Page 100 of Reaper
He shoves off the wall with a grunt and whips an elbow toward my temple. I slip it by a hair, catch it on the forearm, and my fingers go static. He buries another shot in my liver. The pavement leaps up, and my stomach pitches bile. It tastes like old pennies and loneliness. He steps back, palms up again, still trying to talk me down even as I try to break him.
“If you love her,” he says, “respect the line she just drew. You crash it now, you prove her right.”
“She called me a monster,” I spit. “You want me to let that be the last thing she thinks?”
“Not last. Not if you let it breathe. You don’t sandblast wet paint, brother.”
I explode off the ground, rage like a fuse burning backward, grab his collar and drag him deeper, deeper, until the alley swallows us whole. The hum of the city muffles, replaced by our ragged breathing and the slap of bodies on brick. I smash him into a stack of milk crates. They shatter like bones and spill empty bottles that skitter and sing. He grabs my wrists, tries to pin me to a rusted roll-up door, forearm across my throat. The metal rattles, my airway narrows, stars fizz in my skull.
“Twenty-four hours,” he says, voice low, inches from me. “Let her cry. Let her rage. Then go after her.”
I twist, peel his arm, drop my weight, and we trade positions, and I drive him into the metal hard enough to set the whole door buzzing —
Then, the world rips open.
A crack. Sharp. Final.
Then three more in a tight, ugly rhythm.
High, panicked voices spike and tangle. A woman screams. Glass shatters like teeth.
We freeze. All the heat between us goes cold.
Another burst punches the air flat. That ain’t fireworks. That’s work.
“Down,” Tank says, already dragging me with him, and we melt into shadow, shoulder to shoulder, our breath suddenly measured like we’ve done this a hundred nights before.
The alley pulses with sound. Muffled pops, then the throatier bark of something with a longer barrel, unsuppressed. A chair or table goes over inside the den. Someone cries out in Chinese — short, frantic syllables that slice across the brick.
“They’re hitting it,” I say, like I’m saying a weather report. Then another scream cuts through the gunfire. It’s a familiar scream, one I heard only hours ago at karaoke. Mrs. Eng. “We have to get in there.”
“We do.” He nods once. No more talk about feelings. His hand goes under his jacket, and a dark shape is suddenly in his hand, clean and oiled. “You ready?”
I draw. The slide is cool, stippling tacky with alley grime and my blood. I count without counting. However many are inside, they’ve come heavy and prepared to rip the Triad Den from its foundation.
“Ready.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Reaper
I thought I’d seen hell before. Thought I’d stared it straight in the face. Deep in addiction, when I’d find myself in the jaws of all the shit I’d stick in my veins, when I’d feel the slime of the drugs bleed themselves out of my ruined body and I’d come to in the grimiest, sleaziest pit surrounded by the husks of things that you could only call people out of generosity and pure pity, because only people could ruin themselves so wholly, I thought I’d witnessed some of the dreariest, darkest points of human existence.
But if that was staring into the jaws of hell, what I see inside the Triad den as the Russians launch a full assault is nothing short of being seized within the teeth of that gaping maw and chewed with a slavering vengeance.
Screams of horror and terror. Bullets that zip through the air like a storm of malicious wasps seeking flesh and blood; blood and viscera and bone that spray and spatter and splinter amid a chorus of howls and ululating fear, a gut-churning buffet of gore.
“Holy fuck,” Tank says, squatting low and surveying the position. “I thought I’d seen it all, but this…”
I crouch down beside him, my eyes taking in the surroundings, the deep back of the Triad den’s kitchen. Ahead of us, the kitchen’s open door is like a portal into a nightmare, through which stray bullets, malice, and the cries of the dying fly through like stray demons escaping the infernal abyss.
“This was because of us. Because of me,” I murmur. “Volkov must’ve seen us with the Triads.”
“This Volkov sounds like a real fucking asshole.”
“He is.”
“But you’re an idiot if you think that he’d go to war with the Triads over however much money you owe him.”
