— Three Days Earlier –

The twisting alleys of Dalton blurred past him as Mark weaved through them with practiced ease, muscle memory guiding his feet over familiar broken pavement. His boots splashed through shallow puddles that reflected the sickly yellow glow of distant streetlamps, kicking loose gravel that scattered like his fractured thoughts. The night wind sliced against his jawline with razor precision, but it couldn’t cool the burning mess clawing at his chest from the inside.

“Goddammit,” he muttered through clenched teeth, the words lost in the maze of crumbling brick and rusted fire escapes.

His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, his steps growing more unsteady with each surge of confusion and frustration that crashed over him like waves against a deteriorating seawall.

He hadn’t even meant to remember them—those two words. Just a pair of syllables that shouldn’t have mattered, shouldn’t have lodged themselves in his mind like shrapnel. And yet, when Elishia had looked at him with those silver-flecked gray eyes and whispered “Thank you,” something fundamental inside him had fractured. Cracked clean through like glass under pressure.

A surge of heat flushed his face, creeping up his neck and burning behind his ears. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached.

Why the hell would she thank me?

He didn’t deserve that. Didn’t deserve the soft vulnerability in her voice, the way she’d looked at him like he was something other than the monster he knew himself to be.

He wasn’t worthy of gratitude. Not from her. Not from anyone who still had enough humanity left to offer it.

And yet…

With a violent growl that echoed off the narrow alley walls, Mark kicked a rusted can, sending it clattering and bouncing against the brick with a sound like gunshots. His breath came fast and shallow, like he’d run a mile through smoke.

There was something inside him now—a flutter. Faint as a dying heartbeat. Ridiculous as hope in hell. Unwelcome as light in a place that had learned to love darkness.

He wanted to rip it out by the roots and stomp on it until nothing remained but the familiar numbness he’d cultivated for years.

He clawed a hand into his hair, gripping hard enough to make his scalp burn, hard enough to ground himself in physical pain rather than this… whatever this was.

That night, he hadn’t asked for any of the girls’ names. Hell, he’d barely looked at most of their faces—had trained himself not to see them as anything more than cargo. When he’d asked her name, it had been impulse, curiosity he should have strangled before it could take root. He hadn’t expected an answer.

None of his crew knew any of the girls’ names. That was the unspoken rule, the barrier that kept them functional.

The only ones who might’ve known were Chad and Joey—maybe Joey had them catalogued on some clinical roster, given he was Chad’s walking calendar-slash-secretary, his meticulous keeper of schedules and inventories. But the rest of them?

They were just “goods.” Merchandise with heartbeats. Nameless. Pricetagged. Reduced to numbers and categories that made sleep possible.

So what was this now? This careful preservation of two syllables that had no business rattling around in his skull?

The moment Elishia had told the doctor her name, he’d stored it away—shelved it like something precious—as if it carried weight beyond mere identification. As if it meant something in a world where meaning was a luxury none of them could afford.

And that… terrified him more than any gun barrel he’d ever stared down.

“What the f*** is wrong with me?” he muttered, the sound bitter and broken, laughing at his own pathetic descent into something that felt dangerously close to conscience.

He looked up from his boots just in time to catch the low murmur of voices drifting from an alley entrance a few paces ahead, the words carried on air thick with the smell of garbage and forgotten promises.

“You heard about the explosion last night?”

“Yeah… I heard it was Chad’s group. Some trafficking op gone wrong.”

“You mean—?”

“Shh! Don’t say more. Brison’s guys might be listening.”

Mark’s eyes narrowed to slits, predatory instincts sharpening his focus like a blade finding its edge.

Two figures hunched in the shadows. Young, probably early twenties. Smoking something that definitely wasn’t tobacco—the sweet, acrid smell of cheap weed mixing with the alley’s perpetual stench of decay. Both wore tattered pants and hooded jackets that had seen better decades, hunched like urban vultures picking over the bones of a dying city.

Recognition hit him like a physical blow.

Todd and George. Bottom-feeders who occasionally ran errands for Brison’s outer ring when they needed extra bodies for the kind of work that required more desperation than skill. Not exactly criminal masterminds, but they had ears in places where information flowed like dirty water.

