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Retaliating, I go hard, punching him with enough force to knock him down. Before he can scramble back up, I straddle him and punch his face repeatedly. The rhythm of my moves becomes trancelike as my body takes control. It craves something completely different to my mind. It wants to deliver pain and feel the ache of those who caused pain to me. My body doesn’t care about consequences; it just wants retribution. It wants to punish in the most savage way it can.
It’s not until Ransom pulls me off the guy that I realise I’ve completely disconnected. I’ve left a bloody pile of skin and bones. Not something I’ve ever done before. My usual way is to get in fast, take care of what I need to, and get out just as fast. Tonight I don’t recognise myself.
“The building’s empty,” Ransom says as I survey the dead bodies at our feet. “We’ve got everyone.”
Fuck, I need to focus. For the first time I can recall in this kind of situation, my brain struggles to detach itself from how I’m feeling.
Glancing around at my men, I finally get my shit together and bark out orders. “Search the building for anything that will give us more details on who runs this operation and how the fuck they do that.”
I spend the next ten minutes looking for paperwork and information I don’t find. When I locate Ransom again, I say, “You find anything?”
He points at Striker, who’s carrying a few laptops out to the van. “They’re locked down tight, but I figure Hunt will be able to get into them.”
“Thank fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll go through them tonight.”
I want the motherfucker who runs this gang dead and I want that tonight.
He’s stolen from us.
He’s taken men from us.
He’s intruded on my marriage.
“Burn the fucking place down,” I command. “And load as much of that coke into our vans as we can.”
Tomorrow Storm goes back to being in control of this goddam city.
I crawl into bed just before 5:00 a.m. It’s been a long night, and I’m physically and mentally exhausted.
It took us hours, but we managed to get into all the laptops. It then took us another hour or so to download all the data and sort through it. Robert Dean is the leader of Zenith, and thanks to the photos on one of the laptops, Ransom was able to verify we killed him tonight. We have a list of all gang members and all Zenith customers. Tomorrow we’ll begin the task of visiting them.
A text comes through on my phone.
* * *
Ransom: I got hold of Vic. He knows what he has to do.
Me: Good.
* * *
Birdie stirs as I place my phone back on the bedside table. “What time is it?”
I reach for her, my hand landing on her belly. “It’s almost five. Go back to sleep.”
“Did you just get home?”
“Yeah.”
She moves closer to me, hooking her arm and leg over my body and snuggling into my side. “I know you have to do it, but I don’t like you being out there,” she murmurs, still half asleep. It’s these conversations we have in the middle of the night when she’s in between sleep that I love. She says things she maybe wouldn’t say when she’s fully conscious. It helps give me a look into her thoughts.
“I’m hopeful this will be the last night I get called out for a while.”
“I hope so too,” she says as her hand traces lazy patterns over my bare chest. “I missed you tonight.”
