CASSIAN

Emilio paused on the other end. I could hear him drawing in a shallow breath through his nose, enjoying the quiet, savoring the fact that he had me on the hook and could pull the line whenever he pleased.

"Come and see for yourself," he said, and the grin was so wide I could hear the skin stretching against his stitches.

"I’ll send you the coordinates now. Come alone. Or bring a whole army with you if you think Marceli is still answering your texts. Honestly, it doesn’t matter either way to me."

The line went dead with a short click.

A second later, the phone vibrated again, a brief string of numbers appearing on the screen. I looked down at the coordinates, my own pale reflection staring back at me through the bloody smudge on the glass.

I didn’t need a map to know where those numbers pointed. I knew every abandoned yard along the industrial canal; I knew what the location meant and exactly what would be waiting for me if I turned the key in the ignition.

The math was incredibly simple. They would be waiting behind the gates in numbers I couldn’t possibly fight by myself.

If I drove through that entrance, I would be swarmed before I could get my door open. I would be put in chains, or I would be shot until there was nothing left of me, or they would do both just to make sure the message was clear to the rest of the city.

I put the car in gear and hit the gas. The math had never mattered less to me than it did right now.

The coordinates led to an old industrial lot near the salt marshes, a place that was half-demolished and mostly forgotten by the city planning boards.

Long concrete walls had crumbled into piles of gray gravel, and rusted iron rebar stuck out of the ground like broken teeth.

You couldn’t see the ocean from down here; the view was completely blocked by corrugated steel warehouses and heaps of old machinery.

There was nothing but wet dirt, the dark sky, and the bright, white headlights of four large SUVs arranged in a neat semicircle in the center of the yard.

They had set the lights up like a theater stage, because that was exactly what this was to them. It was a show, and I was the only audience member they cared about.

I walked straight into the light. I didn’t try to creep around the side walls, and I didn’t pull a weapon out of the glove box.

It wasn’t because I was stupid or because I thought I could talk my way out of a grave; it was simply because there was no version of tonight where I stayed outside that circle.

Julian was somewhere inside that concrete ring, and that was the only rule that counted.

They let me get surprisingly close... further into the open space than I expected them to.

They wanted me right in the middle of the glare where the high beams would blind me, making sure I could see everything clearly before they moved in to finish it.

Then the shadows around the trucks started to shift.

From every corner of the yard, men stepped out into the light. There were more than I had counted on, always more than you think, always three more behind the first five.

They didn’t say anything; they just closed the circle until the air smelled like exhaust and wet wool.

The fight didn’t last long. I caught the first one in the throat with the edge of my palm, dropped the second with a knee to the ribs, and managed to wrench a heavy iron wrench away from a third before the sheer weight of the rest came down on my back.

I didn’t stop swinging my arms, but eventually, numbers are just numbers. One man cannot lift six hundred pounds of meat off his shoulders when they want him on the ground.

My arms were pinned behind my spine until the joints groaned, my boots scraping uselessly through the mud as they lifted me up.

They dragged me across the gravel, my toes barely touching the dirt, and shoved me through a heavy metal door into the brightly lit belly of the main warehouse.

The room inside was blindingly bright.

They had rigged three massive construction lamps to the rafters, flooding the concrete floor with a harsh, white glare that left no shadows anywhere.

It was Emilio’s gift to himself, he wanted to make sure I wouldn’t miss a single detail of what he had done.

Emilio was standing right in the middle of the space. His face was still heavily wrapped in white surgical linen, and both of his hands were bound in thick splints from where I had broken his fingers one by one.

The damage I had inflicted was still right there, still fresh and angry, visible in the awkward, rigid way he had to hold his chin just to speak.

And right beside his left boot, sitting on a rusted metal chair, was Julian.

My brain stalled when I looked at him. I tried to process what I was seeing, to take the image and fit it into something that made sense, but the gears wouldn’t turn.

His face was completely wrong. Everything that made Julian look like Julian... the soft line of his jaw, the shape of his nose... was still there, but it had been brutally rearranged by hours of something I couldn’t bring myself to put a name to yet.

His left eye was swollen completely shut, a dark, bulbous purple mass that leaked a thin trickle of clear fluid.

His bottom lip was split into three distinct pieces, the edges raw and crusted over with black, dried blood that ran all the way down his chin and soaked into the collar of his shirt.

There was a long, jagged gash near his temple that had stopped bleeding hours ago, leaving a rusty streak through his hair.

His wrists were tied behind the rungs of the chair with thick plastic zip-ties, and his whole body was folded inward, his chest sunken and his shoulders hunched in that specific way a body protects itself when it has entirely given up on the idea of being safe.

But then his right eye opened, just a fraction, and found me across the room.