Chapter 14 #2
The room changes immediately as every Obsidian man seems to go quieter at once. Saint doesn’t move, but something drains from his expression until his face looks carved out of restraint. Sol laughs softly.
He reaches for the foam case, lifts one vial, and holds it up to the light.
The liquid gleams with that strange, clinical shimmer.
The buyer’s men shift behind him, and one of them, broad and red-faced with a thick neck and sweat shining at his temples, takes half a step forward before he realizes stepping forward has made him visible.
Sol looks at him. “You.”
The man freezes. “What?”
“You had the tremors?”
The buyer starts to move. “He doesn’t need to—”
Sol is on the man before the sentence finishes.
He catches him by the back of the neck, cracks the vial open with his thumb, and tips the dose under the man’s tongue before anyone on the buyer’s side can decide whether reacting will get them killed.
His other hand clamps the man’s jaw shut.
The whole room locks around the motion, guns still holstered but suddenly present in every line of every body.
The man jerks once, both hands flying to Sol’s wrist, but Sol holds him in place with the bored patience of someone restraining a dog at the end of a leash.
“Let’s test the complaint,” Sol muses, his eyes dancing.
For a few seconds, nothing happens. The man’s eyes roll toward the buyer, pleading and furious at the same time, breath pushing hard through his nose.
Then XR3 hits. His pupils blow wide, black swallowing color.
A flush climbs his neck and floods his face, sweat breaking along his hairline as his breathing turns ragged.
His fingers claw at the edge of the table as a low, wrecked sound slips out of him before he can swallow it. The reaction moves through him visibly, sharpening and unraveling him at once, every nerve dragged awake beneath the warehouse lights.
Sol releases him and steps back. “Product seems fine to me.”
The man grips the table with both hands and then his body betrays him in front of everyone.
One hand drops to his cock, clutching himself through his pants before he seems to understand what he’s doing.
Shame catches up half a second later, violent enough to twist his face.
His humiliation turns into fury because men like that would rather die angry than be seen helpless, and he swings at Sol with the sloppy desperation of someone trying to reclaim a room he already lost.
Saint’s gun is out before the fist finishes moving.
The shot cracks through the warehouse and the man drops hard, one leg folding under him as he hits the concrete.
Blood spreads fast beneath his shoulder and across the front of his shirt.
I flinch so violently my shoulder clips Bricks’ arm, Bricks putting more of his body between mine and the buyer’s side.
Guns immediately come up on both sides, voices overlapping in panic and threat, the buyer shouting that Sol dosed his man. The buyer stares at the man on the floor, then at Saint, rage and terror fighting across his face.
Saint stands with his gun still raised, expression empty. “First,” he says, voice cutting through the noise, “that drug works just fucking fine. Second, of all the people your man could have advanced on, the president of a club shouldn’t have been one of them.”
“You shot him,” the buyer says.
“He swung at Sol.”
“You forced the product on him.”
Sol smiles around his cigar. “And proved your complaint was bullshit.”
The buyer’s gaze darts to the vials, the body, the weapons pointed at his men. “This is insane.”
“No,” Saint says. “Insane is thinking you can put a quality complaint on Obsidian’s name and walk into this room without the truth ready. Who told you to say the product was wrong?”
“No one.”
Bricks moves around the table, catches the buyer by the lapel, and slams him down so hard his knees hit concrete with a crack I feel in my own bones.
The buyer chokes on a scream and folds forward, but Bricks hauls him upright by the jacket.
One of the buyer’s men curses and raises his gun an inch.
Cade pistol-whips him across the face before the barrel comes level.
Bone meets metal with a sick, blunt sound, and the man goes sideways into the table, knocking the foam case askew.
The buyer is on his knees now, blood running from a split lip where Bricks’ fist landed, his expensive suit ruined by dirty concrete and fear. Sol watches him for a moment, then crouches in front of him with the cigar held away from his body.
“Try again.”
The buyer spits red on the floor. “Fuck you.”
