This wasallwrong.
I sat there for a second too long, staring at the warehouse entrance while my grip tightened around the steering wheel, before I looked down at my phone again.
At the picture of Alfie unconscious on the concrete floor, wrists bound, blond hair falling across his face and my stomach twisted hard all over again.
He’d looked so still.
Thatwas the part I couldn’t shake. Alfie wasn’t supposed to be still. Not the Alfie I'd gotten to know in that short time. Nothing about him gave me the impression that he even knew how to be still.
He was supposed to be talking. Laughing. Arguing for no reason other than to get a rise out of someone. Saying insane things with complete confidence and then somehow making them sound reasonable five minutes later.
He was supposed to be alive so loudly it exhausted everyone around him.
“You keep staring at that thing like you’re gonna burn a hole through it,” Milo muttered.
I slowly lifted my eyes to the rearview mirror. “You say one more thing,” I said quietly, “and I’ll forget I need you alive.”
For once, Milo shut up.
Good choice.
I grabbed my gun from the passenger seat, checked the magazine automatically, then tucked it back into the holster at my side. My leg throbbed the second I put weight on it, the buckshot wound tightening angrily beneath the bandage.
Didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting Alfie out alive.
Which was a problem in itself, because somewhere between Milo's house and now, things had shifted.
As I climbed out of my truck, the cold night air hit my face immediately, carrying the sharp scent of rust, wet dirt, and distant rain. Somewhere inside the warehouse, metal clanged loudly enough to echo.
Then—
“Are you kidding me?”
I froze.
That was Alfie.
Followed immediately by a loud crash.
And then:
“I swear to everything that is bright, glittery and holy, if one of you morons don't tell me where the bathroom is—”
A man shouted something in response I couldn’t make out before another crash echoed through the building, and I closed my eyes briefly. Behind me, Milo started laughing so hard he nearly choked on his own blood.
“What,” he wheezed, “the fuck is happening in there?”
I slammed the door shut as quietly as possible, which wasn’t quiet at all with how everything echoed in the abandoned lot. The sound traveled like a warning shot. I rounded the hood and opened the back, hauling Milo out of the truck by the collar.
For a guy who’d just been shot, he didn’t complain much. His eyes glittered in the moonlight, the wild kind of alive that always seemed inches from collapse. I pressed the gun against his ribs. “Make any kind of move I don’t like, and I’ll put another bullet through you. This time in a less convenient spot.”
“I never doubted it,” he said, with a quiet menace.
I pushed him forward, and we made our way to the warehouse door, stepping over broken glass and the half-melted husks of old beer cans. The bandage around my thigh pulled tight with every step, but I kept moving. Milo’s boots scuffed the ground,hands still cuffed in front of him. He looked over his shoulder, like he was about to say something clever, but my scowl must have discouraged him because he turned back to face the way we were headed.
Our target was a faint line of light at the seam of one of the large garage doors that promised someone was there.
The closer we got, the more we could hear. It wasn’tjustAlfie in there. There were at least three distinct male voices, all shouting at each other. Alfie’s voice, unmistakable, rolling right over the others.
