Chapter Fourteen
He woke with pain in his shoulders, and standing on his toes.
Metal bit his wrists, warmth tracked down his arms telling him that his wrists were bleeding.
A steel pipe ran across the ceiling, and the cuffs forced his arms high enough that every breath pulled at his shoulders.
Concrete underfoot, cold through his socks.
The air tasted of dust and adhesive—new build, not warehouse.
His head rang with a thin bell from the hit.
Concussion haze made the edges swim. He cataloged anyway.
Inventory. Head—split, ringing. Face—bruised. Ribs—one good shot, maybe two. Wrists—cuffed, blood warm under steel. Manageable.
He opened his eyes to a room that wasn’t finished. Vapor lights hung on temporary cords. Plastic sheeting ghosted a doorway. A chalk line crossed the slab.
Men stood in the open space in front of him. Four of them moved, one didn’t. The still one watched him the way a man watches a fire he made.
They’d worked him over already. Not for fun—but for efficiency. A punch high on the right kidney to set the tone, a rib shot to fold him, a few careful hits to the face that would look worse later. Somebody knew what not to break.
They spoke under their breath. Not English. Chechen. Now it was all starting to make a horrific kind of sense.
When the still one finally stepped closer, Dale knew him. Not from a name. From a moment in dust and heat, outside under a busted sky, when a man had pointed at Dale as they fled in the back of a busted up truck and dragged a finger slow across his own throat. Not a threat. A promise.
“Soldier,” the man said. His English was clear but heavily accented. “Do you know me?”
“I do,” Dale said.
A flicker that might have been approval moved through the lines of the man’s face. “You killed my son.” He didn’t raise his voice. “He was the last one I had.”
Dale kept his chin level. “I remember the fight. I remember the faces. But it was war.”
“Yes.” The man nodded once. “War. I buried three sons in the name of that war. My brothers buried children. Two buried wives. This one—” he touched his chest, a small precise gesture “—was my last.” He looked past Dale at the others, then back. “We understood this is a road we do not return from.”
“You know what I am going to say,” Dale said. “That every man I’ve put in the ground had someone who loved him. That it doesn’t end anything.”
“It ends for you,” the father said, and stepped close enough that Dale could see where old grief had shaved his voice down to the bone. “I must bring my son’s honor home. I will do this with your last breath.”
A glove hit his ribs again. Not full power. Just a well-placed reminder.
Static scratched Dale’s left ear. A whisper cut under the room. “Dale.” Oren’s voice, tucked right against the drum of his heartbeat. “Talk to me.”
Dale didn’t move his head. He didn’t turn his mouth. “I’m here,” he said, barely air.
“Do you know where you are?” Oren asked, soft and flat like he was reading off measurements.
“New construction,” Dale said. A fist found his left side this time, impatient, making him grunt. He kept going. “Concrete dust. Plastic sheeting. Temporary lights. Smell of adhesive. Cold slab. No street noise.”
“Good,” Oren said. “We’re coming.” The words were calm. The heat behind them was not. “Keep breathing.”
One of the brothers caught the way Dale’s lips moved and swung for his jaw. The cuff chain took most of it, the rest rang his teeth.
The father held up a hand and the room obeyed him. He studied Dale like a map. “You have someone in your ear,” he said, not asking.
“I have a lot of someone’s looking out for me,” Dale said. The split on his scalp made the laugh cost. “You brought an audience. So did I.”
The father’s eyes didn’t change. He reached up and, with a narrow blade, drew a careful line under Dale’s jaw.
Just enough to sting and bleed. He wiped the knife clean on a blue shop towel and folded the towel like it mattered.
“In my village we mark what is ours when it is time to say goodbye,” he said.
“We are not animals. We do not tear. We write.”
“How poetic,” Dale said, gritting the words. “Right now, you need to know you picked the wrong team with which to fuck.”
The father tilted his head. “And you picked the wrong son to kill,” he said. “But we must all live with the choices we make.”
Static again—Oren, closer in his ear for how far away he had to be. “Say again the smell.”
“Adhesive. Pine. Drywall. Bleach,” Dale said. “Floor slopes to a drain.” He let his head tip as though the cuff weight did it. He didn’t want to give the father the grace of seeing him look for help.
“Copy that,” Oren said. A murmur off-mic—Ty, probably, low and precise. Then Oren, warmer. “We have you.”
