Ten Justice
TEN
Justice
Fury runs through my veins with the precision of a laser strike.
Sirens rise and fade while my crews clean the block.
Men in dark jackets sweep brass into canvas sacks, roll hoses, and rinse the curb.
Two fold a tarp and lift a body to the van.
Another checks for pulses that aren’t there and tags wrists.
Phones are already out to the right sources in the police department, but we only have a few more minutes until they have to arrive. My men will get it done.
I stalk into Malice Media’s main hub, so angry my ears burn.
My white shirt drips and clings to my skin.
Blood runs warm down my ribs and cools in the air of the lobby.
Security clocks me without a word. The two men who brought me in hold the elevator and keep their eyes forward.
We ride down in silence. The car hums. Fluorescents buzz.
I breathe through the sting in my shoulder.
The doors open and Kaz looks up from a bank of monitors. He’s our resident computer genius. “What the fuck happened to you?”
His damn voice slices across my ribcage. “Firefight. Didn’t you hear it?” My voice is even and low. Copper sits at the back of my tongue. I taste dust and cordite and stale coffee from the elevator.
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you got shot. I got the 911 and sent our soldiers.” His voice grates, like usual, but I don’t wince. My brother relies on him, which is why he’s still breathing. He looks at my bloody shoulder. “How bad?”
“Stop talking. I’m fine.” I brush past him. “Ella Rendale was with me and escaped through an alley, somehow losing both of my men pursuing her. Find her by the time I get back.” My teeth grind.
I reach the far wall and work the locks in sequence.
Keypad. Card. Palm. Retina. The green bar crawls to full and relays click until the magnets release.
I pull the door and step inside. The room breathes at fifty-eight degrees and fans move in a constant wash.
Ozone and cold metal and a faint hint of lemon cleaner hang under the noise.
The wound is high on my shoulder, so I strip out of my shirt to study it.
Entry and exit are both shallow. Good. It’s nice to know I gauged it correctly, although the wound is aching like a bitch.
Inhaling, I cross to the pedestal at the center, where light panels bathe the stone from four sides.
The garnet sits in milled steel, a mass of dark red with crisp facets, the color deepening toward the core.
It’s the size of a bowling ball. The air around it feels warmer by a narrow degree.
Power pools in the space like an electrical field I can feel on my skin.
My shoulders drop, though one burns. I reach the stone and place my palm on it. The contact quiets the noise in my head. My breathing evens, and the heat at the edges of my sight cools. How have people not figured this out?
Of course, even if they have, not many can reach our level of expertise. It’s probably something genetic that hasn’t been mapped yet.
I close my eyes, take a long breath in through my nose and release it slowly from my mouth.
I push a steady hum through the heel of my hand.
The garnet brightens, takes the current, and returns it on a higher pulse.
Air catches in my chest as the flow enters, runs across my clavicle, rides my brachial plexus, crosses to my spine, and settles along the ribs.
The pattern holds. The stone and I meet on the same frequency and lock.
Maybe that’s the key. We’ve got theories and partial proofs.
We don’t have the full map. Matter carries energy.
Energy carries information. The fit between my field and this crystal stays true every time.
Finally, my eyelids open. The tear in my shoulder knits from the inside first. Heat climbs, then eases.
The pain is excruciating, and I should take several hours to fix myself. I don’t have time. Ella hasn’t given me that time. So I push to get it done, my knees weakening from the agony.
Pain flares hot and cutting for too long before dropping to a dull throb.
Ceiling fans pick up a few cycles, and the room adjusts to the load without complaint.
The garnet dims by a notch, so I ease more of my own energy store into it, not just surface current but the deeper charge that feels personal and specific.
Essence, if that word must stand. The transfer stabilizes the crystal, and a dark red color returns to her center.
I hold contact and keep count. Ten breaths. Twenty. A minute. I’m going to spank Ella’s small ass raw for this. God knows what kind of damage I’m doing to my body by rushing the healing process.
The pulse under my hand and the rack hum fall into a clean ratio.
I add my second hand to the facet and test for resistance.
None presents. The stone still has headroom, so I give more.
My shoulder tightens once and lets go. I lower my arm and stretch it carefully, noting that my range of motion returns without instability.
The edges of the wound seal. A band of heat remains. Functional is enough.
Hopefully I didn’t just give myself permanent damage. I’ll find out later.
I think about the day I worked the damaged crystal that was killing Thorn.
It never bound to me and didn’t push back.
Although it drained me and led to the mess I’m in right now.
The sensitivity in my auditory cortex somehow went from nuisance to pain.
Voices that only irritated me before now turn into knives on my nerves.
We pulled Thorn out with energy workers in a circle, a timed sequence, and a set of stones that weren’t supposed to share a room.
Chance and pressure made it hold. I don’t think we’ll ever reproduce that again, which sucks for me.