Bricks hits him, the punch delivered with enough force to snap the buyer’s head sideways and send blood across the concrete in a bright arc. The buyer coughs and tries to curl in on himself, but Bricks catches him by the hair and keeps him upright for Sol.
I swallow hard, forcing myself to look even as my stomach turns.
I’ve seen violence. I grew up inside the Rogues.
Men came back bloody, men disappeared, men made jokes about things no one should survive saying out loud.
But I was never brought to this part. I cleaned up afterward in ledgers and revised payments, in missing inventory and quiet corrections, in numbers that made violence look like loss or expense or adjustment.
Standing close enough to smell blood before it cools is different.
Sol’s voice stays almost gentle. “Give me a name, and I’ll spare your life. You’ll owe me everything attached to it, but you’ll breathe long enough to regret that. Keep wasting my morning, and I’ll send what’s left of you back through your broker in separate bags.”
The buyer looks at Saint, then Bricks, then the man bleeding out beside the table.
Bricks tightens his grip in the man’s hair. “Name.”
The buyer’s answer comes out broken. “Maverick.”
Saint’s expression doesn’t change, but the air around him hardens.
Sol tilts his head. “The Reapers paid you to complain?”
“They didn’t pay. They pushed.” The buyer starts speaking faster, blood on his teeth, panic making him sloppy. “They said Obsidian’s got a monopoly, said everyone’s tired of bending for your price, said if enough buyers started questioning quality, the market would open. We just—”
Sol’s boot catches him in the chest and knocks him onto his back. The buyer wheezes, hands clutching uselessly at his ribs as Sol stands over him.
“You just sold me whatever business you thought you owned by being stupid enough to let another club use your mouth.”
The buyer tries to speak, but only a wet cough comes out. Sol looks at Saint, then at the room.
“Boys, clean it up.”
Cade starts zip-tying the man he hit and Bricks drags the buyer upright again, less for questioning now than to make sure the lesson isn’t over before Sol decides it is.
Sol turns toward me. Every bit of air I managed to pull into my lungs turns thin. He walks over slowly, cigar in one hand, eyes on my face. Saint shifts beside me, subtle enough that no one else might read it as warning, but Sol stops just before it would become a challenge.
“Be glad this wasn’t your father’s doing,” Sol says.
I hold myself still because I can’t think of a single safe movement.
His smile carries no warmth. “I was all set to send your head back to Canon on a platter. As it is, you’ll be marrying my son tomorrow. It’s too bad. I was excited for a funeral.”
Then he walks out, leaving cigar smoke and dread behind him.
For several seconds, no one seems willing to disturb the shape of his exit.
The warehouse is full of blood, gun oil, breathing, and the harsh chemical brightness of XR3 from the open vial on the table.
The buyer is groaning on the floor. One of his men is kneeling with his hands zip-tied behind his back.
The dead man’s hand rests palm-up near my boot, fingers slack and already wrong-looking in their stillness.
I shudder in disgust, the last standing man from the buyer’s side taking a chance he shouldn’t.
He must have been closer than I realized, half-hidden by the table after Cade hit him, ignored for one second too long because the room was looking at Sol.
He lunges from the side, one arm locking across my chest and the other crushing against my throat hard enough that sound dies before it reaches my mouth.
My back slams into him as he drags me backward so fast the floor slips under my boots.
Saint’s gun snaps up but he freezes as there’s no clear shot, probably just what the man figured out. The man’s forearm grinds against my windpipe, and his breath scrapes hot against my hair as he hauls me backward.
“Let us walk,” he snarls. “Let us fucking walk, or I’ll break his neck.”
Saint lowers the gun. For a heartbeat, that frightens me more than having it aimed in my direction.
He doesn’t negotiate. He doesn’t threaten.
He drops the weapon to the concrete with a hard metallic clatter and stalks forward.
One second, Saint is several feet away. The next, his hand catches the wrist at my throat and twists.
Bone gives with a wet crack that turns my stomach.
The man screams as his grip on me loosens, Saint ripping me out of his hold with such force that I stumble straight into Bricks’ arms. Bricks catches me against his chest, one arm across me like a bar, and holds me there when my knees try to fold.