21. Sniper
twenty-one
Sniper
Ipivoted, not fast but smooth, gun still angled down at the porch boards—because even with the night this dead and the desert wind in my ears, I knew the click of a nine-mil safety when I heard it.
The woman ten feet off the steps had her hands already squared up, stance perfect, both arms locked like a goddamn ROTC instructor.
The pistol she pointed at my chest was so steady you could’ve balanced a dime on the slide and fired a hundred rounds before it ever tipped.
Emma Steele.
Hair in a ponytail, not a strand loose. Face washed clean, eyebrows a little too perfect to be natural, but what sold it was the total absence of doubt.
There’s a look you learn from years of watching people decide whether they’re going to kill you or just tell you to fuck off. Emma wasn’t undecided.
Her voice, when it came, was low and dry: “You should’ve brought a friend.”
The air was thin up here, but I drew a breath anyway, thumb flexing inside the guard of the Glock, calculating the line. She had the drop, but I had range; if I broke right, the porch post might buy me enough time to—
She shot me before my brain finished the sentence.
There’s a difference between getting shot in the movies and getting shot in real life.
In real life, you don’t hear the gun. There’s a tight, hot punch to the meat above your ribs, then a weird, electric deadness that radiates out and makes your left arm disappear.
The bullet spun me halfway around, and the Glock hit the deck before I even felt it leave my hand.
Blood fountained onto my shirt, instant and dark.
I dropped to a knee and tried to bring my right up, but something went wrong with gravity and I just sort of listed sideways.
Emma stepped closer, gun still up, expression flat. She hadn’t blinked.
I sucked a lungful through my teeth and made a reach for the backup knife at the back of my belt. The world blurred. I barely had two fingers on the handle before something jammed the side of my neck. Sharp, burning, like a red-hot wasp stinger, and my hand just stopped listening.
I clawed at my own throat and found the barrel of a syringe, still humming from the plunge.
The liquid burned its way into my brain, like tequila but with a side order of formaldehyde.
My legs, which had carried me out of car wrecks and club brawls and the worst corners of Kingman, collapsed in a tangle.
I landed on my back, splinters biting through denim, vision whitening out in the corners.
Emma lowered her gun. Adam Steele appeared over me, sleeves rolled up, one hand still holding the syringe.
“Smart,” he said, admiring. “Always go for the dominant arm first.”
He put two fingers to my throat, checking pulse, then turned to Emma. “Let’s drag him in?”
She nodded, and her mouth twitched—not a smile, not quite. More like satisfaction.
I fought to focus, but the world turned syrupy. I saw stars—not the ones in the sky, but a hallucination of blue-white dots, pulsing in time with my heart.
They hauled me up by the armpits, Emma with a grip like a bench press champion, Adam’s hands careful not to touch the wound. I tried to kick, but my knees didn’t belong to me anymore.
The front door opened, and a blast of lemon cleaner punched my sinuses.
They got me inside, feet dragging over the synthetic floor, down a hallway where every light was already on, like they’d planned this for weeks.
The house, so cold and white and anonymous, passed in a blur of faces I’d never see again.
They dragged me down steps, and that’s when I remembered I was here because of the bunkers.
They raised me up and plopped me down on something metal—table, stretcher, didn’t matter.
My head thumped back. I tasted blood at the corner of my mouth.
Adam bent over, unzipped my cut, and did a quick field dressing on the shoulder, the kind you do when you expect someone to survive, but not for long.
My eyelids turned to sandbags. I heard Emma’s voice, faint now, as if underwater: “Want me to finish it?”
Adam’s voice: “He’s more useful this way.”
Someone laughed. Not me. Maybe Emma, maybe nobody. The world spun, then blurred, then faded into a silence so deep I thought I might have already bled out.
Last thing I saw was the ceiling. Last thing I felt was the wet heat of blood pooling at my side, fingers gone cold, but mind still burning with all the things I’d left unfinished.
They hadn’t killed me. Yet.
I went under, fighting it the whole way.
***
I woke up staring at a lightbulb so bright it erased every memory for a solid minute. Then the pain in my shoulder yanked the clock back to zero.
I was spread out on a metal table, arms above my head like I’d been crucified by someone with a taste for overkill.
My wrists were locked in cold steel cuffs, each one looped to a length of heavy chain that snaked up to a ring in the ceiling.
Whoever did it had measured my reach just shy of full extension, so my arms burned but didn’t let me sag.
My feet were splayed wider than was comfortable, ankles cuffed to the table’s legs, shoes gone, socks stiff and damp from the blood that had soaked through them.
The room was low and squat, concrete block walls, with an industrial tile floor sloped gentle toward a central drain.
Overhead, the fluorescent hummed at a pitch that made my fillings ache.
The air was the worst part: not just bleach and ammonia, but the sticky copper tang of meat gone wet and wild, with a backnote of something dead that refused to be buried.
My shoulder was fire. The bullet must have gone through, missed the bone, but the meat around it throbbed like it had its own heartbeat.
Someone had bandaged it—bare minimum, wrapped tight, gauze taped down with the kind of care you give a transmission fluid leak, not a person.
I flexed my hands, felt the skin on my palms crack, tried each finger one by one.
Everything moved, even if it felt like someone had replaced my blood with quick-drying glue.
I took a slow breath. The chains didn’t rattle—too short for leverage, too tight for play. The only sound was the buzz of the light and the faint, distant rumble of what might have been a freezer cycling on somewhere beyond the wall.
I glanced around the room: stainless prep counter to the right, a rack of cleavers and bone saws hung in perfect order, not a tool out of place.
Hooks on the far wall, some swinging empty, one with a length of rope still tied into a noose.
A metal vat against the left wall, steam curling up from its rim.
I clocked the drain in the middle of the floor—deep, with a steel grate that looked new.
Someone had poured bleach straight down the hole, but the pink line around the edges said it hadn’t done much to clean up the history.
My mouth was dry as sand. I licked my lips, tasted blood, and spat. The spit hit the floor and vanished in the shadow under the table.
I ran the check: wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck. Everything but the bullet hole worked. I arched my back, tried to lever my legs up, but the chains just bit deeper into my skin. I turned my head left and right—nothing but the cold metal rim and the endless hum of the light.
The door was steel, inset with a small mesh window. It was shut, but I could see a slice of darkness at the bottom, like the world outside the room had gone extinct.
I’d been in worse spots, but not by much.
I waited. There was no clock in the room, but I counted the seconds anyway. On minute three, a faint sound filtered in—a single, deliberate step on concrete, heavy enough to echo but not so heavy it said brute force. Then another, closer.
I closed my eyes and listened.
The light buzzed. The air hung thick, blood and bleach. The chains trembled with my pulse.
The step stopped at the door.
I set my jaw, flexed every muscle I still owned, and waited for whatever the fuck was next.