Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
Ruined
Kenji
We rounded the corner.
Reo took the lead. My Scales fanned around him in a tight diamond—two ahead with rifles sweeping the corridor in slow arcs, one at each shoulder watching the side doors, one at our rear watching the way we had come.
The formation moved as a single body.
Hiro and I remained safely within it.
Blood dripped from my ear.
The corridor curved. The smoke was thicker here. The east wing's fire had climbed somewhere into the walls, and the heat was starting to push along the ceiling in slow heavy waves.
I could feel it on the side of my face and on the back of my neck.
Something didn’t add up with Kiko’s plan.
She killed everybody to stop the DNA test? No. That doesn’t make sense.
Kiko had a smarter plan, which meant there was more at play here. She was an Eye. Eyes didn’t waste people for nothing. If she killed everyone in this clinic, she did it for something she could not have gotten any other way.
My heart hammered in my chest.
What did she want?
I thought of my Tiger and tensed. “Reo, I need more men around Nyomi and—”
“She’s already been taken back to the mansion and heavily guarded. Yoichi is with her.”
“You told Yoichi to help?”
“No. He was already with her.”
I blinked.
Why?
Yoichi was not a man I had ever fully understood. He had appeared the day after my mother was buried, carrying the artifacts of her bloodline in two cloth bundles at his side. He had handed them to me and then refused to leave. Hiro threatened and even tried to kill him. Reo plotted for weeks.
Yoichi avoided both of their actions and remained around me for two full years like a shadow. Eventually, after he saved me twice, I made him my Fang.
Reo theorized that Yoichi must be one of my mother's people. Some sort of protector planted in my life by a bloodline I had never been allowed to fully meet.
Reo had even interrogated him for ten hours.
Yoichi had sat in the chair, looked at the wall, and never confirmed nor denied it. He had simply outlasted the questions, and my Roar.
If Yoichi was at my Tiger's side tonight, he had chosen to be there due to some sort of instinct to protect her.
I’ll have to talk to him later and figure out how he knew she could be in danger.
We rounded the bend into the patient wing.
The last four Scales waited at the end of the corridor. Shivering, they placed their weapons on the floor and raised their hands.
Sweat dripped down the first one’s face. “We are turning ourselves in. We did not—”
Reo shot him before he could finish.
The other three tried to run.
Reo fired three more rounds and did not break stride. They dropped one after the other—with a bullet either in their heart or forehead—collapsing to the floor.
Reo signaled to our men. “Clear the wing.”
They split into pairs and moved fast—one Scale low and one high at each doorway, weapons cutting the air in disciplined sweeps.
Doors opened in rapid succession. Boots crossed thresholds.
Muzzles arced left, then right. Inside each room, the soft echo of clear came back to us in clipped controlled voices, one after another.
But at the last door in the hallway on the right, a Scale yelled, “In here!”
A woman’s sobbing rose in the air.
We all raced forward.
The diamond reformed as we moved. Two Scales hit the doorway first with their weapons up, one going low and one going high. They cleared the threshold in two seconds and signaled back.
Reo flowed in behind them with his sidearm raised, sweeping right.
Two more Scales peeled inside and took the corners.
The rear pair held the corridor behind us with their rifles trained back the way we had come.
What the fuck will we find in there?
Hiro and I crossed the threshold inside the formation.
A horrid stench slammed into my nostrils. Copper. Antiseptic. Some other chemicals.
A doctor was sprawled across the bed. His mouth hung open. His chest jerked in fast, shallow heaves. His eyes had rolled back so far I could only see the whites.
A scalpel stuck out of his throat.
The handle was buried just under the right side of his jaw, angled up. The blade was lost in the meat of his neck. Blood pumped out around the steel in a rippling surge that matched the jerking of his chest.
Two nurses worked over him.
One pressed both hands against his throat on either side of the embedded scalpel.
She was packing the wound with a wad of gauze that had already soaked through.
Blood ran down her fingers and dripped from her wrists.
Her sleeves were soaked to the elbows. The front of her uniform was streaked dark from the chest down.
The other nurse stood at the head of the bed. She leaned hard against the doctor's shoulders to hold him still as his body jerked. Her hair had come loose from its tie.
“Hold on, Dr. Goda!” Tears ran down her cheeks. “Please. Hold on!”
Her left wrist hung at a wrong angle against her stomach. Someone had grabbed it and twisted hard. Still, she was using her right hand and her forearm to brace him anyway. She sobbed through her teeth as she worked.
