Page 16 of Shai

Gathering all my willpower, I planted my hands against his chest and

pushed, putting some much-needed space between our bodies. “Don’t touch me like that.”

Shai’s lips twitched as if he was doing his best not to smile. “Like

what?”

“You know.” Glaring at him was hard when it felt like my eyes were full

of grit, but I persevered. “Like you care. Like I’m not feeling like this because of what you did to me.” My words were slurred, another symptom of the fatigue coursing its way through my body.

“What I did to you.” Shai’s voice was low, the words enunciated almost

too carefully. “I saved your life. I put you in a comfortable bed and had a doctor watch over for you for a week while your body healed. I didn’t put you out of your misery. I didn’t give you back to McIntyre so that he could finish the job properly. I gave you a chance to live. And last night, I gave you a chance to choose death if that was what you really wanted. You chose to live, and fate agreed. What’s so terrible about any of those things?”

My head was spinning. He was twisting things, trying to make himself

out to be the savior that my brain had already started believing he was. It was too much. Too confusing. Was he telling the truth? Had the test not been about cruelty, but instead an opportunity for me to commit suicide by snake should I have wished to? Or was it just a convenient way of changing the narrative to mess with my mind? I didn’t have a fucking clue. I closed my eyes, swaying on my feet. “I need to sleep. Can I sleep?”

“Of course you can. Things will seem a lot clearer once you’ve slept.”

The words were thrown out so casually that I opened my eyes to study him. Who was this man? McIntyre, I’d understood. He’d been a man driven by his base desires, a man partial to gluttony in every sense of the word, whether it was about food, money, or people. But Shai… he was an unknown quantity. If I was already reeling after less than twenty-four hours in his company, that didn’t bode well for the future. I needed to stay strong, needed to remember who and what I was, that I wasn’t a pushover, that I wasn’t a man that he could bend to his will that easily.

S HAI

A S SOON AS I set foot on the opposite side of the river, I pulled my hood up. It served two purposes: it protected me from the cold bite of the wind, which on this cold January morning seemed to bring a threat of snow with it, and it enabled me to stay incognito. If anyone caught wind of me being seen on McIntyre’s side of the city, it would cause unnecessary ructions. For all intents and purposes, McIntyre and I had a truce of sorts, an agreement that if I stayed out of his territory, he’d stay out of mine.

Anyone who really knew me, knew it was a crock of shit, the agreement

built on lies and half-truths, false assurances meant to buy time until I found a way to oust him from his throne. And it didn’t take a genius to work out that the same must be true for McIntyre. I’d stolen half a city from him. He wasn’t about to give up until he’d taken back what he saw as rightfully his.

While we both went through the motions of maintaining a truce, we

were plotting. It was just down to which one of us made the definitive move first. There wasn’t room for both of us. One man would prevail eventually, and there was no doubt in my mind that that man was going to be me. McIntyre’s one opportunity to stop me was before I got a foothold in the city, before I’d taken what was his. He hadn’t. Therefore, he was fair game.

I trod silently as I headed away from the river and toward the old

factory McIntyre used as a base. It was an ugly building, all gray stonework and windows which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a prison. It suited McIntyre down to the ground. Big, squat, and ugly, just like him. No wonder he’d chosen it over the thousands of other buildings he’d had at his disposal.

Drawing to a halt fifty meters away, I made sure I was obscured from view by virtue of a thick tree trunk. I didn’t want McIntyre’s sniper catching sight of me. Staring up at the building, I catalogued everything I knew about it. McIntyre kept at least a hundred men in there, around forty of them on guard duty at any one time. All exits and entrances into the building were heavily guarded. I would have liked nothing more than to stroll in there, find McIntyre, and slit the fucker’s throat. But that wasn’t going to happen. I’d never make it to him. I’d given thought to simply storming the building on multiple occasions, but casualties would be so high that it would be almost like starting over again. Common sense dictated that as joyous as McIntyre’s demise would be, it wouldn’t be worth it.

I’d explored all the angles over the years, from infiltration by someone undercover, to an aerial assault. They’d all come to nothing, or in the case of the aerial assault had never been a viable option in the first place. McIntyre had the place locked up tighter than a nun’s pussy.

V OICES BROKE INTO MY THOUGHTS , faint, but getting louder. I moved back into the shadows, turning my face away to prevent the light from catching my skin, and relying on my dark clothing to do the rest. The men came into sight. Two of them. McIntyre’s men. I could tell from the strut in their walk, like they thought nothing and no one could touch them.

My fingers tightened reflexively around the grip of the revolver tucked into my waistband. It would only take a few seconds to put a bullet in both of their brains. Neither would have time to reach for their own weapons. Temptation was my closest ally as I pictured the neat hole I would put in their foreheads, the urge to take something from McIntyre as strong as it ever was.

I forced my fingers to relax. It would serve no purpose apart from arousing suspicion, especially when their bodies were found so close to his compound. He might not be able to prove that it was me, but he’d suspect it. After all, who else but me would dare to dispatch his men virtually on McIntyre’s doorstep.

Their route took them straight past me, no more than a few meters away.

Neither turned in my direction, my hiding place remaining undisturbed. I returned to my scrutiny of the building. I liked to come here to think, the visual seeming to help. It was a risk, but I liked that as well. Nothing beat that spike of adrenaline. Although, I was still waiting for my stakeouts to bring that flash of inspiration, that solution to the ongoing problem McIntyre represented.

If I was seen and identified, it would spark a war. Perhaps that was what

I was secretly hoping for. At least it would bring an end to the never-ending ennui that hung in the air between myself and McIntyre. It was like the slowest game of chess possible, both of us protecting our kings behind a wall of men.

War wasn’t the answer. It created casualties, and we’d been there