Mark stepped lightly, years of practice allowing his boots to barely whisper against the cracked asphalt as he crept closer, moving with the fluid patience of something that had learned to hunt in concrete jungles.

Then—

Clamp!

He dropped heavy hands on both of their shoulders with the sudden finality of a judge’s gavel.

“Evenin’, boys.”

The two nearly jumped out of their skin, joints scattering from nerveless fingers as they spun around with the panicked coordination of prey animals sensing a predator.

“OH—!”

“M-Mark?!”

Their eyes went wide with the unmistakable terror of small fish suddenly realizing they were swimming with sharks. The kind of fear that came from knowing exactly what Mark was capable of, and exactly how little it would take to convince him to demonstrate.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” Todd stammered, his voice cracking like he was thirteen again and facing down the school bully.

Mark’s grin stretched across his face—all teeth and no warmth, the kind of smile that made smart people cross the street. His golden eyes gleamed with the cold light of something that had stopped pretending to be human years ago.

“Oh, skip the pleasantries.” He tilted his head with mock consideration, the gesture somehow making him look more dangerous than any overt threat. “Let’s get straight to the juicy part.”

Both nodded frantically, their heads bobbing like broken marionettes operated by trembling hands.

“Y-yes.”

“Absolutely.”

Mark gestured with a casual thumb toward the deeper shadows at the back of the alley—a narrow slice of darkness wedged between two abandoned buildings like a wound in the city’s flesh.

“Why don’t we continue this conversation somewhere more… private?”

The color drained from their faces like water through a broken dam.

But they followed anyway, feet dragging like condemned men walking to their execution, knowing with crystalline certainty that nothing good ever happened in the dark with Mark. Nothing that left everyone walking away on their own power.

—-

Twenty minutes later, Mark leaned against the cold brick wall, alone now except for the lingering echoes of scrambling footsteps and muttered curses. Todd and George had fled like beaten dogs, clutching new bruises and carrying information that would keep them awake for weeks.

He didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just stood there feeling his heart hammer against his ribs with a rhythm that had nothing to do with physical exertion.

Not because of what they’d told him—though the words had hit like bullets.

But because of what those words meant. The implications that spread out from this moment like cracks in glass, threatening to shatter everything he thought he understood about the explosion, about survival, about the rapidly shrinking time he had left to act.

This wasn’t some random detonation.

This wasn’t police incompetence or a rival buyer making a move.

This was retaliation. Calculated. Personal. The kind of message written in fire and blood that echoed through the underground for months afterward.

—-

Three nights ago.

One of the covert smuggling operations under House Suarez had been compromised with surgical precision. A confidential tip had landed directly into the hands of Detective Connor and his small team—those increasingly rare law enforcement officers who still remembered what their badges actually meant, who hadn’t yet been bought or broken by the machine that ground through idealists like grain through a mill.

Within hours of receiving the intelligence, an undercover team had mobilized with the kind of speed that only came from knowing lives hung in the balance. They’d intercepted a major handoff in one of Suarez’s lesser warehouses—a nondescript building in the industrial district that looked like any other crumbling monument to the city’s dying manufacturing sector.

But this wasn’t just any operation. This was the kind of bust that made careers and ended others.

They’d uncovered high-grade synthetic narcotics worth more than most people would see in ten lifetimes—enough product to pin federal trafficking charges that would put people away until their hair went gray. The kind of evidence that prosecutors dreamed about and defense attorneys had nightmares over.

The shootout that followed had been brief, brutal, and absolute. Four of Brison’s crew had died in the first thirty seconds, gunned down in a warehouse that reeked of chemicals and broken dreams. Blood had painted abstract patterns on concrete floors while sirens wailed their approach through streets that had heard too many sirens to care anymore.

The government officials who’d grown fat on Mafia gold had wanted to intervene, to make the whole thing disappear with the bureaucratic magic that had protected their mutually beneficial arrangement for decades. But the operation had gone public too fast, drawn too much attention from news crews who smelled blood in the water.

Cameras had rolled. Shots had been fired on live television. Social media had exploded with footage that couldn’t be deleted or explained away.

To cover their increasingly exposed asses, high-ranking officials had immediately contacted Suarez through encrypted channels, explaining in panicked tones what had gone wrong. Someone had betrayed the operation. Brison’s men were dead. The seized product was gone forever, along with any hope of quiet resolution.

