Chapter Twelve
Chapter Tweleve
Selene
Itook the last two turns at sixty, brakes screeching, engine howling like a caged dog.
The air had cooled, but the blood in my ears stayed hot, a percussion of memory and hate.
Every bump in the road shot fire up my leg, but I white-knuckled the throttle and leaned into the pain.
The lights of Jack's place, so gaudy they looked radioactive, rose over the last ridge and bled into my vision. Even from a quarter mile out, you could see where he’d thrown his ego.
Neon wolves leering above the entrance, gold-tinted windows, the whole thing built to look like a billionaire’s wet dream of Versailles.
The parking lot was full of SUVs, black on black, every one of them aftermarket and armored.
I aimed for the back entrance, never once letting off the gas.
I killed the engine in a gutter between two loading bays.
For a second, the only sound was the tick of the cooling block and my own ragged breath.
Then I heard voices, footsteps, the static crackle of a walkie.
I climbed off the bike, let my weight settle evenly.
My left leg was shot to hell, numb and burning, but the rest of me felt tuned to a finer frequency. Every sense awake, every muscle coiled.
The right here and now was a culmination of everything I’d been through in life. It was time to put up or shut up. I wasn’t the shut-up type.
Two guards were posted at the employee entrance.
They wore navy sport coats and sidearms big enough to ruin a man’s whole night.
One carried a clipboard, the other a twelve-pack of muscle and nothing behind the eyes.
The old Selene would have found them attractive; the new Selene found them repulsive.
I walked right at them, gun already out and down at my thigh. They didn’t flinch at first. The clipboard one frowned, like I’d tracked blood onto his nice clean concrete.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” he said, voice bored.
I didn’t smile. I just raised the Glock, finger on the trigger. “Step aside or die,” I said, keeping my voice low. “You work for Jack, you know how this ends.”
The clipboard guy stared a second too long, weighing his next move. The other man, the big one, reached for his holster. I shot him through the knee, and he went down hard, screaming, hand spasming open and shut.
Clipboard man stepped back, hands high. “All right, all right. I don’t get paid enough.” He dropped the clipboard, eyes flicking to the bleeding guy on the ground, then back to me.
I kicked the door open, dragging my leg, and entered without looking back. I heard the clipboard man say, “Fuck this, I quit,” and the sound made me want to laugh, but I didn’t have time.
Inside, the casino was dark and too quiet.
No slot bells, no drunk laughter, just the low drone of ventilation and the wet slap of my boots on the fake marble.
The carpet had been ripped up in places, and the half-assed repairs just made it look more like a crime scene.
Every so often, a bulb flickered, illuminating a painting or a potted plant covered in dust. Jack ran his businesses like he ran his life.
All shine on the outside, rot at the core.
I kept to the edges, gun out, eyes adjusting.
The adrenaline made the edges of my vision glow white, but I could still pick out the shapes—shadows moving in the bar, a pair of girls in cocktail dresses hiding behind the roulette wheel, a body slumped in a chair near the craps table.
The only real sound came from up front, where the high-roller suites overlooked the floor.
I recognized the cadence, even muffled. Jack was barking orders at someone.
And another voice, deeper, broken by pain.
I froze, then moved closer, pulse cranked up another level. The second voice was Zeke.
The stairwell to Jack’s office was supposed to be guarded.
Tonight, it was just an open corridor, the carpet sticky with dried blood and puke.
I went up two steps at a time, favoring my good leg, until I reached the landing.
Here, the wall was covered with framed magazine covers of Jack on the front of Forbes, Jack shaking hands with a senator, Jack at the opening of some doomed Vegas restaurant.
I resisted the urge to smash them and instead kept moving.
At the top of the stairs, I pressed my back to the wall and listened. Jack was pacing, boots hard on the tile, ranting about something. I heard a wet cough, then Zeke’s voice. It was shaky but alive.
“…fucking monster,” Zeke was saying. “You could’ve let us go, but you can’t stand not owning everything you touch.”
Jack’s reply was pure ice. “You think you’re better than me? You’re just a shittier version. I should have drowned you at birth.”
I slid the safety off and waited for my heartbeat to slow.
There was another noise—a faint, metallic click.
I pictured Zeke chained to a chair, the desk between him and the window, Jack circling like a coyote.
For a second, I just let myself feel the heat in my chest. Zeke was alive.
Hurt, probably close to broken, but alive. It was more than I’d hoped for.
I reached for the knob, took one last breath, and kicked the door in. I didn’t know if I was walking into a trap or a family reunion. I didn’t care. The only thing left was the kill.
Jack stood at the far end, half-shadowed by a desk lamp, the gun already in his hand, arm outstretched and eyes fixed on the gap. Zeke was alive, upright, and bleeding from chest wounds.
I froze, just a blink, but that’s all Jack needed. He smiled, that shark’s sneer, and said, “Hello, darling.” He reached for the desk drawer.
I barely processed the words. My mind stuttered on the image of Zeke, blood running from his lip, one eye swelling shut, but alive, alive, alive.
That blink cost me.
Jack jerked the drawer open, fished out a pistol so polished it shone in the lamplight. I saw the movement, muscle memory kicking in, but the angle was wrong and Zeke was in the line of fire. Jack leveled the gun at me, finger curling, lips parting for a quip or a curse. And then Zeke moved.
He must have picked the cuffs, or Jack had never locked them right. Zeke’s left hand came up, holding a .45 so hard against Jack’s side that the muzzle dimpled his suit. Zeke didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger.
The noise in that little room was cataclysmic.
Jack’s eyes bulged. The slug caught him in the ribs, tearing through flesh and silk and bone.
