Angel gave the signal. We went in.
Hawk had no intention of knocking on the door politely. His boot hit the frame just below the handle and the door came in fast and hard, with the brothers pouring through behind it. Two men in the front room. One on a couch, one at a table. They had about three seconds to understand what was happening and they used those seconds badly. The one at the table reached for something under a newspaper and Duke put him on the floor before his hand got there. The one on the couch stood up and Hawk hit him once, clean, decisive, and that was the end of that conversation.
I moved past them down a hallway. The layout matched Melissa's description perfectly. Doors on both sides. Some closed, some open.
Two of them had padlocks on the outside.
I stopped. The hallway was narrow and poorly lit and the padlocks were heavy, industrial, the kind you'd put on a storage unit or a shipping container. Bolted to the doorframe with lag screws, the hasps sitting against the wood with the dull certainty of something that had been locked and unlocked hundreds of times. These weren't improvised, these were purposeful.
I grabbed the first hasp and pulled. The lag screws held for a second, then tore out of the frame with a shriek of wood and metal, and the door swung open.
A room. Mattresses on the floor. A bucket in the corner. A window mostly boarded over with plywood. The air was thick and stale and smelled like a place where human beings had been stored rather than housed.
More doors. More locks. I broke every one. The outbuildings were the same. Padlocks, mattresses, boarded windows. Each lock I broke fed the rage behind my ribs.
I found the man I was looking for in the back room of the main house. The man who’d been running this trafficking operation. The room was an office. Desk, filing cabinet, a laptop still open, the screen casting blue light across the walls. He was on his feet, moving toward the rear exit.
Ghost was already there. Leaning against the frame with his arms folded, his pale eyes flat and empty. The boss saw Ghost and stopped.
“Going somewhere?” Ghost asked, even though they both knew he’d just taken that option away.
The man turned and saw me filling the other doorway. The realization that he was cornered dawned on him.
He was ordinary. That was the thing about him. He had the kind of face that belonged to every guy buying coffee at a gas station. Nothing you'd remember. Nothing that would make you look twice. Melissa had described him exactly right, and standing in front of him I understood how he'd done this for years. The face was a weapon and the weapon was invisibility.
He didn't fold.
"Let's talk about this." His voice was calm, measured, the voice of a man who'd negotiated his way out of tight corners before and expected this to be another one. "I have resources. Connections. Whatever she told you, there's a conversation to be had here. Money. Protection. Ongoing arrangements. I can make problems disappear."
I walked toward him.
"You don't want to do this," he said, and the calm slipped just enough to show what was underneath. Pure calculation. He was reading me the way a predator reads a situation, looking for the angle, the leverage, the thing that would make this something he could control.
He reached into the desk drawer. The gun came out fast and practiced, a compact semi-automatic that he brought up in a clean arc, and I caught his wrist with my left hand and drove my right fist into his jaw and the gun discharged into the ceiling and plaster rained down on both of us and the weapon spun across the floor toward Ghost, who put his boot on it without unfolding his arms.
The boss staggered but he didn't go down. He came back at me with a speed I wasn’t expecting, and his fist caught me on the cheekbone, a solid hit that snapped my head sideways and washed my vision white for a few seconds. He followed it with an elbow aimed at my throat that I only half-blocked, catching it on my forearm, and then he kicked the chair between us . It hit myshins. I stumbled and he used the opening to drive his shoulder into my chest and put me into the wall.
He was stronger than he looked. Years of surviving in spaces where survival was a physical skill had put real muscle behind the ordinary exterior, and his hands found my throat and squeezed with a grip that said he'd done this before. To people who couldn't fight back.
The difference was, I could.
“So you want to do this the hard way huh?”
I broke his hold by driving both forearms up through the inside of his grip and snapping outward. His hands flew apart and I headbutted him, the bridge of my forehead into his nose, and the crunch was loud and wet and his head snapped back and blood poured down his face.
He came back. Bloodied, nose broken, but he still came back. A wild right hand that caught my ear and set it ringing, a left that glanced off my jaw, and he was reaching for something on the desk, a letter opener, a piece of metal, anything he could use as a weapon because the gun was gone and his hands weren't enough and he knew it.
I caught his arm. Twisted. He grunted in pain and swung with his free hand and caught me on the mouth . My lip split. Copper flooded my mouth. The familiar flavor of my own blood unlocked the cage fighter.
All at once. The warehouses, the crowds, and I was back in front of the men who wanted to take my head off. My body remembered the rhythm before my brain could catch up. I hit him. My right fist into his ribs with everything behind it, the satisfying give of muscle and bone under my knuckles, and he doubled over, and I hit him again. An uppercut that straightened him out and sent him backward into the desk. The laptop crashed to the floor. Papers scattered. He grabbed the desk edgeand tried to stay upright and I was on him, both hands on his shirt, lifting him off the desk and driving him into the wall.
He fought against the wall. Still trying. A knee aimed at my groin that I turned away from, an elbow that caught my ribs and sent pain flaring through my side. I pinned his arms with my body and hit him again, close range, short punches with my fists tight, into his body, his face, his ribs. Each one carried the weight of what he’d done to Melissa and the other women he was trafficking. My anger rained down on him blow by blow.
He stopped fighting back. His arms dropped. His head sagged. But I wasn't done. The cage fighter had the wheel and the cage fighter didn’t stop when the opponent dropped his hands. The cage fighter kept going until someone pulled him off, and there was nobody here to pull me off except Ghost, who was still leaning against the doorframe watching, understanding and making no move to intervene.
I hit him again. And again. His face was a mess, his breathing labored, ragged sounds coming through his broken nose, and the satisfaction of each impact was the thing I'd spent five years trying to outrun, the thing that made me good at the warehouses, the part of me that liked this.
I stopped.