Dale shut his eyes a second. He hadn’t planned to. It still happened. “You always do.”
The father watched the little surrender and mistook it for his own. He nodded to a brother. A punch to his stomach came lazy and mean, but packed with strength. He took it and rode it down to his toes and back up.
“Enough,” the father said to his men, not to show mercy but to save it. He stepped in and tapped Dale’s sternum twice with two fingers, the same measured touch as before, then traced the flat blade of his hand across the air at throat height. “We finish clean.”
The room changed on the next breath.
It was small things first—the way one of the brothers glanced left without meaning to, the way another set his stance like he’d heard a truck roll up outside. Air moved under the plastic sheeting. Wind had no reason to be here.
Ricky’s voice, faint through the mic. “On your go.” Bateman’s answer, quieter. “On me.”
Dale rolled his shoulders against the bite of steel and took the extra breath that was being offered. “Showtime,” he told the father.
The breach came fast. Two men entered at once, a third half a count later from the rear.
The brothers moved the way men do when their plan meets a bigger one and loses.
Two dropped fast. Qne tried to run through the wrong space and met Ricky’s weapon and the end of that idea.
The father alone didn’t flinch. He took a step back, as if to make room for the story to finish itself.
Then crumpled to the floor, the red mist from the back of his head signaling his grizzly end.
Ty was there when the edges stopped screaming. No bang, no speech. Just Ty, eyes searching and landing, mouth set, hands already reaching up. He took Dale’s weight first, then the cuffs, like he could be two places at once. A pick was in his hand. Two turns. A click.
“Got you,” Ty said, low and fierce. “Eyes on me.”
“Trying,” Dale said. The world swam and tried to tip. Ty’s shoulder kept it from being a choice.
Oren slid into the corner of Dale’s vision, gun down, jaw tight. “You pick the worst rooms to just hang out in,” he said.
“Good acoustics,” Dale managed. He let Ty pull his arms down, let the blood come back hot and ugly. “How did you find me?”
Bateman said from somewhere to the right, dry as dust. “Save it for the debrief.” He was already on the father, already talking in the voice he used when the paperwork would be rough and the story would be clean.
Ty’s hands moved—checking pupils, checking ribs. “You with me?”
“Unfortunately,” Dale said, because the line would make Ty roll his eyes and rolling his eyes meant Ty was still here.
“Don’t pass out yet. I need you vertical long enough to yell at you,” Ty said. He pressed his forehead to Dale’s for one second in the only prayer Dale believed in.
“Get in line,” Dale said. He felt the floor tilt again, more insistently. The room narrowed to Ty’s breath and Oren’s shoulder and the terrible comfort of being where his people were.
“Absolutely not,” Ty said. “Hold on.”
Dale did. For another breath. Maybe two. Long enough to hear his name one more time in Oren’s voice, long enough to feel the cuffs leave his skin and stay gone. Then the dark he’d been keeping on a leash tugged twice, patient as a trained dog. He let it have him.
****
They’d left the lamps low because all of them liked to see the others clearly. It added to the moment when all five senses were used.
Dale lay on his back between the men who refused to let him drift too far from the center of their attention.
Two weeks and change—enough time for the glue line at his scalp to be a pink memory and the rib to swear at him only when he forgot and reached for something wrong.
Not long enough to stop his shoulder from twinging when Ty slid closer and Oren’s thigh caged his.
Not long enough to let him act like the alpha he was and not a man on a short leash.
Ty felt the thought hit and answered it with a quiet kiss to Dale’s shoulder. “Stop it,” he said into skin. “You’re here. We’re here. You don’t get to be the one calling the shots tonight.”
Oren’s palm settled over the center of Dale’s chest, a steady piece of weight. “Translation,” he said, deadpan. “We intend to love on you thoroughly and ignore your growling.”
“I am not growling,” Dale said.
“You keep telling yourself that, big guy,” Ty said.
He huffed and let the fight go. For a while it was the sound of their breathing and the soft slide of the sheets and the quiet way Oren held him like he would never let him go. Dale was all good with that
The click of the tube signaled that things were amping up, and Dale felt the cold slide of gel around his stiff cock and Oren got him ready. Dale groaned as Ty decided that looked like fun, and began to massage the lube into the sensitive ring of muscle he was no doubt planning to invade.