Chapter 18 Owning It
The van hit a pothole hard enough to throw Del sideways into the wheel well, and the zip tie around her wrists snapped against the metal edge with a sound she felt more than heard.
She didn't move yet. She kept her wrists together behind her back, kept her head down, and waited.
The van slowed. Doors at the back cracked open, gray predawn light spilling in, and a hand closed around her arm to haul her out. Del let herself stumble on purpose, let her knees buckle like the fight had already left her, and the man pulling her didn't tighten his grip fast enough.
She drove her free arm back and up, elbow catching him square in the throat.
He choked, grip loosening, and Del twisted out from under his hand and ran three steps to the storage structure's doorframe where a length of pipe leaned against the wall, forgotten by whoever had left it there.
She grabbed it and swung before she'd fully turned around, catching the second man across the temple as he lunged for her.
He dropped.
The first man was still choking, one hand at his throat, the other fumbling for the gun at his hip.
Del closed the distance and swung the pipe into his wrist before the gun cleared the holster, bone cracking audibly, and he screamed and dropped the weapon.
She kicked it away, out of reach, and brought the pipe down across the back of his skull. He went still.
A third man came through the doorway behind her, faster than the others, and got his arm around her throat before she registered him at all.
Del's vision spotted at the edges, air cut off, and she drove her heel back into his shin, then stomped down hard on his instep.
His grip loosened just enough. She twisted free, gasping, and grabbed the pipe off the ground where she'd dropped it, swinging wild and catching him across the ribs.
He grunted, staggered, and she hit him again, higher, across the jaw.
He went down and didn't get up.
The fourth man had a gun already raised by the time she turned, and the shot caught her shoulder in a line of white heat that spun her sideways into a shelving unit, metal crashing down around her, cans and boxes scattering across the concrete.
She hit the ground hard, ribs screaming where the shelf's edge caught her on the way down, and rolled onto her back gasping, blood already soaking warm through her shirt.
He walked toward her, gun still raised, unhurried, and Del's hand closed around the fallen pipe on pure instinct. He was three feet away, close enough that his shadow fell across her, when she swung it up and into his knee with everything she had left.
He screamed and went down, and Del forced herself upright through the pain screaming in her ribs, grabbed the gun that had clattered from his hand, and put a round through him before he could recover.
Silence.
Del stood in the wreckage of the storage room, chest heaving, blood running warm down her arm, ribs grinding with every breath, and looked around at four men down, two dead, two not moving enough to matter right now. Her hands were shaking. She didn't let that stop her.
She reloaded the gun with a spare magazine off the dead man's belt, because whatever came next, she wasn't walking into it empty.
The compound's main house sat beyond the tree line, lit gold through its windows, and Del walked toward it with blood soaking her side, one arm curled protective around her ribs, gun steady in her other hand despite everything her body was screaming at her to stop.
She found the side entrance unlocked, a guard slumped dead against the wall already, someone else's work, and moved through the house fast and quiet, following the only sound in the building, a voice, low and urgent, coming from behind a closed door at the end of the hall.
The study.
She didn't knock. She kicked the door open and stepped through with the gun already raised.
Sorin stood at the window, phone pressed to his ear, and turned at the sound with a composure that didn't crack even looking at the barrel pointed at his chest. He set the phone down slow on the desk without ending the call.
"Delphine." He said her full name like it belonged to him. "You're bleeding rather badly."
"You should see the other four."
Something almost admiring crossed his face. "I underestimated you."
"You underestimated everything about me for four years." Del's arm shook slightly, blood loss finally catching up, but the gun stayed level. "How many people moved through my building? I want a number."
"You want closure." He reached for the pistol sitting on the desk beside him, slow, deliberate, and Del fired before his hand closed around it, the shot catching him high in the shoulder and spinning him back against the bookshelf.
He didn't go down. He came at her instead, faster than a man his age should move, and knocked the gun from her hand with a vicious backhand that split her lip. Del staggered, and he grabbed her by the throat, slamming her back into the wall hard enough that her vision whited out.
"You should have let the men in the storage room finish it," he said, breath hot against her face, fingers tightening. "Would have been cleaner."
Del's hand found the letter opener on the desk beside her, blind, and drove it into his side.
He roared and released her throat, staggering back, and Del gulped air and came off the wall swinging, driving the blade into him again, lower, feeling him shudder against her.
He grabbed her wrist hard enough to bruise, trying to force the blade away, and they grappled over the handle, both bleeding, both refusing to yield, until Del twisted her whole body weight into it and felt the blade sink deeper.
"Four years," she said, voice raw. "Four years you let me believe I built something real."
"You did build it." His voice had gone strained, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "I just made it useful to me while you did."
"That's the same thing as it never being mine."
She wrenched the blade free of his weakening grip and drove it into his stomach, and again into his chest, and again, the strength of every night she'd spent proving herself in a district that never believed a woman could hold this much territory pouring into every strike.
He grabbed at her weakly, blood soaking through his shirt in widening patches, and Del didn't stop, didn't slow, until his legs gave out beneath him and he slid down the front of the bookshelf, leaving a dark smear against the spines of books he'd probably never read.
She stood over him, chest heaving, blood that wasn't entirely her own soaking her hands to the wrist, and watched the light go out of his eyes.
"That's for my club," she said, to a man who could no longer hear her. "That's for every person you moved through my building like they were cargo."
The study door burst open behind her.
She didn't turn. She stood there over Sorin's body with the letter opener still clenched in her bloodied hand, breathing hard, her whole body finally starting to shake now that there was nothing left to fight.
"Del."
Matteo's voice, close, careful, and she felt him stop just short of touching her, giving her the half second she apparently needed before her fingers finally released the handle and let it fall to the desk with a dull clatter.
"He's dead," she said. "I did it myself."
He came around into her line of sight, slow, and the look on his face wasn't horror, wasn't pity, just something fierce and reverent that made her throat tighten. "Del. Look at me."
She looked at him, blood splashed dark across her shirt, her arms, one streak drying along her jaw where she'd wiped sweat with the back of her hand at some point without noticing.
Her knees finally buckled, and this time she let him catch her, folding into his chest with Sorin's blood still tacky between her fingers.
"Ribs," she managed. "I think they're actually broken this time."
He lifted her carefully, one arm under her knees, mindful of the wound at her shoulder, and Del let her head drop against him, the adrenaline draining out all at once. "Ambulance is already on the way."
Her eyes were closing despite every effort to keep them open. "Matteo."
"I'm here."
"I got him."
"You got him." He carried her out of the study past Ronan, who'd gone very still at the sight of Sorin's body and the state of the woman who'd made it that way, something like awe crossing his face before he looked away.
Del was barely conscious by the time they reached the compound's front lawn, sirens finally audible in the distance, and the last clear thought she had before darkness took her was the particular, savage satisfaction of knowing Viktor Sorin had died understanding exactly whose hands had ended him.