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Chapter 8
I hammered on his door with the side of my fist. No answer, but the screaming abruptly stopped. Had he killed his victim? Kicking the door until its latch broke, I burst in and found him with a young woman of about Natasha’s age. She was tied to a chair, and gagged now. Tear tracks ran down her cheeks, making pink lines through gray dirt.
“You got no fucking business, here, alpha,” he spat. “Get outta my place.” He was swaying a little. Obviously high on something.
Pointing my disruptor at his head, I waited for him to notice what he was getting himself into if he fucked with me.
“Untie her.” I didn’t ask. Didn’t plead. That wasn’t my way.
“She’s mine. I found her.”
“Kidnapped,” I corrected. Changing tack, I pointed the disruptor at his balls.
His face changed from a smirk to wide eyes and the color drained from his face.
“No! Please! I’ll do it.”
If I’d been in a less forgiving mood, I would have shot him, anyway. As it was, I simply waited while his shaking hands fumbled with knots. When the chick was free, she collapsed sideways onto the filthy floor.
For his trouble, I punched the dirtbag hard in the stomach. He groaned and doubled over.
“You kidnap another woman, I’ll cut your fucking balls off with a blunt knife,” I warned him. He responded with a whimper of pain.
I picked her up and carried her out. She was floppy and barely responsive. Shock. If I were in a better part of town, I’d take her to the hospital, but not here. She couldn’t pay, and he’d only find her again.
Instead, I lay her on my couch and wrapped her in blankets. She stared off into the middle distance, the expression of someone who’d seen too much. There was a chance she would snap out of it in a couple of hours.
I made her some sweet lantana tea.
“Drink this.”
I held the cup to her lips. She moved them slightly, accepting the liquid. Carefully, I poured a little in. It reminded me of my childhood, when I’d found a stray puppy, rejected by its mother. Every afternoon, when I’d finished school, I’d taken milk out of our store cupboard—we were too broke to afford a food cooling machine—and carefully nursed the puppy with it.
When my mother had caught me taking our precious milk and feeding it to a stray animal, I’d been in deep trouble. Didn’t sit down for a week.
But I learned a hard lesson, that week. My mom was dirt poor, but she’d fight anyone to ensure we had food on the table. Even me. As an adult I cringed at the fact I’d taken that milk away from my brothers and sisters. For a fucking puppy.
The mangy fleabag had grown into yet another of the wild dogs that roamed the city. Maybe it would have lived anyway. All my life, I’d had a bad habit of trying to fix up strays. I resented myself for it. But I couldn’t help myself.
I tipped a bit more liquid into the woman’s mouth. She swallowed. I hoped she had somewhere to stay nearby, because two of them here was going to be impossible.
Over the course of three cups of lantana tea, the woman went from needing to be fed to being able to hold her own cup and drink from it. She sipped her fourth cup of tea before she finally spoke.
“Why me?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t a great question. Didn’t have a clear-cut answer. There were a great many reasons he might have targeted her, and I had no idea which was the truth.
“Probably opportunity. You live local?”
She nodded. “Two Gardens Court.”
I knew it. The gardens were nonexistent. Another huge concrete tower with hundreds of families crammed into one place. Much bigger than the building I lived in. It had been hailed as the future of housing, thirty years ago. Now it was just a dilapidated pressure cooker with ice on the inside of the windows at night. The communal areas weren’t big enough, so they had become flash points where a great many incidents took place.
But worst of all, Two Gardens Court was the territory of Regin, the leader of one of the most powerful gangs in Xanar. I’d had run-ins with him, before. I tried to avoid him and his crew. I’d been sent in there on a couple of assignments. They’d left me with nightmares. That was when I’d realized Imperial Command didn’t care about me. I was expendable. A tool. Or a weapon.
“Where did he take you from?”
She frowned. Already, her brain was trying to avoid thinking about what just happened.
