Chapter 7
Knox
Knox was crouched behind the counter restocking gum when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out without thinking, but the moment he saw the name on the screen, his stomach tightened.
Dominic.
He stood, wiped his hands on his shirt, and answered. “Yeah?”
Dominic’s voice was direct, all business. “I need you at the address I just texted you. Now.”
Knox straightened, glancing automatically at the clock mounted above the cigarette display. Almost an hour left on his shift. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m still working.”
“You work for me. Close up and get here.”
Knox shook his head. “I can’t just bail. The owner’s good to me. I’m the only one here for the next hour.”
Dominic’s reply came colder. “That’s not my problem. Don’t make it mine.”
Knox gripped the phone tighter. “I’ll come when my shift ends. I don’t leave decent people hanging. Not even for you.”
The silence that followed felt heavy enough to hurt. When Dominic spoke, his voice had gone dangerously calm. “The second your shift ends, you get here. Don’t make me wait a moment longer.”
The line went dead.
Knox lowered the phone, staring at his reflection in the cooler door.
Three days.
It had been three days since he’d seen or heard from Dominic. Three days of silence that had left him feeling weirdly restless, like he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now, with one call, everything ordinary felt temporary again.
He finished the rest of his shift with a strange current under his skin. When the next clerk came in, Knox ran through the handoff quickly and stepped out into the afternoon sunlight.
He found the nearest bus stop and boarded, taking a seat by the window. The ride crawled through the city blocks and industrial lots, every street making the ordinary feel farther away.
He got off at the closest stop he could find, checking the map on his phone as he walked the rest of the way.
The address led him to an old warehouse that looked forgettable, the kind of building you could pass a hundred times without ever noticing it.
Except now his entire life seemed to be pulling him toward it.
He drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and stepped inside. The temperature dropped immediately. Weak daylight filtered through grimy high windows, striping the floor and turning everything a little ghostly.
There were voices, low and serious, echoing off the walls. He hesitated just long enough to get his bearings before following the sound. Every footstep echoed. His heartbeat felt impossibly loud, pulsing in his throat, his ears, even his fingertips.
And then he saw them. Dominic stood beside a battered folding table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, posture deceptively relaxed in the way only truly dangerous men managed. His gaze lifted the moment Knox entered, taking him in with one quick sweep.
Beside him stood the dark-haired man Knox recognized from before. Cassian. The easy grin was there again, but there was something watchful underneath it now.
Two more men lingered nearby, leaning against a stack of crates, their arms crossed. They looked like the kind of men who had done worse than break a nose.
And there, slumped in a chair at the center of the room, was the casino’s floor manager. One eye was swollen shut, blood stained the collar of his shirt, and one hand trembled visibly in his lap. Shame and anger flickered across his face, but it was fear that made him twitch with every sound.
Dominic nodded once. “Right on time.”
Knox kept his expression blank, but he could feel the tension pull tighter inside him. He flicked his gaze from the floor manager to Dominic. “What happened?”
Dominic’s eyes remained on him. “You noticed something no one else did. The other night, you said he seemed nervous.” His gaze flicked briefly to the man in the chair. “He had reason to be. Turns out he’d been stealing from the casino for months.”
Cassian stepped forward, studying Knox with open interest. “We checked after you mentioned it. Not bad, kid,” he said.
The floor manager lurched upright, voice cracking. “It wasn’t like that—”
Dominic silenced him with a glance, then his eyes returned to Knox. “You see details most people miss. That makes you useful. Remember that.”
The praise caught Knox off guard, sparking a flicker of satisfaction he hadn’t expected. Before he could decide what to make of that, Dominic’s expression hardened. “You’re here because I want you to see what happens when someone crosses me,” he said.
Knox managed to nod. He could feel the world reshaping itself around him. Whatever happened next, he was in it now—deeper than before—and there was no turning back.
“Hold out his hand,” Dominic said.
One of the men moved from the shadows, grabbing the floor manager’s wrist. Panic flashed across the man’s face. “No—wait—please—” He struggled hard enough to nearly tip the chair, but it made no difference. The man restraining him forced his fingers apart despite the frantic resistance.
Knox’s stomach twisted, but he didn’t move.
Dominic stepped closer, voice cold as stone.
