27. Caden
Caden
Agitation put more force behind every punch. The bastard hanging from the ceiling wheezed out a broken breath when my fist slammed into his stomach, his body jerking against the chains.
“So,” I said, flexing my aching knuckles, “you going to tell me how you found this place?”
“Fuck … you,” he choked out, not even trying to pretend he was innocent.
So I hit him again, only this time he pissed himself. As I’d hung him upside down, the stream ran straight over his own face.
Fucking lovely.
Building a lab in the King’s Forest had been my idea.
The entire woodland sat under a conservation covenant and preservation order, one of those old British protections so layered in procedure that changing it would take years and a minor war in Parliament.
No developer could dare sink foundations here, not without triggering a legal avalanche.
Which made it the perfect place to hide an entire drug manufacturing facility.
Except I’d received a call that morning from my chemist, T, telling me the guards had caught this prick lurking around the perimeter with a camera. Luckily he hadn’t found the entrance, but the fact he’d gotten that close at all was a problem.
Now here he was, bloodied and hanging in one of the storage rooms I kept the dried coca leaves, still somehow stupid enough to stay quiet.
“T!” I shouted down the hall, and then immediately regretted it. Calling for her was counterproductive. Anything that disrupted her routine could set her off balance, and Mr No-Name interrupting today’s production had already thrown the entire lab out of rhythm.
Instead, I stepped out, my overalls squeaking as I passed the men and women who were quietly packing the cocaine. A few heads turned as I made my way through the lab, their eyes widening beneath their goggles.
Any one of them could have shared the location, but until Mr No-Name started talking, I had nothing.
“Is it done?” T asked when I stepped into her office, her gaze skimming past me rather than meeting my eyes as she exhaled her displeasure at my presence.
Her desk was immaculate, with pens lined up perfectly parallel, paperwork stacked by size and colour, and every label facing the same direction. Even the monitors were positioned with exact symmetry.
But the disruption in the lab had clearly gotten to her.
I could hear it in the clipped precision of her voice, see it in the rigid set of her posture and the way her fingers tapped lightly against the desk in repeating patterns.
That tightly wound, hyper-controlled energy would usually set off alarms, but not with T—it was simply her default setting.
She’d been with us nearly eight years, and the only reason she’d lasted longer than the chemists before her was because she was obsessed with the science itself. Where others saw criminality, T saw complexity. A challenge worthy of her attention.
That obsession made her invaluable and loyal. It was also why she was still alive when the others had ended up with bullets in their heads.
“He’s not talking.” I searched the office for something long and heavy. “Do you have a bat?”
“Why would I have a bat?” she all but growled at me, her anger simmering beneath frigid control. “You’re not supposed to be here. You’ll mess the day up. We’ve already lost powder thanks to—”
“T,” I interrupted, shooting her a look as I continued searching the office. “You’ll make the loss back once our powder moves.” My searching caused some of her papers to fall from her desk, and she let out a sound of frustration, immediately dropping to her knees to pick up them back up.
“Our powder?” she snapped, flustered. “It’s my powder. Remind me, who has the Master’s in chemistry, and who just enjoys mixing things together to see what explodes?”
Yes, she had the Master’s, but I created the original formula. She just … refined it.
“Stop touching things!” she hissed, hovering over my shoulder when I checked one of the wooden stools. Ignoring her, I turned it over then kicked out one of the legs.
Perfect.
Nodding my thanks, I made my way back to the storage room.
Mr No-Name groaned once he saw what was in my hand, and to make sure he understood, I swung it straight at his shoulder. He screamed as the bone shattered.
“So, are we going to try this again?”
Instead of replying, he spat blood at me.
“You know what I think?” I said calmly. “I think you’re either very brave … or very fucking stupid.”
A weak laugh rattled out of him. “You’re dead anyway.”
“Interesting answer.” My expression didn’t shift as I weighed the length of wood in my hand. “So here are your options. You give me a name …” I tapped the edge lightly against his forehead. “Or I keep driving this into your skull until one of us gets bored. What do you think?”
His breathing turned uneven, some of the fight finally bleeding out of him.
Good.
Tightening my grip, I drew my arm back anyway.
“Wait!” he screeched, swinging violently in the chains from the sudden panic. “Wait, we knew the facility was somewhere in this area, but we didn’t have the exact coordinates. I was told to search the grounds.”
“We?”
He swallowed hard, trying to nod despite the position he was hanging in. “Y … yeah.”
“Who told you?”
His eyes darted away, which was a mistake. I slammed the wood into his ribs hard enough for a crack to echo through the room.
“Names,” I said coldly as he screamed. “I’m rapidly losing patience.”
“Blackwater!” he gasped, twisting against the chains.
My pulse slowed instead of spiking. If the information came from Selene Blackwater, then Aeris had fucking shared it.