Page 9 of Dark King Daddy

I carried Sergei through the bay and into the yard. The night air hit his skin and he groaned. I adjusted my grip and kept moving. Twenty meters. Thirty. Forty. The second vehicle was waiting at the gate with the rear door open.

I was already at the vehicle. I loaded Sergei across the rear seat. His head fell against the window. His breathing was ragged but present.

“Drive him to the clinic on Coney Island Avenue,” I told the man behind the wheel. “Tell them he fell. Don’t leave him alone.”

The vehicle pulled away. I turned back toward the building.

Arkady stood thirty meters from the bay doors, silhouetted against the dark interior. He had not moved farther. He was watching me.

I reached him. We stood together. The building gaped open, dark, quiet except for the faint hiss of something I could not identify — fuel vapor, or a fuse, or the sound of a structure waiting to stop being a structure.

The timer had still been running when I left it. I was not waiting to find out whether it could be trusted.

“Get in the vehicle,” I said.

“You get in the vehicle.”

“I’m getting in the vehicle. So are you. Now.”

We moved.

The vehicle had moved fifteen meters when the world turned white.

The blast came from behind — a deep, concussive thud that I felt in my teeth before I heard it with my ears. The rear window of our vehicle blew inward. Safety glass scattered across my neck and shoulders like coarse sand. The driver swerved, braked, and we stopped sideways in the yard.

The countdown had been a lie. I turned.

Flames poured from the roof of the building. The corrugated steel had buckled upward, peeled back in two places, and through the gaps I could see fire climbing the interior walls. The bay doors acted as flues, drawing air in and pushing heat and smoke upward in a column that turned the night sky orange. Windows along the side of the building — the ones I had not noticed, small and grimy and set high — blew out in a sequence, each one a small pop followed by a spray of glass that caught the firelight and fell like sparks.

The heat reached us thirty meters out. A wall of it, dry and acrid, carrying the smell of burning fuel and melting plastic and something else underneath — rubber, maybe, or insulation. My eyes watered. I blinked it away.

“Everyone sound off,” I said into the earpiece.

Responses came in order. Twelve men accounted for. No injuries from the blast. The second vehicle — the one carrying Sergei — had stopped at the gate.

I was already walking toward it.

Arkady fell in beside me. His face was lit orange from one side. He had a cut along his forearm where the window glass had caught him. He had not noticed it yet.

The rear door of the second vehicle hung open. Sergei lay across the back seat where I had placed him, but he had shifted — pulled himself upright against the far door, his legs drawn up, his hands gripping the seat. His swollen eyes were open. He was shaking.

He had heard the explosion. He knew what it meant.

“They were going to leave me in there,” he said. His voice was thick, broken-nosed, barely audible over the roar of the fire. “They were going to leave me in there and burn it.”

I crouched beside the open door. “Tell me what they asked you.”

“I told you. They — “

“Tell me again. Everything.”

Sergei’s chest heaved. Blood still darkened his torn shirt, though most of it had dried. His jaw was swollen on the left side where someone had worked him over methodically — not frenzied, not angry, but patient, the way someone tightens a bolt.

“They wanted Mikhail Orlov,” he said.

I went still.

“His movements. His schedule. When he was at the warehouse, when he was at home, which car he drove, which routes he took. They asked me over and over. Same questions. I told them I didn’t know — I work the docks, I move cargo, I see him maybe once a month when he walks the floor — but they didn’t believe me.”