For a second, he just stood there, mouth working, blood already welling up and soaking his shirt.
Then his legs went out, and he collapsed onto the desk, the pistol clattering harmlessly to the floor.
The blood was so red it looked painted. It sprayed the wall, the chair, and the edges of the desk.
For a beat, nothing happened. Just Zeke, standing, gun still raised, breath ragged. Jack’s body slumped, limp and leaking. The wolf-head necklace swayed, pendulum on a crime scene.
Then the door behind me blew open, and two men barreled in.
Both big, both wired for violence, both carrying sidearms. I didn’t even think.
I spun, dropped into a crouch, and fired three times.
The first shot took the lead man in the eye.
The second tore through the other guy’s cheek.
The third missed, but it didn’t matter; both were already falling.
They landed hard, skulls popping against the fake marble.
I stood, gun up, chest heaving. Blood pooled under the men, oozed out from Jack’s collapsed chest, and spattered across Zeke’s face and hands. I could taste it in the air, metallic and raw. The place looked like a fucking bloodbath.
Zeke looked at me, blinking away the shock. I wanted to run to him, wanted to wrap him up and bury my face in his neck, but there were still two loaded guns in the room and a dead man who’d spent his whole life cheating death.
I limped over, bent, and checked Jack’s pulse. There was none. His eyes were open, but what was behind them was already gone.
I stared at him for a long second. Then I looked at Zeke, who was still holding the .45, arm extended. He shook all over, blood leaking from his own wounds, but his grip was steady.
“Did you mean to do it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he lowered the gun and looked at me with something like relief, and something else, darker. “You got shot,” he said, voice broken.
“Just a graze,” I lied.
We both stared at the ruin we’d made. It looked like the end of the world, and maybe that’s what it was.
Then I heard the footsteps again, outside, and knew we had a minute, maybe less, before the rest of the security team woke up and decided to finish what Jack started.
I took Zeke’s hand, warm and sticky with blood, and squeezed. “Can you walk?”
He nodded, wordless. I squeezed harder, and for the first time in years, I thought I might cry after all.
But I didn’t. I just chambered a fresh round, shoved the door with my shoulder, and pulled Zeke behind me. Time to go.
The corridor outside Jack’s office echoed with panic and the smell of gunpowder.
I’d barely pulled Zeke into the hall when Stephanie appeared at the stairwell, gun drawn and eyes wide with murder.
She took in the mess, including me limping, Zeke, covered in blood, and the ruined wall behind us.
Her face shifted from shock to a calm that bordered on religious.
“You did it?” she asked.
I nodded, but she’d already pushed past me. She ducked into the office, stepped over the bodies, and met Zeke’s eyes. The two of them exchanged a look I couldn’t decipher, one that was equal parts mutual disgust and ancient understanding.
Stephanie set her pistol on the desk, then grabbed one of the dead men by the ankle and hauled him, casual as moving a sandbag, into the center of the room.
I grabbed the other, ignoring the shooting pain up my leg.
We worked in silence, stacking them against the radiator and using a throw rug to mop up the worst of the blood.
Jack’s body didn’t move, but his face sagged into something softer in death, almost normal, almost human.
Nines slipped in through the side entrance, phone pressed to her ear. She had a half-eaten candy bar in one hand and a backpack slung low across her body. “Cameras are reset,” she said. “Our entrance is erased. Security’s on a ten-minute loop, so we’re ghosts until the next shift.”
Stephanie grunted, tearing the sleeve off her own jacket to wipe fingerprints off the desk. “Good. Get the bikes ready.” Nines nodded and vanished as quietly as she’d come.
I checked the window. No sign of movement in the lot, just the sick blue glow of neon and the stutter of distant sirens. Vegas had a way of swallowing noise, even gunfire.
When I turned back, Zeke was standing over his father’s body, gun hanging from his hand. His face was unreadable, but the tremor in his jaw said more than words.
“You okay?” I asked.
He looked at me, blinked hard. “Never,” he said, and it was the truest thing I’d ever heard from him.
Stephanie didn’t offer comfort. She just clapped him on the shoulder and said, “You did good, kid.” She turned to me, and I saw a new respect in her eyes. Not the grudging, patronizing kind. Real, bone-deep respect.
“Time to go,” she said. “You want to leave a message for the next asshole who tries to take your place?”
I thought about it. Then I grabbed Jack’s wolf necklace from the lamp and looped it over the doorknob, the charm catching the light like a tiny green curse.
We headed out, Zeke trailing behind. At the exit, he stopped, pulled me close, and kissed me hard enough to taste iron. His hands were trembling, but hungry. For a second, the world narrowed to just the two of us and the pulse that ran between our ribs.
He broke the kiss, held my face between his hands. “Go,” he said, voice raw. “I’ll call the cops. I’ll say it was self-defense. It’s cleaner that way.”
I wanted to argue, but I saw the steel in his eyes. He needed to do this alone.
“Don’t let them eat you alive,” I said.
He smiled, bloody and beautiful. “I never do.”
Stephanie and I mounted our bikes, the engines coughing to life like old gods waking up. Nines and the rest of the crew waited by the lot, faces set and eyes bright with adrenaline.
We didn’t speak as we rode out, just let the hum of the city fill in the blanks. Behind us, the casino faded into the darkness, and with it, the last grip Jack Smalls ever had on the world.
I didn’t look back. Not once.
The Strip unreeled ahead, a living wound, and I gunned the throttle until the pain in my leg became a blur. We rode into the night, the wind cold and absolute, the horizon wide open and waiting for the next war. I was sure it would come, but until then, I needed to be patched up.