Chapter Thirty-Three
White Ravens
Scar
The hardwood floor shuddered when the doors blew apart.
Scar felt the impact through the chair he was taped to, felt it in his teeth, in the bruised joints of his shoulders where his wrists were secured behind him.
The room erupted. People swore. Others screamed and scampered toward the back, hungry for violence but scared of being near it when it turned real.
Ravens.
He knew his brothers would come.
He braced for Meridian, for black coats, for slaughter, for the kind of brutality he knew they’d deliver, the kind that lacked mercy.
Then he saw him.
Gage stood in the decimated doorway—so fucking ethereal and still—like a figure cut out of moonlight.
All white fatigues, a knee-length coat with an oversized hood shadowing his face. Silver-rimmed glasses with tech lenses enhancing the dim lighting.
Scar’s heart dropped to his bound feet.
He bucked against the chair, and his shoulders screamed in protest, but he ignored it. Pain was background noise. The only thing that mattered was getting Gage out of there.
The crowd surged, pushing away from the doorway, making room for the show they’d accidentally bought tickets to.
Scar’s old crew—assholes he’d once ruled with an iron fist—stared as if they couldn’t decide if the intruder was a joke or a real threat.
The new king growled from somewhere behind him. “Yo, who the fuck is that?”
Gage didn’t move, but he spoke as if his patience had a limit.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said evenly. “I’m only here to take back what belongs to me. Release Scar, and I’ll leave peacefully.”
Scar blinked slowly. Peacefully!
For a thin, selfish second, he wished Jo had sent Meridian. Wished the place was already a morgue, and he didn’t have to sit there and listen to Gage offer compassion to men who didn’t deserve it.
He wanted to shout at Gage to get out…but he didn’t.
If the Kings knew what the man in white meant to him and wanted to really punish him, they’d open fire and make him watch.
Gage looked too beautiful to be taken seriously by these thugs. Worse, he didn’t look blind, helpless, or like a threat.
His cane was collapsed to baton-sized in his right hand and another similar-looking baton was clutched in his left.
“Belongs to you?” the new king scoffed, already sounding stunned and disgusted.
He flicked his hand at his enforcers as if he were swatting flies. “Get this motherfucker outta here. Take him around back.”
Scar ground his teeth so hard his jaw popped.
Five muscle-heavy bastards with all brawn instead of brains closed in.
Before Scar could react and do something stupid—like holler for Gage to run— Gage reached behind him, pulled something from his back pocket, crouched, and flung his hand outward in a wide sweeping motion.
Small crystal-looking beads scattered across the hardwood floor like spilled stars, forming a loose perimeter around him.
The first boot that touched one released a slight pop.
Another step. Pop.
Gage’s cane snapped out to its full length—six feet of reach locking into place.
One end had a razor-pointed tip, and the other was blunt and weighted, that was meant for destruction, not lethality.
In his other hand, the baton lit up with a blue-white electrical current.
Gage executed a three-sixty turn, building momentum as he met the first man with the long cane, striking him in the knee.
A sickening, bone-chilling crack sounded before he dropped with a primal scream of agony.
The second enforcer was already mid-rush as Gage pivoted toward the popping beads and stabbed the rod into the man’s ribs. The shock made him convulse violently before it shut him down. Collapsing him with his mouth open and eyes wide.
The third came in swinging, and Gage dodged him as if he were light work.
He dipped and drove the blunt end of the cane up under the jawline, clean and vicious, snapping thug’s head back, before he dropped to the ground, bloodied and unconscious, but still very much alive.
More beads popped like knuckles cracking, rapid little reports that drew a grid and turned the enforcers steps into mistake.
The next one tried to use his heft to rush and tackle.
Gage sidestepped him as if he were an annoying obstacle and struck him in his gut with the blunt end of his cane before he shot it upward and shattered his chin. In the same breath, he twisted his wrist and struck him again in the right jaw.
The enforcer collapsed in a rough heap, face twisted, body doubled over.
The last one hesitated…but not quick enough, his left boot coming down on one of the beads.
Gage pivoted in response, and slammed the steel bar into the bastard’s midsection, folding him over like a raggedy card table, before he shoved the electric baton against the side of his neck.
The current stole his breath, shorted out his muscles, and dropped him to the floor in a twitching heap.
Gage straightened his coat, relaxed and unbothered, as silence swallowed the room.
Scar gaped like everyone else. How had he underestimated him.
Gage was fiercer than a killer, because he left men breathing with bloodied, broken bodies and a brand-new kind of fear.
Pride warmed his insides.
