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Prologue – Zane
I took another long draw on my cig and then stubbed it out against the wall beside me. I had quit smoking a long time ago, but here, tonight, I knew I needed the fug of smoke to stay lost in.
My eyes were pinned to the bar opposite me, flush with life, freshly built, full of people. Every now and then, a few of those bastard Dogs would emerge for a cigarette, laughing together, slapping each other drunkenly on the shoulder before they headed back inside. I hated them. Fuck, I hated them more than I could make sense of...
But that was why I was here. That was why I had abandoned my old life and come to Atwood, to make right what they did to my only family.
I was going to get my revenge. I was going to ruin them any way I could. And it was going to start here, now, tonight.
I drew another cigarette from the packet and lit it, inhaling a hit of the dirty smoke into my lungs and blowing it out slowly. I had been hanging in this doorway for what felt like a lifetime now, waiting for one of them to come out unattached. I needed a clean shot at someone, and no matter how pissed I might have been, I knew I couldn’t take on more than one at a time. I needed to play my cards right, or I would end up dead.
Just like my brother, Liam.
A stab of hurt caught me off guard when I thought of his name, but I brushed it away quickly. I wasn’t going to let that get under my skin, not here, not now, not tonight. I wasn’t here to get all up in my head. I was here to let that rage out on the first Dog I could lay my hands on. I was going to take them down, and it started here.
As long as I could keep my shit together long enough to see it through.
It had begun weeks before, when Liam had stopped answering my calls. The first couple of days, I didn’t think anything of it, knowing the way he got busy with his work. That guy he worked for, Lombardi, had him running all around the city, handling business, making sure none of his enemies got a foothold. But by the time it hit a week with no word from him, I was starting to worry.
And that’s when I reached out to one of his friends, a guy I’d met when I had visited him in Atwood the year before—and discovered an obituary. A little more digging and it soon became clear that Lombardi and his crew had been hit by a nuclear-level strike that wiped out practically the entire business at once. Including my brother.
There wasn’t even an obituary for him; hell, it took me weeks to track down the grave, tucked in the corner of a cemetery, with nothing but his name and his date of birth and death on it. I could still remember, all too clearly, crouching down in front of it, planting a hand against the unweathered stone, and staring at his name, wondering if this could be real.
Wondering if he could really be gone.
It wasn’t like my brother and I were close. Not really. Growing up the way we had, all both of us wanted was to put as much distance between our upbringing and our current lives as possible. I knew about the guy he worked for, Lombardi, and I didn’t exactly approve of the shit he was involved in. Yeah, I might have been up to my ears in some shady stuff myself, but I kept my hands clean of human trafficking, all that bullshit. My brother, though, he knew that was where the money was, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of him making his dime.
And I got it, I did. We’d grown up with next to nothing. My parents had ripped pieces out of each other every chance they’d gotten, both hard drinkers who would turn it on the two of us when things weren’t going their way—which always felt like the case. I couldn’t count the number of bloody noses and whupped asses I’d gotten from my parents over the years. By the time they died, each within a year of each other, drinking themselves to a painful death, I wasn’t even sorry. Went to their funerals, didn’t cry. Glad to be shot of them, though disappointed that there wasn’t so much as a cent in the way of life insurance or inheritance for us to live on.
Liam and I had both been hustling for years by that point, knowing we couldn’t exactly rely on our parents to look out for us in the face of everything that was going on. Which was fine by us. I ran drugs for a gang in our hometown of LeGuin, and he started moving weapons between cities, eventually settling in Atwood. I hated it out there—felt so far removed from everything I knew, but there was no point fighting him on all of this. He would do what he wanted, and I knew the smartest thing for me was to keep my head down and let him get on with it.
He made his life there, and I made mine back in LeGuin, and that’s the way both of us liked it for a long time. I would visit once in a while, but the guys he worked with out here never seemed to like me, as though they could tell that I didn’t like the shit they got up to, not one little bit. I didn’t bother hiding my disdain for them. Why would I? They were up to their ears in the kind of nasty business I did everything I could to distance myself from. They were welcome to it. Didn’t mean I had to pretend to like it.
But then, Liam was gone. Killed off in an attack on the Lombardi compound. It shouldn’t have come as so much of a shock to me, given what he was involved with, but the reality of it hit me like a ton of bricks. My last family, the last connection I had in the world, gone, just like that. It hurt. Hurt worse than I ever would have expected, given the distance between us the last few years.
I came to Atwood and asked around a little, did my research, and soon came up with a name—the Dark Dogs. Turned out that they had been feuding with Lombardi for a while, and Liam had been caught up in the middle of it. Not his fight but it had been his death anyway.
But that left me with a target, at least. A group to take down. I staked out their new bar, the Kennels, and watched from afar, trying to get a feel for how they worked and what they did there. Things seemed to be pretty calm for them, now that they had dealt with their last major enemy. I guessed that was to be expected. But they had no idea that I was coming for their asses, forming a plan and piecing together exactly how I was going to pull it off.
I would kidnap one of them and demand a ransom so big that paying it would leave them destitute—or give me an excuse to take out one of their members. I knew what it would do to a tight-knit group like that to lose one of their own. It would shatter them. The high they had been riding on since they had taken down Lombardi would dissipate, and I was looking forward to snuffing it out, once and for all, watching the look on their faces when they realized there was going to be no coming back from this.
And tonight was the night I made my move, I was sure of it. Tonight was the night I was going to grab one of them and take them in. I had a location, a shitty little apartment stashed in an abandoned building on the outskirts of town. I could have used my brother’s place, but the thought of being around his stuff was more than I could take. I didn’t want to deal with that, not now.
Not when I knew the people who had taken him were still walking around out there like nothing was wrong.
I finished my cigarette, eyes still pinned on the building before me. I was doing my best to keep my patience, even though there was a part of me that wanted to just walk in there with a gun and show them just how serious I was about making them pay. The only way I was going to be able to do this was if I kept my head, kept my sanity, despite the rage coursing through my system at every turn.
It was getting late. I knew they would be drinking hard in there, like they had done every night I had been watching them. Getting sloppy, getting stupid, making the kind of mistakes that would land them in trouble. That’s exactly what I wanted. Exactly what I needed...
Finally, I saw a couple of girls stumbling out of the place, one with long blonde hair, the other with a crop of vibrant red locks. The blonde girl hugged the other one and pulled back for a moment to say something to her. I tensed. This could be it.
Sure enough, after a few moments, the blonde headed back inside the bar, leaving the redhead alone out there. She pulled out her phone and checked something and then wandered out of the parking lot, yawning and running a hand through her hair.
Perfect. It would be easier to take a girl than it would be to fight one of the guys. And they would probably go further to get her back, knowing she wouldn’t be able to defend herself easily against everything I would do to her. A smile curled up my lips, a cruel one. Finally, I was starting to get somewhere.
She stumbled out onto the street and looked this way and that before she chose a route, like she didn’t know the area well. Good. That was going to make this easier.
I moved in behind her, keeping my distance as she started down one of the alleyways that led off the main street. She didn’t seem particularly with it, clearly drunk, but I still wanted her to be well away from the bar by the time she worked out what was going on here.
