Twenty One
Jersey Boy
I’d been in bad buildings before.
Trap houses with sagging floors. Hotels where the wallpaper peeled like dead skin. One time, a half-burned row home that smelled like melted wiring and old screams.
Roman’s new build was different.
It wasn’t ruined yet. It was in that ugly in-between—too finished to be a full skeleton, but too raw to be safe. Concrete, glass, half-installed chandeliers hanging like nooses. It felt like we weren’t walking through a crime scene so much as a crime still being drafted.
We moved up from ten.
Boots on concrete, guns up, breath loud in my ears under the hum of the building.
I led, Valkyrie on my right. Snake Eyes and Spade behind us.
Turnpike watching the rear with Priest. Blackjack and the others were close enough that if this place tried to spit us out, they’d see which way the teeth were angled.
My ribs throbbed with each step. My hand kept wanting to drift back, to touch the patch on my cut like that could anchor me.
It didn’t.
Eleven was offices. A few framed walls, open ceilings.
A couple of doors already hung, others leaning against the studs.
The air smelled like dust. The building would have been too big for us to clear ourselves had it been fully finished.
Fortunately, in its current state, we could see from one side to the other on many of the floors.
Once we got to the landing for twelve, I eased the door open. I slipped through with Valkyrie tight on my flank, barrel leading.
The first thing I saw was a shoe.
A black dress shoe, polished enough to catch the overhead work light. Attached to a leg in dark slacks. Attached to a man who wasn’t moving.
He lay half-in, half-out of an office doorway, face turned away. Blood had soaked his collar and dried in a dark halo on the concrete.
The tie, though.
Red silk. Perfect Windsor knot.
Roman’s men wore those ties like uniforms.
“Contact,” I said. “One down. Roman’s.”
Everybody went still for that heartbeat you get when the hypothetical turns into reality.
We edged closer. Priest slid in behind me and crouched, fingers moving to the man’s neck.
“Cold,” he said. “Shot in the back, exited through his front. He bled out. He’s been like this for a while.”
The wall ahead was stippled where a bullet had punched out through bone and paint. Little flecks of red dotted the gray.
“Let’s clear this floor,” I said, voice tighter now. “Snake Eyes and Spade, right. Me and Valkyrie left. Priest and Turnpike hold here. Nobody gets cute.”
We fanned out.
It didn’t take long to find the others.
Two more of Roman’s men lay farther down the hall in an intersection of framed-out walls. One face-down, gun still in hand. The other crumpled against a column, eyes open and glazed, mouth slightly open like he’d been about to say something and never finished.
Three bodies that weren’t wearing those red ties lay around them.
Two Steel Serpent vests. Gray leather with the coiled snake logo half-obscured under blood. The third had a Bolivar tattoo on his neck, dark ink crawling up from under his collar. He had a gold chain with a little cross that had flipped the wrong way.
The fight here had been fast and controlled. Rounds had punched clean lines through the drywall. Minimal spray. Whoever hit them had known exactly where to aim.
It felt like I was looking down a tunnel at ourselves. Different cuts, but the same dead eyes.
“Miami,” I said into the mic, throat dry. “We’ve got casualties. Roman’s men, two Serpents, one Cartel. Floor twelve, center hall.”
His voice crackled back in my ear. “I can’t see. Still blind on most of the inside. Everything is glitching like a bad DVD.”
“Keep trying,” Blackjack interjected.
We pressed on.
At the far end of the hall, near a door marked with taped-up paper that read SECURITY / OPS in sharpie, we found another one.
He wasn’t dead yet.
Steel Serpent cut, gray vest half-unbuttoned, stomach a slick mat of red where the shirt had been shot through.
He propped himself up against the wall, one leg stretched out, the other bent awkwardly.
His breathing was ragged, harsh pulls that bubbled wet in his throat. Gun lay a foot from his limp hand.
His eyes snapped to us when we rounded the corner. Fear flared, then something like ugly pride.
“Hands where I can see them,” I said, gun already leveled at his face.
He smirked, lips split and swollen. “What, you going to arrest me or something?” he rasped.
Valkyrie slid in low to his side, hand reaching toward the wound. “He’s got minutes,” she muttered. “Maybe.”
“Then we don’t have time to fuck around,” I said. I stepped closer, just outside the radius where a dying man could still pull off something stupid. “Where?” I asked him.
The Serpent’s gaze tracked to me. Took in the cut. The DEVIL’S ACES rocker. The Enforcer patch.