He was watching the warrior angel—his partner—in real time.
He’d been so transfixed he hadn’t noticed the cold press of steel against the back of his head.
“Drop that shit, or he dies now!” A man barked at Gage.
Scar didn’t know who it was, it didn’t matter, as the pounding in his chest increased tenfold.
Gage froze a split second, before he jerked fast to the left.
An arrow whistled past his shoulder and over Scar’s head, close enough to make the hairs on his forearms rise.
He cringed at the sound of instant death the man behind him made before the pressure from the gun’s muzzle was gone.
He glanced in shock over his shoulder at the wicked black-and-green arrow protruding from the man’s throat.
The king started yelling, his voice cracking. “Get him! Get him!”
Nobody moved.
The room had watched five enforcers fall at the hands of one man, a gunman killed by an invisible crossbow, all while Gage stood there unaffected as if his name was Consequence.
Gage collapsed the long cane back into its compact form as he walked past the unconscious and writhing men at his feet with eerie composure.
“I never wished for anyone to get hurt,” Gage said in a level voice. “But my warning was clear. Do not make me ask again for what I came for.”
His electric baton buzzed with an obvious increase in voltage, the sound making the ones left standing shrink away.
Hands fumbled behind him as someone started ripping at the duct tape around his wrists.
“Which one of you is in charge?” Gage called out.
The piece of shit—unworthy of the king title—stepped forward, arms held out wide at his sides.
“Yeah, I’m the fuckin’ king!” he barked. “And you’re interfering in family business. Scar belongs to South Side.”
Gage shook his head slowly.
“You are wrong on both counts.”
Gage snapped his cane out again with a sharp click making the King flinch like the bitch he was.
“First, you are not Scar’s family, and you never were.”
A long, steel blade slid free along the bottom quarter of the cane’s shaft.
“And second…he belongs to me.”
“Who the fuck are you?” the king asked.
Gage smirked.
“A saint.”
He moved so fast Scar thought his eyes lied about it.
A silver blur cut the air, as Gage spun in a tight circle, the whispering slice almost too fast and clean to see until the blood splattered across the dingy wood. The severed arm hit the floor with a dull, wet thud, the fingers still twitching.
The king looked down in disbelief, shock freezing his face, and swallowing his scream as crimson spread across his crisp white T-shirt.
Gage’s composure remained steady, cold and calculated as he retracted the blade into the cane with a snap that sounded almost polite.
The king dropped to his knees, staring at the bloodied stump as though his brain couldn’t translate what’d happened.
Gage squatted beside him, his relaxed resolve terrifying.
“Consider this one amputation a mercy,” he said quietly, “Because if you ever touch what’s mine again, I will take the other arm and both legs, dismantling you piece by piece until you’re nothing but a hard lesson learned.”
Scar’s hands and feet were cut free.
He surged up, his shoulder howling in pain, as he followed Gage out of the hole in the front of the club and into the armored Hummer where the Greens waited in the third row, both hooded and quiet as predators.
The driver pressed on the accelerator and said through the comms, “Whites secured and inbound.”
Gage tossed his gear to the floor, then his hands were on Scar, checking him with fast, probing touches.
Scar just stared, transfixed.
Gage had saved him. And in the most spectacular way.
“I’m okay,” he said, trying to make it sound like the truth.
Gage didn’t stop touching. “Your gait is slightly off, and…”
He palpitated Scar’s shoulder and a sharp grunt escaped him before he could stop it, making Gage go still.
“Your shoulder is dislocated,” he gritted, then spoke through his own comms. “Roz, tell medical to be ready.”
“Bullshit,” he muttered. “Just pop it in, I’m going to my quarters.”
“You’re going to get checked out. Period.”
Scar smiled despite the pain. “I like this side of you. It’s turning me on.”
Gage didn’t smile.
Instead, he leaned in until his lips were against Scar’s ear.
“You scared me,” he whispered in a tone that sounded as if the words hurt to say.
Scar hummed low and rubbed his cheek against Gage’s, a rough, grounding touch he knew he liked. “You didn’t look scared.”
Gage stayed close.
“Why’d you leave?” he asked, quieter now. “We were supposed to be together tonight.”
Scar swallowed. “I’d planned to be back in time. Trust me. I had no intentions of missing that.”
Silence took them the rest of the way home.
When they reached headquarters, medical was already staged and waiting.
He protested the moment the doors opened, but with Gage’s express permission, gloved hands were on him anyway.
The doctor was still in the middle of taking his vitals when Jo and Meridian came in.
One look at their faces and he knew he was in deep shit.