Page 32 of Femme Fatale
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What waited was a cinderblock farmhouse, half an hour off the main road, locked up with chain-link and the paranoia of men who trust nothing. As we got close, I saw the SUVs parked out front and knew immediately it was a trap. Didn’t matter. If you wanted to kill a wolf, sometimes you had to stick your arm in the hole.
I hit the comm. “Everyone in position?”
Aces was the first to answer. “Ready.”
Spade chimed in, voice excited. “Go signal in two.”
Joker said, "Come on, boss, make it loud.”
I twisted the throttle and skimmed the gates, Zeke at my flank. Security came out, guns up, all male, all dumb. We didn’t even stop. We rode straight through the line, scattering them like bowling pins, and as soon as we cleared the open ground, I braked and rolled off the bike.
Gunfire lit the air. Zeke barreled forward, not dodging but absorbing, moving with the confidence of nobody caring if they got shot.
I took cover behind the overturned grill, fired two rounds, clipped a guy in the knee, and watched him dance. Aces was already over the chain-link, silent and perfect, taking down two men.
The girls were in the basement. I knew the design. I charged the side door, Zeke turning to cover me. A man grabbed my arm from behind and tried to put me in a chokehold. I slammed himinto the doorjamb, elbowed him in the teeth, then used his head to unlock the door. Zeke followed, clearing the hall.
Down in the root cellar, two men stood watch. They looked up, saw me, and for a second, nobody moved. Then Zeke swung a length of pipe and broke one’s arm. The other reached for a gun, but I’d already shot him in the foot. He screamed, fell into the jam, and Zeke kicked him in the temple.
The girls huddled by a water heater, gagged and zip-tied. Zeke got them loose while I checked the perimeter. No more guards. I double-checked by firing a warning shot into the floor. Nothing but the sound of frantic breathing and someone sobbing.
The minute the girls were up, Zeke scooped one over his shoulder. The other ran on her own, limping but fast. We made it out to the bikes, gunshots still echoing.
Spade met us at the gate, blood on her face and a wild glint in her eye.
“Bit of a mess,” she said, voice high from the adrenaline.
“It was a test,” Zeke said. “He’s studying your resolve.”
When we got back to the strip, nobody followed. No cops ever came; Jack owned too many of them. The girls ran inside the casino, crying and hugging Boss, who wrapped them up with the tenderness of someone who’d seen too much loss.
I spent the next twenty-four hours moving between war rooms and battlefields, but the real fight had been happening in the closet-sized office Buck left me, now filled with blueprints, city records, and the raw heat of Zeke Smalls breathing down my neck. Men had been few and far between since I arrived in Vegas. Working too hard and trust issues were two things I could never move past until now.
He sat across from me, knees spread, hunched over the table with his forearms flexed and his eyes locked on the diagrams. Even when he was still, he radiated a kind of violence that shared the potential energy of a grenade with the pin barely hanging on.He smelled like cold sweat and expensive leather, and every time he leaned closer, I felt my own body echo it, pulse kicking up, muscles coiling.
He traced a line on the map with one thick finger. “Here’s where you go in,” he said, voice a low drone. “Kitchen staff parks around back. Doors are alarmed, but Dad got lazy with the codes. Every Thursday, they rolled them to the same sequence.” He scrawled a string of numbers in the margin, then leaned back, chin up, daring me to question it.
I didn’t. I memorized the code and started mapping exit routes. “What about cameras?”
He shrugged. “Mostly for show. The night manager is a drunk; he sleeps through half the feeds. You hit him first, and the place goes blind.”
I liked the way he spoke in absolutes. No hedging. No ‘maybe’ or ‘if we were lucky.’ He was a man raised in a world where certainty was the only weapon that ever counted.
I caught him staring at my hands as I worked. My nails were bitten raw, the tips black with ink. “Something on your mind?” I asked.
He grinned, slow and wolfish. “Just trying to figure out if you are as dangerous as you pretended to be.”
I didn’t rise to it. “More than you know.”
He nodded, not offended. “That’s what I was hoping for.”
We worked in silence until my phone buzzed. It was a ping from Nines. The video feeds were ghosted.
I closed the folder and looked at him. “You sure about this?”
He cracked his knuckles. “I am.” He tapped the table. “You never asked why I left my father?”
