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Could I?
“Who was it?” the officer asked gently. The knife sliced through the ties, and I brought my arms forward, massaging my wrists gently. The cop began working on the ties on my ankles. “Who was it, ma’am?”
I opened my mouth, and a moan escaped me. Although I couldn’t see them, I knew there were at least a few other people in the space with us now. I heard the scrape of their shoes, the distinctive rattle of their weapons belts as they walked around.
“Cox, come and see this,” someone called.
The sound of heels clicking over concrete grew louder as she walked into the room. There was a sound like a knife cutting through plastic, then, “Motherfucker. That cock-sucking motherfucker!”
“Is it pure?”
“As a virgin Colombian. Fuck!”
“Who does it belong to?”
“I need to get the paperwork on this warehouse. Find out who the fuck owns it!” Cox screamed, her voice ricocheting like a stray bullet. She marched from the room, leaving a couple of the officers muttering about how many pounds they estimated were there and who it could possibly belong to.
I tuned them out when the constriction around my ankles was suddenly gone, the blood flowing back into my feet with an almost painful rush. I moaned again, but this time it was in relief. The officer helping me didn’t know that, though, and he shouted, “Where’s the goddamn EMT?”
“Two minutes out, Ward,” someone said.
“Do you think you’ve broken any bones?”
I took a moment to listen to my body. Besides the throbbing in my wrists and ankles, the sharp pain in my face from the beating and my fear yanking on my self-control, I didn’t think Hawk had broken anything.
I shook my head.
The officer, Ward, helped me stand, wrapping an arm around my waist and holding me up. “Okay, the door is about thirty feet in front of us. Once we step through that, I’m going to sit you down in one of the squad cars, and we’ll wait there.”
A small whimper threatened to come out of my mouth as we began to move, but I pressed my lips tightly together, refusing to let it out. It was a shuffled pace as we made our way outside.
“The car is another sixty feet away,” he told me. “Can you make it?”
I gave him a curt nod.
The sun already had a bite to it, making me sweat immediately. When Hawk had said it was nine, I assumed at night, but clearly I’d been wrong. Ward opened a car door, then eased me inside. The interior was still cool from the air conditioning that had been running, then a moment later, cold air was blowing over my face.
“This should keep you comfortable while we wait,” he said. Touching my hand, he placed a bottle of water into it. “I’m just going to go and speak to the detective, then be right back. The EMTs shouldn’t be long.”
I opened the bottle and took a shallow sip just as an explosion threw me back into my seat.
33
Bane
My hand curledinto a fist as I watched my brother-in-law help Wren from the fucking warehouse. I was set up on an adjacent wharf, keeping tabs on everything that was going on. I knew Cox wouldn’t have been able to walk away from the tip I’d given her. I also knew it had been a fucking risk to even bring her into this. Sanderson was a vicious man. He would’ve killed Wren whether I turned up or not. At least this way, my Little Bird was safe, I wasn’t implicated, and never would be if Cox was smart. I was sure she wouldn’t reveal her source for this. She had too much on the line. Then again, so did I.
I waited until James settled Wren into the back of a squad car with a bottle of water, then hit the proverbial red button of the detonator on my phone screen.
The charges I’d set last night came to the party. The explosion that was connected to my finger-walking thundered through the port, making the seagulls that were steadily circling overhead cry out as they were knocked off course.
The sound echoed around us, flames licking above the roofline of the building already. Black smoke billowed out from the building like a dying beast, my latest shipment of coke going up in smoke with it. I had about two billion dollars’ worth in there with a street value of fifty billion.
“Was this absolutely necessary?” Dagger rumbled beside me.
“Nobody fucks with me, Dagger.” Jerking my head at the destruction of my own property, I added, “This will be a message to any motherfucker who thinks he can come in and take what’s mine.” I turned back to the carnage, to the pieces of sheet metal that were strewn across the ground, to the fireball still erupting from the belly of the building, to the black smoke swelling high into the sky. Sanderson may have cost me fifty billion in coke sales, but I made sure I would fuck him up even more.
When the text had come through with the address of one of my buildings as the meeting point, I’d called in some fucking favors. Changing over the deed of ownership from me to Sanderson wasn’t fucking hard. All it had cost me was one free year’s membership at the Dollhouse, along with free drinks for that period too. I gladly gave that up to fuck up the man who had taken Wren from me.
