Chapter 26 — The Rabid Dog #2
“It was a setup!” Kyle shouted again, the word ricocheting off the lobby’s marble. “You set the trap! You said, ‘Bring her and we’ll forgive everything’! Before I even lost! You told me that weeks ago!”
Ethan moved.
Too fast for the human eye to follow, too fast even for the high-definition camera to process without a blur.
One moment, Ethan was standing with his hands in his pockets. The next, he was on Kyle.
He didn’t punch him. That would be vulgar. That would be a bar fight.
Ethan grabbed Kyle by the throat.
With one hand.
He lifted Kyle off the ground. Not completely, but enough that Kyle’s feet scraped against the marble, robbing him of any foothold, any leverage.
Kyle’s scream cut off instantly, turning into a wet choke.
Ethan shoved Kyle against the edge of the fountain. Water splashed onto Kyle’s back, soaking his dirty jacket.
The crowd gasped. Some stepped back.
Ethan leaned in. His face was inches from Kyle’s.
Maya moved closer to the screen, desperate to hear. The microphone picked up the water, Kyle’s choking, the murmur of the crowd.
But Ethan’s words were a whisper.
Maya saw his lips move. Saw the expression on Kyle’s face change.
The defiance vanished. The madness vanished.
What remained was pure, absolute, distilled terror. The kind that makes the soul abandon the body before death even arrives.
Kyle’s eyes widened until the whites seemed to swallow his irises whole. He stopped fighting. His arms fell to his sides, useless. He went limp in Ethan’s grip, paralyzed like an animal caught in headlights.
What did Ethan say?
What threat could silence a man who already had nothing to lose? What truth could transform rage into instant paralysis?
Ethan held Kyle’s gaze for three more seconds. Three eternal seconds in which a message passed between them, absorbed and accepted.
Then Ethan released him.
He didn’t throw him. He simply opened his hand.
Kyle slid down the fountain wall to the floor, coughing, clutching his throat. He didn’t try to get up. He didn’t try to shout more about the “plan.” He curled up, trying to make himself as small as possible.
Ethan straightened. He adjusted his shirt collar, covering the exposed skin, regaining his composure with frightening ease.
He made a brief gesture with his right hand. A silent snap of his fingers.
Miller and the elite team emerged from the shadows. Four massive men.
They lifted Kyle off the floor. There was no gentleness. They grabbed him by the arms and legs, like he was a leaking garbage bag.
Kyle didn’t resist. He was catatonic. His eyes fixed on the floor, empty.
“Get him off my property,” Ethan said. His voice was calm again, but there was a tremor in it, a residual vibration of adrenaline. “And make sure he understands that if he comes back... the conversation won’t be public.”
Miller nodded. They dragged Kyle toward the back exit, away from the tourists’ eyes, away from the cell phone cameras.
Ethan stood alone by the fountain.
He looked around. At the crowd. At the chaos he had just silenced with his own hands.
People began to look away. No one wanted to stare at the man who had just strangled someone with one hand in the middle of the lobby. The ambient music, which had seemed to stop, filtered back in. Life in the casino resumed, hesitant, pretending nothing had happened.
Then Ethan looked up.
At the ceiling. At the painted glass dome. And specifically, at the small black sphere hidden among the frescoes.
The camera.
He looked directly at the lens.
Directly at Maya.
His gaze traveled through the fiber optics, through the servers, through the screens, and struck Maya in the dark office.
It wasn’t a look of triumph. It wasn’t a look of anger.
It was a look of fear.
For the first time since she’d met him, Ethan Vance looked scared. There was a plea in his eyes, a desperate attempt to control the narrative before he even opened his mouth. He knew she was watching. He knew what Kyle had shouted.
And he knew that the seed of doubt, which he had tried to crush with luxury and sex and protection, had just blossomed into a poisonous tree.
Ethan looked away, turned his back to the camera, and walked toward the elevator.
The screen showed the steel doors closing, swallowing him.
Maya sat in the dark. The hum of the computers seemed louder now.
“It was a setup.”
“You chose me.”
“You planned every second.”
She turned off the audio. The office fell silent.
Kyle’s words didn’t make sense… unless they made all the sense in the world.
If it were true… if everything had been a plan… then nothing that happened in the last six months was real. The debt hadn’t been bad luck. The meeting hadn’t been fate. The “rescue” hadn’t been heroism.
It had been a kidnapping. A slow, meticulous, legalized kidnapping.
She looked at the office door. It was unlocked. But she felt more trapped than ever.
He was coming up. The elevator took less than a minute.
She had sixty seconds to compose her face. Sixty seconds to decide whether she believed the monster who protected her or the addict who’d sold her.
Maya rose from the chair. Her legs trembled, but she forced them steady.