno handed Griffin a zip tie, and Griffin secured the Steel Serpents’ guy.
He was young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, with a thin patchy beard along his jaw and a smear of blood at his nose where he’d hit the gravel when he fell.
His eyes were open and moving, looking like he’d tried very hard not to appear scared but failed miserably.
I knew I should leave or, at the very least, wait until they’d all left the area, then head back to my room.
Even though there was nothing I could do, and no one at Kiss of Death would let me be a part of whatever they did with this guy, I wanted to know what questions the men would ask and what the Steel Serpent’s answers would be.
I tried to convince myself it concerned me because Iron was looking for me, and whatever this man had been climbing the fence to find was almost certainly me.
The other part of the truth, the part I didn’t want to think about, was that I wanted to see Griffin work.
He’d been gentle with me so far, but I got the feeling he hid something darker not all that far beneath the surface.
Inferno spoke for the first time. “I reckon he’s done climbin’ for the night.”
“Yep,” Griffin agreed.
The second the two men stepped back, the Serpent sneered at them, likely trying to save face as much as he could. “You don’t fuckin’ scare me. I might not get the bitch, but one of us will.”
Griffin moved before the last word was out. He got a fist in the guy’s hair and drove him down into the gravel face-first. The guy yelped, then grunted as Inferno’s boot came down on the center of his back and stayed there.
Griffin crouched in front of the Steel Serpent. He rested his forearms across his knees. I shrank deeper into the shadow and waited. “Who sent you over the fence, son?”
The guy didn’t answer.
“I’m gonna ask you twice,” Griffin said. “And then I’m gonna stop askin’. Who sent you?”
“Fuck you.” The downed man tried to spit. The angle was wrong and most of it landed in the gravel under his own chin, mixed with the blood from his nose.
I watched the interrogation in the muted glare of the security light as I stayed as still as I could with my arms crossed tightly over my chest. I barely dared to breathe as Griffin crouched in front of the prospect while Inferno kept him pinned.
Griffin straightened from his crouch in one fluid motion and kicked the prospect in the side, connecting with his ribs.
Not a kick meant to get the prospect’s attention.
No. Griffin meant to rearrange things inside the young man’s body.
The sound it made was dense and wet, and the prospect’s whole torso folded around the impact with a grunt.
Then he retched, gasping as he seemed unable to form words either through the pain or because he couldn’t breathe.
Again, Griffin kicked him, this time, I heard the unmistakable crack of his ribs snapping under the impact. This time, the prospect found his voice. Blood sprayed from his lips with each long scream as any bravado the young man had evaporated with that second kick.
Griffin crouched again, unhurried. He rested his forearms back on his knees like they’d just paused a conversation.
“That’s one,” he said. His tone, though menacing, conveyed disinterest when he looked hyper focused.
The contradiction struck me much the same as this Griffin and the Griffin he’d shown me thus far.
“I asked who sent you,” Griffin said again, his tone unchanged.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the man sobbed out his words, obviously not expecting this kind of an attack. “Iron sent me! Iron! He wanted me to confirm the girl was here.” He paused, swallowed. “Said he put a bounty on her! Twenty-five grand to anyone who brings her in!”
“Alive?” Griffin asked.
“Just so long as she’s not dead, he don’t care.” The man gasped. “That’s all I know! I swear to God! I’m just a prospect! Just wanted me to confirm she was here and report back! I wasn’t gonna touch the bitch!”