He threw his head to the side and smacked his skull into someone’s face. A strangled yelp followed the distinctive crackly pop of a broken nose, and the grip on Clay’s arm loosened. He yanked his arm free, twisted in one smooth motion and shoved his thumb into the second man’s mouth, crooked into his jaw like a fishhook. Clay yanked to the side and banged the man’s head off the damaged sign. The thin skin of the man’s forehead split open on the metal, and blood dripped down his face. Now both hands were free.
Clay stepped forward quickly, and… Nope. His knee wasn’t having that. He could have worked through the flare of eye-watering pain. Clay had felt worse. The fact it just folded—the wrong way—under him threw him more. Before he could recover, the third guy grabbed him by the shirt, fingers knotted in the cotton, and threw another punch.
This one connected squarely on Clay’s temple and washed gray-tinged red over his vision. His head went blurry, and when it cleared, he had his fist clenched around the third man’s balls, the zipper of his chinos rough against Clay’s hand, and his thumb jammed into the man’s eye socket.
Stupid really.
Clay had never been particularly squeamish. That was one of the things that had impressed his training officers in boot camp, that hurting people didn’t make him flinch. Eyeballs always made him quietly gag, though. It was the way they gave under pressure, the wet give of them as they shifted in the eye socket. He tasted bile in the back of his throat as he pressed down.
The third man’s mouth fell open on a howl as he writhed. Before Clay could dig in that last, necessary bit of pressure, something cracked on the back of his skull.
This time when his vision grayed out, it didn’t come back. He dropped into the dirt, scratchy against his face, and briefly felt hands on him before his brain decided to reset and just switched off.
***
Everything hurt when Clay woke up.
He blinked groggily and licked dry lips as he took stock of himself. His knee throbbed, a hot, sickly pain as the leg of his jeans squeezed around it, and his head hurt. Both hands, currently cuffed behind his back, stung itchily. Road rash, probably.
Clay cracked his neck and then worked his jaw from one side to the other until the joint clicked and loosened. He rolled his shoulders back and straightened up on the chair he’d been dumped on. The man next to him pulled the needle out of Clay’s arm, a quick scratch as a drop of blood ran down Clay’s forearm and got lost in the ink, and scrambled backward.
He looked around at the bare metal walls and the few damp-stained boxes stacked against them.
“Shipping container,” he said. “Good choice. Blood’ll hose right off.”
Charity Parker gestured for Errand Boy, blood still on his clothes, to pull a chair over. He did so uneasily, his attention on Clay, as if Clay might snap his cuffs and lunge at any moment.
“Stop it,” Charity told him impatiently. “Even with the speed we just gave him, the man can hardly sit up straight, never mind do anything to you.”
Errand Boy muttered an apology and stepped back. He wiped his hands nervously, scrubbing with his fingers at the already raw skin. Clay winked at him.
“I didn’t want it to be this way,” Charity said. She glanced at the smartwatch on her wrist, absently tapped the screen, and turned her attention back to Clay. “All you had to do was give me the laptop. But no. Not you. Did you think you could use it for leverage?”
Clay settled back in the chair. Speed always made him mellow, like someone had smoothed down the hackles on a dog. It evened all his moods down, leveled him out.
“You’d have tried to have us killed anyhow,” Clay said. “You couldn’t let Fisher know you’d left a paper trail that would implicate him in judicial corruption. That would get you taken with him on a trip to feed the fishes, wouldn’t it?”
Charity’s mouth twisted in an unpracticed grimace, her glossy lips pinched in against her teeth. It was an ugly expression. It looked more real than her usual practiced mask.
“I’m not one of you,” she said. “I’m notdisposable. You can’t pick up another one of me in any shitty bar in this county. I used Fisher, not the other way around.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Clay said.
Her hands clenched hard enough Clay would bet she cut her palms, but then she pointedly relaxed them and sat back.
“I had hoped that your cleaner would hand it over,” she said. “Then we could have been done with this.”
Clay ignored that. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “I assumed you were fucking Collymore, he broke it off, and you wentFatal Attractionon him. Ledger just walked in at the wrong time. I mean, put your all into killing Collymore, didn’t you?”
Charity swallowed hard. Her expression was somewhere between horror and a queasy excitement. She flexed her hand for a second, as if she could still feel the neck of the bottle. Then she turned the gesture into smoothing down her skirt.
“None of that was meant to happen,” she said. “None of it would have happened if Melanie Ledger had just taken the loss like a big girl. But she thought she could beat me, that she deserved something from me.”
“She did beat you.”
Charity gave him a bleak look. “What did you talk to Fisher about?”
“I read that biopic they did for you inKentucky Monthly,” he said. “Born rich, Daddy lost all your money—”
