6. Priest #2
He sagged in my grip. I held him upright and drove my fist into his ribs, felt them give, heard the grunt of air leaving his lungs.
Hit him again. Same spot. Harder. He tried to swing at me, a weak, looping punch that caught the side of my neck and didn’t register.
I answered it with a straight right to his mouth that split his lip against his teeth and sent him staggering back into the wall.
He bounced off it and I caught him by the collar and hit him again.
And again. Short punches, close range, each one carrying the weight of the phone call that had scared her, the drive-by that had shredded her shop, the handler who’d sold her, every month of isolation she’d endured because a man in a federal cell decided his pride was worth more than her life.
Every punch landed with a satisfaction that was dark and clean and total, and I understood in that moment what Razor had been fighting his whole life.
The thing that lives inside a man trained for violence when the violence becomes personal.
The thing that feels righteous and correct and wants to keep going until there’s nothing left to hit.
I wasn’t stopping. I knew I should. Somewhere in the back of my mind the man I’d always been was watching the man I was becoming and trying to reach the controls, but the controls weren’t responding. The rage had the wheel and the rage didn’t follow rules.
I hit him again and his knees buckled and I held him up by sheer grip and hit him again and heard someone say my name from very far away.
I pulled my fist back for another shot and the thing behind it wasn’t discipline, wasn’t training, wasn’t the measured, precise force I’d spent my adult life perfecting.
It was the raw, blinding fury of a man who’d watched the woman he loved stand behind a counter and face down the men sent to kill her, and it wanted to finish this.
“Priest.” Angel’s voice. Closer now.
Angel’s hand closed on my shoulder. Iron-hard, the grip of a commanding officer physically pulling a soldier out of a place he wasn’t coming back from on his own. His other hand caught my drawn-back fist and held it.
“Stand down.” His voice was right in my ear, steady, absolute. The voice that had pulled men out of firefights and dropped them back into discipline across years of operations. “We need him conscious. We need him talking. Stand down, brother.”
The word cut through the red. Brother. The word, not the command. The reminder of who I was, what I was, the code I’d lived by since Angel pulled me out of a drift I’d thought was permanent.
I stood there with Angel’s hand on my fist and the tall one sagging in my grip and I fought the hardest fight of my life. Against myself. Against the part of me that wanted to keep going, that had tasted what it felt like to stop being careful and wanted more.
I opened my hand. Let the jacket go. He dropped to the floor and curled onto his side and coughed blood onto the hardwood.
His face was ruined. Swollen, split in three places, one eye already sealed shut.
He was breathing in short, wet gasps, each one a struggle through a nose that wasn’t working anymore.
I stepped back. My hands were shaking from the effort of stopping.
My knuckles were split across both ridges, the skin torn, blood on my fingers that wasn’t all mine.
I looked at my hands as if they belonged to someone else.
These hands had been precise my whole life.
The hands of a man who measured his force with the same care he measured everything.
I’d just tried to beat a man to pieces in a flower shop. And the only reason I’d stopped was because Angel had physically held my fist.
That scared me more than anything the tall one could have done.
Behind me, the other two were face-down on the floor. Hawk had one zip-tied, wrists behind his back. Razor had the third pinned against the wall with his forearm across the man’s chest.
Angel was already on the phone to his federal contact. Short, precise. Location, suspects, evidence. The conversation of men who’d worked together long enough that efficiency replaced ceremony.
Mia was behind the counter. She hadn’t moved. Her hands were still flat on the surface, her back still straight, and she was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Deeper than fear or shock. An understanding of what she’d just watched and what it meant.
The feds arrived within the hour. Two SUVs, federal plates, men in suits who looked at the three men on the floor and the eight men in leather standing around them and asked only the necessary questions.
Angel’s contact had briefed them. They knew who the crew was, who sent them, and who’d sold the witness.
Rawlings would be arrested by end of day.
The evidence chain, the crew’s phones, the communications, the money, would land on Salieri’s file and trigger a transfer to a facility where every word was recorded and every contact monitored and the network he’d built to reach her was dismantled down to the last connection.
He’d know where she was. He’d always know. But knowing wouldn’t matter from inside a concrete box with no crew, no handler, and no way to reach anyone who could act on it.
He wasn’t dead. But he was finished.
The feds took the crew out in cuffs. The SUVs pulled away from Main Street. The brothers started moving toward the back door, the tension draining out of the room, the exhale of men who’d trained for violence and were done with it for today.
I was standing behind the counter, trying to get my breathing to settle, my split knuckles throbbing, when Razor stopped beside me. He looked at my face. Looked at my hands. Then he reached into the nearest bucket, pulled out a single white rose, and held it out to me.
“Here,” he said. “You need this more than I do.”
I stared at him.
“Take the flower, Priest.”
Mia laughed. The sound broke through the room like daylight, sudden, unexpected, warm. She was standing three feet from a bloodstain on her own hardwood and she was laughing at Razor holding a rose out to the man who’d just lost his mind in her shop.
Duke grinned from the doorway. Hawk shook his head, smiling. Ghost, on his way out, glanced at the rose, glanced at me, and kept walking, which from Ghost was approval, amusement and commentary all at once.
I took the rose. Because Razor was Razor, and because the man I’d always been was coming back, and because that man could take a joke even when his hands were still shaking.
The brothers left. One by one, through the back door, the sound of engines fading down the alley until the shop was quiet.
The only evidence of what had happened was a smear of blood on the hardwood. I’d clean it before the day was out.
Mia was behind the counter and I was beside her.
The street outside was settling back into the ordinary rhythm of a small town, and the sun was coming through the windows, throwing long shapes of gold across the floor.
She reached over and took the white rose from my hand. Turned it between her fingers with the same attention she gave every stem, reading it. Then she set it on the counter between us and looked at me.
“You scared me in there,” she said. “Not because of what you did. Because of what it cost you to stop.”
I looked at my hands. The split knuckles, the torn skin. The hands of a man who’d spent his whole life being careful and had just discovered what happened when careful wasn’t enough.
“I’ve never done that before,” I said. “Lost it like that. I’ve never been the man who can’t stop. I would have kept going. If Angel hadn’t grabbed my arm, I would have kept going.”