Chapter 7
Damian
The meatpacking warehouse was too quiet.
That was the first sign.
No guards smoking outside. No music from a speaker somebody forgot to turn off. No rats moving through the trash. Just brick, cold air, and the kind of silence men build when they want you listening to the wrong thing.
Darius ran the side camera from the van. "Heat signature inside. One seated. Two moving."
"Maya?"
"Likely."
"Likely is not enough."
"It's what I have."
I moved anyway.
We entered through the loading dock. Darius behind me. Two men wide. No words. No extra noise.
Maya sat tied to a chair under a single light.
Sixteen. Face swollen from crying. Wrists red. A strip of tape hanging loose from one side of her mouth where she had worked it free.
She saw me and shook her head hard.
Trap.
I already knew.
"Maya," I said quietly. "Don't move."
"There's something under the chair," she whispered.
Darius cursed under his breath.
My phone rang.
Unknown.
Bishop.
I answered.
"She is a child," I said.
"Children become useful when adults refuse to listen."
"You want me. You have me."
"No, Damian. I wanted you moving. I wanted the room opened. I wanted the queen found. I wanted Tammy to learn what she is."
My hand tightened around the phone.
"You do not say her name."
"Which one? Tammy? Savannah? The girl has collected more names than she understands."
I looked at Maya. She was shaking so hard the chair rattled.
"Let her go."
"I already did my part. You found her. Now prove you can save her without losing the next piece."
The line died.
Darius moved fast, careful, hands steady over the mechanism beneath the chair. I watched the windows, the doors, the shadows.
Maya cried silently.
"Look at me," I told her.
She did.
"You're going home."
"He said if I got out, the real thing starts outside."
"Who said that?"
"Bishop. And the other man. They called him Saint. He had a broken crown tattoo on his hand."
Darius freed the last restraint. "Move. Now."
I lifted Maya from the chair and carried her toward the side exit.
The blast came before we reached it.
Not enough to level the building.
Enough to throw heat, smoke, and shrapnel across the floor.
Pain opened along my side.
I kept moving.
Outside, gunfire started from the alley.
Men rushed from the dark.
Darius fired. My men returned fire. Maya screamed against my chest.
Then an SUV tore into the lot.
Rico jumped out first.
Tammy came after him.
For one second, everything in me stopped.
She saw the blood at my side.
"Damian!"
"I told you to stay."
She ran to me anyway. "And you keep saying things like they work."
Even in smoke and gunfire, she checked the wound with steady hands.
Maya lifted her head.
When she saw Tammy, her eyes widened.
"He said you were the reason."
Tammy looked at her. "Who?"
"Bishop. He said none of this would have happened if they had given him the girl the first time. He said the King family stole her."
Rico went still.
Tammy's face changed.
I pulled her behind the SUV as another round hit the brick.
"We are leaving," I said.
This time, nobody argued.
We moved through a back alley and split routes twice before reaching the old clinic I kept off paper for nights like this.
My phone rang again before we got there.
Bishop's voice came through when I answered.
"You did exactly what I needed. Opened the room. Took the queen. Found the girl. Now Tammy knows enough to start asking the right questions."
"You keep talking like a man who wants to be found."
"No. I talk like a man who knows what her blood is worth."
"Blood doesn't make a person," I said.
Bishop laughed. "Debt does."
The line went dead.
Tammy sat beside me in the SUV, one hand pressed to my bleeding side and the other holding Evelyn's letter.
Her world had cracked open in one night.
Mine had started burning around the edges.
And Bishop was still smiling somewhere in the dark.