Neither of them looked up when we entered.
Reo took it in with one sweep of his eyes. Then, he pointed to a pair of Scales. "You two, help them. Put pressure on the wound and don't pull the blade. Keep him alive until we can move him."
The two Scales slung their rifles over their shoulders and moved fast. One took over from the nurse at the throat. His bigger hands wrapped around hers, and he applied steady pressure as she eased back to grab a fresh pack of gauze from the toppled tray.
The other stepped in beside her partner at the doctor's shoulders. He braced the body with both arms so she could finally pull her broken wrist out of the work.
She let out a small sob. “Oh my God.”
I crossed to her.
She flinched at my approach.
I lowered my gun. “What happened?”
She sniffled. "T-the woman, Kiko, was on the bed while. . .D-dr. Goda drew blood for the test, and then he turned around to put the vial in the rack and s-she grabbed a scalpel from the tray and stabbed him.”
More sobs came. The sound was a storm brewing in the depths of her chest. “Why would she try to kill him? He did nothing wrong!”
"Where is she now?”
“Dr. Goda fell forward and she took his phone from his coat pocket, ran into the bathroom, and locked the door."
Hiro growled, “The fucking phone!”
That’s why she did all of this!
We both rushed to the door.
I aimed at the handle and fired.
Kiko screamed from within.
The lock shattered.
Hiro kicked the door open.
It slammed against the inside wall.
I stepped through and brought my gun up in one motion.
Kiko was in the corner, on the floor between the toilet and the wall with her back pressed into the tile and her knees drawn up as far as the large swell of her belly would allow.
The fucking phone was at her ear. Her free hand was clamped around it like she was afraid it would jump out of her grip. Her face was wet with tears, snot, and blood.
Her eyes locked on mine. “H-he’s here! Help me! The Dragon is here!!”
I crossed the bathroom in two steps and tore the phone out of her hand so hard her wrist jerked away and the back of her hand slammed against the tile wall.
She yelped. “No!!!”
I put the phone to my ear.
There was breathing on the other end.
Then my father's voice sounded.
Soft.
Pleased.
And sinister.
“Son? Are you there?”
Horror rose within me.
"I see you now, boy, and I can’t wait to meet your Tiger.”
I closed my eyes for one heartbeat.
“Be patient, son. We're on our way—"
Opening my eyes, I ended the call, dropped the phone on the tile and stomped on it. The screen cracked under my heel. I ground my boot down until the casing splintered and the battery popped loose and skittered across the floor.
Kiko sobbed in the corner. Her shoulders were shaking. Her hands were now pressed flat to her belly, fingers splayed wide, as if she were holding the twins inside her by pure will.
I raised my gun and pointed it at her forehead. My finger settled on the trigger. “How long was the phone call to my father?”
“That bitch called him?” Hiro sneered. “Are you fucking kidding me?!!”
Kiko screamed as snot dripped from her nose. “You g-gave me no choice!”
I rushed her way and pressed the tip of the gun to her head. “How long was the fucking phone call?!”
“I-I don’t know.” She cried. “I t-think it was eight minutes.”
Eight minutes.
Horror hollowed my chest.
Dr. Goda was one of the few people on the island authorized to place outside calls during lockdown conditions.
Reo would have granted him unrestricted satellite access for medical emergencies—heart attacks, supply failures, premature births, storms, evacuation requests.
The clinic needed a direct line to the mainland in case people were dying faster than we could save them.
Which meant the phone Kiko stole wasn’t routed through our protected network.
It pinged towers.
Satellites.
Coordinates.
Eight minutes was not just enough time for my father to hear her voice.
It was enough time for his tech people to triangulate the island, confirm the signal pattern, lock onto the route lines over the water, and start preparing an assault before I had even stepped into this bathroom.
Reo had trusted the doctor because saving lives required trust.
Kiko had weaponized that trust against all of us.
“Fuck!!” My hand shook. I wanted to pull that trigger so fucking bad it hurt my soul. Nothing would be better than spraying this wall with her blood.
Reo got to my side. “Kenji, give me the gun.”
“You sold the island to him. Huh?” I pressed the gun harder into her forehead.
She groaned in horror. “P-please. . .”
“How much did you get?”
“Oh, please!” She tried to push it away, but couldn’t. “Kenji!”
“You sold my Tiger. You just sold every man, woman, and child on this rock, you fucking bitch.”
Reo tried to take the gun. “Kenji—”
“Give me a minute—”