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No fucking way.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I focused on Evan. Just thinking about my brother made my stomach drop into my feet. I thought about his meager belongings, still sitting untouched in his room. I thought about my shitty apartment, all cold and empty without him…
The women were still talking about the asshole who’d snapped at them by the time I reached the doorway. Looking left, then right, I made sure no one was watching me.
Then I pushed the door’s metal crossbar, and slipped silently through.
A swirl of wind hit me almost instantly, cooling the sweat on my skin. It was a cold spring night, even for Oakland. The alley was narrow and deathly quiet. The shadows cast from a distant streetlamp were long, stretching all the way to—
CRACK!
Something hit me hard in the side of the face, my head exploding in a terrifyingly beautiful bloom of silvery-white pain. I fell sideways, into the dirty puddles on the broken asphalt.
Then a blurry gray fog crept into my vision, closing in from all sides…
Two
SILAS
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone getting the shit kicked out of them in an alleyway — not by a longshot. In this part of Oakland, such a beating wasn’t unusual. Hell, most times the people involved even deserved it.
This was my first three-on-one, though. And it wasdefinitelythe first time the person getting kicked around was a woman.
“Hey. Dickheads.”
I spoke the words casually but loudly enough to attract their attention. Two of the goons turned immediately. The one about to deliver the next strike halted, mid-punch.
“Wanna try that shit on someone who’ll hit back?”
All three of them stared back at me in disbelief as I made my way in their direction. To the casual viewer I might’ve looked like some macho hammerhead, strutting his way into something entirely not his business. In reality I was sizing them up. Calculating which of the three would be the most dangerous, and then positioning myself within striking distance of that particular target.
This time around it was the tall guy in the suit. It wasn’t always, though. Most times the guys in thousand-dollar suits were the ones giving the orders, while the two goons in bad jeans and cheap, knock-off shoes were the ones hired purely for muscle. But this guy carried himself differently. His smirk wasn’t only for show, and beneath his dark eyes lay a strange intelligence. A cool, menacing confidence that fell just short of swagger.
“This isn’t your business,” the tall man said smoothly.
“Business?” I scoffed. My eyes flitted to the woman. “Is that what you’re calling it?”
I took a casual step in his general direction, then snuck in another. The others finally began moving in reaction to me. In a few seconds they’d circle around to take me from the side, or even behind. It was a move even the dumbest of goons knew well.
“Walk away, friend,” the tall man ordered me. “Trust me when I say it’s in your best interest to—”
The signal happened in the middle of his sentence. A shift of the eye. A quick, forward wag of two fingers. It was fast, too. Very fast.
But I was faster.
“NNNNGHHH!”
The goon closest to me had lunged forward, quickly but clumsily. I sidestepped him easily, grabbing his collar and using his own momentum to send him headfirst into the brick wall.
He crumpled like a sack of rotten potatoes.
“Fucker!”
It was almost comical, the incredulous way the second goon grunted the curse word. On the surface he seemed even dumber than the first. He looked slower too, which was why I ignored him completely. Instead I shot forward and drove the hard ridge of my hand directly into the tall guy’s throat.
“ACCKKK…”
The surprise on his face was quickly overshadowed by pain, then panic. He fell backwards, tripping over the sprawled form of the woman he was just beating up.