“So, you’re the one,” he coughed. “The pitbull.”
“Where,” I repeated, ignoring him while letting every syllable drop heavy. “Vladimir. Roman’s family. Where are they?”
He wheezed a laugh. Blood flecked his lips. “Too late,” he said. “Up or down. You won’t find them.”
Valkyrie’s jaw tightened beside me.
“Which floor,” I pressed.
“Thirteen. Fourteen. Maybe seven. Fuck you,” he grinned then, wide enough to show pink teeth. “We’ve set the stage. You Devils? You’re late to the show.”
“Enough,” I said,
His head lolled toward the SECURITY / OPS door. “We jammed your eyes first. Cut the cams. Looped what we wanted,” the man’s breath rattled. His gaze unfocused for a second, then snapped back, stubborn.
Priest and Turnpike showed up beside us.
“Heard voices,” they said.
The Serpent coughed then and sprayed more red across his chin.
”You’re just fleas that wandered into a bonfire. You’ll look good in the background shots when this goes viral.”
He started to say more. Or maybe he just opened his mouth to try and spit.
Either way, I shot him in the head.
The sound cracked in the hallway and then was swallowed by the concrete. His skull snapped back against the wall. The wet gurgle cut off mid-chuckle. Blood poured from the wound and out of his nostrils like an unfettered fountain.
Priest flinched, just with his shoulders. Nobody else moved.
“Jesus, Jersey,” Turnpike muttered.
“He was going to bleed out in minutes talking shit anyway,” I said, voice flat. “Now he’s quiet and we don’t have to listen to the rest of the monologue. He was stalling. Buying time. Whatever is happening, is happening now, and we need to move quick.”
Valkyrie’s gaze found mine. There was no shock in it. Just a cool, assessing weight.
“No mercy tonight,” she said quietly.
“Didn’t start it that way,” I replied. “Not going to start now.”
She gave the smallest nod.
“Snake Eyes, Spade, Priest, Turnpike—we need to find the security room. Now.”
“Actually,” Snake Eyes began to say over comms. “Spade and I just found it.”
We regrouped and met outside the door. In my head I thought it was convenient how it was on this same floor.
Then I remembered something about Roman and the paranoid precautions he always took.
He didn’t like the security room on the ground floor.
Something he said once, “If we get hit from the ground, they’ll go for that first. Being higher up buys us time to react. ”
Spade took a breath before he pushed the makeshift door open with the side of his boot. It creaked open a few inches and stopped against something on the other side.
He shoved harder. The chair on the other side gave.
Inside, the room was a nest of screens and equipment racks. Half the monitors showed frozen images—empty hallways caught at a moment and stuck there. Others were solid blue. Some played an empty looping feed we knew wasn’t true.
In the middle of the room, a Steel Serpent with headphones on his head was sitting in a chair.
He turned just as we all entered, his expression shifting to “Oh fuck,” before Snake Eyes shot him in the face.
The bullet struck him in the mouth. Splintered teeth fell to the floor as the man pinwheeled backwards into the console.
A shower of sparks jumped from one of the panels.
The Serpent clutched his face and fell to his knees, blood pouring between his fingers.
I raised my gun up and shot him again, this time, center mass.
“Ops is hot,” Snake Eyes said calmly. “Well, was. Not anymore.”
Priest stepped in to make sure the Serpent stayed down. Spade went for the console, eyes already scanning the mess of buttons and cables.
“I can’t speak to whatever this is,” he said. “But the feeds are all labeled. Give me a second.”
He started flipping manual overrides, shutting off jammers. The looping feeds blinked, flickered, then died.
Static washed across them for a breath.
Then the cameras came back.
For the first time, I saw them flicker to life all at once—hallways, elevator lobbies, empty offices, stairwells—from our angle in the doorway. Little squares of truth.
“Miami,” I said. “Are you getting this?”
Miami’s laugh came through the radio like a spark.
“Oh, now we’re fucking talking,” he said.
Keys clacked faintly behind his voice. “Ops guy’s dead on my screen.
Cams are rebooting. I’ve got external, street side, boardwalk side, and…
fuck, yeah. I’ve got your lobby. I’ve got your elevators.
I’ve got your stairwells. Somebody hit the reset in there, whatever you did.
Feeds aren’t being tampered with anymore.
This is all live. I can see everything.”
“Good,” Blackjack said. “Start earning your disability check and help them in there.”