“You took what belonged to me,” he said before nodding to the enforcer.
The man bent the manager’s pinky finger back with a sickening crack.
The scream ricocheted through the warehouse, loud enough to make Knox’s vision go white at the edges.
He wanted to look away, but forced himself to watch.
He could feel Dominic’s attention on him without even turning his head, waiting for the first sign of weakness.
Another finger bent backward; another scream tore through the room.
Knox locked his jaw so tightly it hurt, breathing through his nose. His stomach churned, his pulse hammering against his ribs so hard it made his skin feel too tight, but he forced himself to stay exactly where he was.
The manager sobbed, broken and desperate, tears and snot streaking down his face. “Please—please, I’m sorry—”
Dominic didn’t so much as blink. “You’re sorry because you got caught.”
The next crack was somehow worse. Knox swallowed against the nausea rising in his throat.
Cassian glanced over. “First time seeing something like this?” he asked, voice almost kind.
Knox didn’t trust himself to answer. Everything about this felt surreal, like he’d stepped so far outside his own life that there was no recognizable path back.
By the time Dominic lifted a hand to stop it, the manager’s hand was mangled, fingers jutting at impossible angles. The man sagged in the chair, sobbing openly.
Dominic turned toward Knox, expression unreadable. “Remember this. This is what happens to people who betray me.”
Knox nodded, the movement mechanical. He could taste metal at the back of his throat.
“If you’re going to remain in this world,” Dominic continued, “you need to understand exactly what it costs.”
He turned back toward the man in the chair, letting the sobbing fill the space. “Enough,” he said.
Relief crashed across the manager’s face so suddenly it was painful to witness. For one stupid second, Knox thought that was the end of it, until Dominic reached for the gun on the table. Knox’s stomach dropped, a foreign sensation spreading through him, but he didn’t step back.
Dominic stepped closer, stopping just in front of the chair. The manager looked up at him, eyes blown wide, mouth working uselessly around broken pleas.
“I gave you a place,” Dominic said. “I trusted you with my business. My people.”
The man shook his head violently, tears tracking down his bruised face. “I swear—I won’t—please—”
Dominic raised the gun.
Knox registered everything in detail. The way the barrel looked too small to end a life.
The trembling rise of the man’s chest. The sudden unnatural stillness in the room.
The sound of the gunshot exploding through the warehouse.
Blood sprayed, painting the concrete red and splattering Dominic’s sleeve as the man’s body jolted and went limp, head lolling forward at an unnatural angle.
The metallic smell hit a second later. Knox couldn’t move. His ears rang and his hands felt numb, like they didn’t belong to him anymore. Something inside him recoiled in horror, but beneath that, something colder locked into place.
Knox barely had time to process what he was seeing before two of Dominic’s men moved forward, calm and efficient in a way that made the violence feel even more disturbing. One retrieved a body bag from somewhere while the other lifted the dead man from the chair without ceremony.
Dominic turned to Knox, their eyes meeting. For a long moment, Dominic said nothing at all, his gaze moving over Knox like he was searching for something. Shock. Fear. Revulsion. Weakness. Any sign that would prove Knox had reached his limit.
He forced himself to breathe through the pounding in his chest, every inhale deliberate, every muscle held rigid beneath the weight of Dominic’s scrutiny.
Eventually Dominic spoke. “You understand now. That I don’t give second chances.”
Knox swallowed, his throat dry enough to hurt. “Yeah.”
Dominic’s mouth curved into an approving smile. “Good,” he said.
Someone handed him a cloth, and he wiped the blood from his hand with the same detached efficiency he brought to everything else. “In my world, you don’t get the luxury of giving people the benefit of the doubt. You’re careful or you end up dead.”
The body was already being taken away, but the blood and the echo of what had happened lingered in the air. Knox’s gaze flicked to the blood, then back to Dominic. His voice was steady when he spoke, even if he didn’t quite recognize it as his own. “I understand.”
And the worst part—the part he didn’t know what to do with—was that maybe he did.
“You did well,” Dominic said. “You have two choices now. You go home. Sit alone with what you just saw. Maybe that’s what you need. But if you do, you say nothing. Not to your friends, not to your mother, not to anyone.”
Knox stayed still.