This garnet still answers me. That means something. The hole in my shoulder is closed now but still aches beneath the muscle. The stone has given what she can on this pass. I lift my hands. The glow steadies at a lower value, and the server noise eases my pulse. Static clears from my head.
I then open the server room door into the main floor. Cold air spills out and thins. Kaz looks up from the console and lifts a hand to stop me at the threshold. “All better now?”
“The only thing I want from you is Ella’s location.” I walk past him.
“Why do you have to be such a dick?”
Fire runs from my shoulder into my biceps, stretching a muscle with pain. “Would you just shut up?” I snap.
Kaz blinks once and tilts his head. He keeps his hands on the edge of the console and watches me without moving.
We’re rarely alone. I avoid him when I can. When I can’t, Thorn usually sits between us and tells us both to shut up.
“What’s your problem?” Kaz says, eyes still on me, voice rough from too much coffee and not enough sleep.
“I don’t like you, and I don’t like when you talk.” It is as close as I’ll give him to the truth. Sound grinds in my head when it comes out the wrong throat. His is the wrong throat.
“Your brother likes me just fine,” he says, rolling one shoulder as he drops into his chair.
“That’s because you’re the best computer programmer in the city. In the world.” Maybe Ella’s better. I don’t say that. “Did you find Ella Rendale?” My palm actually heats with the need to meet her ass. Hard. I can’t believe she ran away during a fucking firefight.
He mutters under his breath. I think about putting a bullet in his head. Thorn would be pissed if he came back and his top computer guy was a stain on the floor. Shit happens. Kaz catches the thought on my face or reads the angle of my shoulders and drops his gaze to the keys.
“She’s fascinating,” he says, fingers moving. He tiles feeds across the far wall, pulls license plate hits, lights up a geofence, and pushes audio to my left. “She hotwired an older car outside the IHOP on Sixteenth.” He scrubs back, zooms, and tags the model.
She hotwired a fucking car? The woman who can hack into anything modern also has old school skills? I stand there shirtless, blood drying across my ribs, and shake my head. “Where did she go?”
“I’ve been searching all available cameras,” he says, softer now, voice leveled out for my ears.
His hands blur. Window after window opens.
He tracks alley cameras, pulls a private garage exit, sorts a license plate list, and kills three false positives.
“She went south. No. Southwest.” He reads off street names and time stamps. He circles a frame. “Here’s the car.”
Good. Where the hell is she? “And then?”
“Then,” he says, typing hard. He flips to a city grid, overlays transit cameras, scrubs the stream, and tags motion vectors. “She’s gone.”
I still. “What do you mean, gone?”
“Her trail’s gone. Wherever she was, she avoided CCTV.” He taps the desk once and locks the view.
I hold still and listen past the fans and the hiss of the HVAC. Sirens skid across the edge of my hearing and fade away.
Kaz keeps working the computer. “I’m not finding her.”
Oh, I’ll find that brat. I drop into the chair at the console across from Kaz and start typing.
I take his feed, pull street grids, then hack every CCTV endpoint within two miles.
I strip out every camera cone and leave only the dead zones.
I map each gap, block by block, alley by alley.
I scrub the last fifteen minutes on every surviving feed.
She never crosses a lens. She’s in one of these holes.
I reach for my phone and take it from my back pocket. The screen lights. No cracks. No bullet took it. “Any idea who attacked us?” I keep my eyes on the map and mark the dark pockets in red. I have to find her.
“No.” Kaz pushes his chair in and widens a grid. “We kept three attackers alive, but two are bleeding pretty bad. They’ve been taken to the Boathouse.”
The Boathouse sits in the cliff below Thorn’s place cut into the rocks above the ocean. I’ll head there after I find Ella Rendale. Two of the three captives will probably bleed out before I reach them. Not my problem. One talking mouth is enough.
I glance over at Kaz. “Call our competitors. I want a meeting sometime soon.” I send the search teams to the red blocks and tag a route I’d take if I were her.
“No problem.” Kaz pivots to the comms desk and starts dialing. He sounds cheerful, which grates on me. My head doesn’t like his register and never has.
I stand from the console and roll my shoulder.
“Let me know if you find Ella. I’m sending teams to sweep each zone.
” I mark assignments and set check-in times.
If she never hits a camera outside these pockets, she’s staying inside them.
My gut says southwest, so that’s where I’ll go.
“Put out the word. If anybody lets Thorn know what happened this morning, they’ll die bleeding from the eyes. ”
My shoulder now itching, I cross the room and ride the elevator up to my penthouse apartment.
The doors open on clean tile and cold air, so I head straight to the shower and rinse the blood off until the water runs clear.
Afterward, I pull on a dark shirt and jacket that will move with me, holster my Ruger and Glock, sheath the knives where my hands expect them, and load spare mags into an inner pocket.
Back in the elevator, I thumb the ops channel open on my phone. Ella Rendale and I are going to settle this today.