Chapter 1 #4
I fire twice more, moving sideways, keeping myself between her and the van.
The sedan lurches forward, trying to cut off my bike. Another man gets out from behind it, and this one does have a cut.
Miami Mutherfukers.
Ugly white denim cut, like the white rose.
I aim at his knee and take it.
He drops screaming.
Lady’s phone starts ringing from where she dropped it.
The sound is bright, stupid, normal.
Then the elevator dings behind us.
Fuck.
I turn half a second too late.
A woman steps out.
Not Carmen.
Cherry.
Red hair, tight jeans, Saints tank she has no right wearing outside the clubhouse, makeup smudged like she’s been crying or wants someone to think she has. Her eyes find me first, then Lady crouched behind the pillar.
For one impossible second, confusion splits through the gunfire.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I snarl.
Her mouth trembles.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
Her eyes flick to Lady before they come back to me, and that is how I know fear ain’t the only thing driving her.
Lady sees it before I do.
Her eyes widen. “Shady.”
Something hard presses to the back of my neck.
I freeze.
A voice behind me says, “Drop it, road captain.”
I know the accent. The smug little smile inside it. Miami street trash wearing MC courage because someone bigger gave him a gun.
I drop mine.
Slow.
My weapon hits concrete.
Across the garage, the man with the shattered knee laughs through pain.
Cherry sobs once. “They said they’d kill me.”
Lady rises from behind the pillar.
“No,” I bark.
Too late.
Because the gun shifts from my neck to her chest.
Everything in me goes still.
Lady looks at me, and for the first time this morning, there’s real fear in her eyes.
Not for herself.
For me.
“Don’t,” she says softly.
I don’t know if she’s talking to them or to me.
Maybe both.
The man behind me speaks louder. “Tell Diablo we got his girl’s girl.”
Lady’s chin lifts. Even with a gun on her, even shaking, she gives him that Miami-famous smile like she’s standing under club lights and not in a garage full of blood.
“I’m not Diablo’s anything,” she says. “I’m Lady Nyx.” Even with a gun pointed at her, she makes it sound like a headline, a warning, and a middle finger.
The man grins.
“Even better.”
I move.
I don’t think. I just turn, fast and mean, catching the barrel with one hand and driving my elbow back with the other.
The shot goes wild. Pain rips across my side, hot and wet, but not enough to stop me.
I break his wrist. He screams. I slam him into the elevator frame hard enough to crack his head against steel.
Then the van door opens again.
More men.
Too many.
One throws something.
Smoke bursts across the garage in a thick gray cloud, burning my eyes and throat. Lady coughs. I hear her heel scrape concrete. Hear hands grab. Hear her curse so sharp and vicious that pride and terror hit me at the same time.
I reach for her through the smoke.
My fingers catch fabric.
Then nothing.
“Lady!”
A body slams into me from the side. We hit concrete. My ribs scream. I drive my fist into a face, feel teeth cut my knuckles, roll hard and come up reaching for the gun I dropped.
Engines roar.
The van.
No.
I run through smoke blind, shoulder hitting a parked car, alarm shrieking alive around me.
“Lady!”
For one second the smoke thins.
I see her.
At the open side door of the van, two men dragging her in. Her curls wild. One earring gone. Blood at her lip. Fury on her face.
Not broken.
Never broken.
Her eyes lock on mine.
“Shady!”
I fire.
The bullet hits the van’s rear window and spiderwebs the glass.
Too late.
The door slams.
The van tears toward the exit, tires screaming. The sedan follows, dragging sparks from a busted rim. I chase on foot because instinct doesn’t care what’s possible. I run until the garage ramp spits sunlight in my face and the street opens in a roar of traffic.
The van cuts hard into Miami morning and disappears behind a bus painted with some smiling woman selling perfume.
Gone.
For half a second, the city goes silent.
Then everything crashes back.
Car horns. Sirens starting somewhere far off. A woman screaming from the sidewalk. My phone ringing on the garage floor behind me.
Blood runs down my side and drips off my fingers.
I turn slowly.
Cherry is on her knees near the elevator, sobbing with both hands over her mouth. The man with the broken wrist is unconscious. The Mutherfuker with the ruined knee is trying to crawl.
I walk to him.
He sees my face and stops moving.
Smart.
I crouch, grab his patch, and drag him close enough to smell the fear sweating out of him.
“Where?”
He laughs, red on his teeth. “You picked wrong, Shady.”
I slam his head into the concrete.
Not enough to kill him.
Enough to make the message clear.
I pull my knife and press it beneath his jaw.
“Where is she?”
His eyes roll, pain making him sloppy. “Ask Carmen.”
There it is.
Too easy.
Too pretty.
A lie with perfume on it.
My phone rings again.
This time I answer without looking.
Diablo’s voice hits hard. “Report.”
I stare at the white rose crushed under my boot.
“They took Lady.”
Silence.
Then Darling screams in the background, so raw it cuts through the line and carves straight into me.
Diablo’s voice comes back lower. Deadlier.
“Who?”
I look at the man under my knife. At Cherry crying by the elevator. At the blood on the concrete. At the city that just reached into the sky and dragged my woman down from it.
“Mutherfukers hit the garage,” I say. “They used Cherry. Left a rose. One of them said ask Carmen.”
Vice curses somewhere on Diablo’s end.
Magic says something I can’t make out.
Darling is crying Lady’s name.
I close my eyes for half a second.
Just half.
Then I open them, and whatever soft thing Lady woke in me this morning burns down to ash.
“Lock the city,” I tell Diablo.
“You hurt?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It matters if you bleed out before we find her.”
“I’m not dying today.”
The man under my knife starts praying in Spanish.
Too late for saints.
I lean closer until he can see exactly what kind of road he stepped onto when he touched what’s mine.
“Tell Vice to pull traffic cams,” I say. “Magic gets names. Six locks down Eclipse. Crypt follows money. Alpha scrubs the posts. Key Rat checks every burner tied to Cherry. Dune and Tubbs hit the garages. Prospects watch Darling and Disco. Nobody moves alone.”
Diablo exhales once, rough and furious.
“You giving orders now?”
I look toward the street where the van vanished.
I can still hear Lady saying my name.
“Hell, yeah,” I say. Then I hang up.
The Mutherfuker beneath me tries to speak.
I press the knife harder.
“You’re going to tell me where that van turns,” I say. “You’re going to tell me who paid you, who gave you Cherry, who sent that text, and who thought taking Lady Nyx out of my hands was a good idea.”
He swallows against the blade.
“And if I don’t?”
I smile. There’s nothing happy in it.
“You’re dead. Then I’ll find your friends.”
Miami thinks it knows roads.
It doesn’t.
Not like I do.
Every bridge, every alley, every service lane behind every glittering club and rotting motel.
Every shortcut through Little Havana, every dock road near the river, every back way out of Brickell when cameras get hungry.
I know how this city moves when it lies.
I know where men hide women. I know where vans go when they don’t want God or traffic lights watching.
They took Lady to hurt Darling.
To punish Diablo.
To make the Saints look weak.
Diablo named me Shady because I knew too much to ever be completely honest and enough to be dangerous.
Now, the name finally fits all the way down to the bone.
I know where Miami hides its lies, I know the roads men take when they want a woman to disappear, and I’m going to use every shadow in me to bring Lady home.