And just like that, Suarez’s pride—the reputation that kept him alive in a world where showing weakness was tantamount to signing your own death warrant—had been publicly wounded.

In the ecosystem of the underworld, you didn’t survive by looking weak. Not for long. Not when there were always younger, hungrier predators circling just outside the light, waiting for their moment to strike.

……

Suarez hadn’t bothered with messages. No official threats delivered through intermediaries. No veiled warnings wrapped in diplomatic language that everyone would pretend to misunderstand.

He’d simply sent a bomb. Clean. Direct. Impossible to misinterpret.

The target had been chosen with deliberate precision: a trafficking auction coordinated by Feraro’s people—specifically, Chad’s crew. Public enough to send the intended message, visible enough to humiliate, but not so spectacular as to draw federal attention that neither house could afford.

It was retaliation disguised as random violence, revenge wrapped in the kind of chaos that made headlines for exactly one news cycle before being forgotten in favor of the next tragedy.

But Feraro… wasn’t some amateur who’d stumbled into power through luck and brutality.

The old man had been playing this lethal chess game since before Suarez had grown his first whisker, accumulating scars and wisdom in equal measure. He’d survived three decades in a business where most people were measured their lifespans in months, not years.

The moment he’d heard about Suarez’s bust—and the suspiciously specific explosion that had followed with mathematical precision—he’d known. Had felt it in his bones the way old soldiers could predict rain from the ache in their joints.

Suarez would try something dramatic. Something designed to restore his reputation while sending a clear message about the consequences of crossing House Suarez.

So Feraro had activated his own failsafes, insurance policies he’d spent years putting into place for exactly this kind of situation.

If Suarez was going to bomb one of his facilities, then Feraro would ensure no evidence survived to complicate the aftermath. No traffickers to interrogate. No girls to rescue and rehabilitate and potentially testify. No guards to flip under pressure.

No one left breathing who could connect the dots back to the larger network.

He’d sent word to his people embedded within the police department—double agents who’d been drawing paychecks from both sides for so long they’d forgotten which loyalty came first.

Their orders had been crystalline in their simplicity:

“If you find any survivors… shoot to kill. Make it look clean. Then disappear like ghosts.”

Collateral damage wasn’t just acceptable—it was the primary objective. Because the fewer people left alive to ask inconvenient questions, the cleaner Feraro’s hands would appear when the investigators inevitably came sniffing around.

Chad’s group? Expendable pawns in a game that stretched far beyond their comprehension or importance.

The goods—those kidnapped women whose names none of them had bothered to learn—were nothing more than inventory in a ledger. Replaceable merchandise that could be restocked from a dozen different countries within the week.

Numbers on a balance sheet. Nothing more.

—-

Mark’s jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his neck stood out like cables under tension.

They never cared.

Not Chad, who’d treated the whole operation like some kind of twisted fraternity prank. Not Joey, with his meticulous schedules and clinical detachment. Not the Feraro chain of command, who moved human lives around like pieces on a board game they were destined to win.

The girls had been as disposable as the plastic chairs they’d been made to sit in, as forgettable as yesterday’s newspaper.

And yet… one of them had survived.

Against astronomical odds, despite the explosion and the fire and the double-cross that should have erased every trace of what had happened in that warehouse, one had made it out alive.

A girl with silver-flecked gray eyes that held depths he was afraid to explore. A girl who’d shed stubborn tears that somehow made her look stronger rather than weaker. A girl who’d whispered “Thank you” with a voice that carried forgiveness he didn’t deserve and couldn’t understand.

Elishia.

Someone who should have been just another piece of merchandise, another nameless entry in Joey’s clinical records.

And yet, when she’d spoken those two words to him with something that might have been gratitude…something fundamental had shifted inside Mark’s chest. Something he couldn’t name and didn’t want to examine too closely.

He didn’t know what it was—guilt, maybe, finally catching up after years of being outrun. Or self-loathing reaching critical mass. Or the slow, inevitable awakening of a conscience he’d thought he’d successfully murdered years ago.

Maybe it was just the recognition that he was tired. Bone-deep, soul-sick tired of being the thing that mothers warned their children about in whispered bedtime stories.

But dwelling on the philosophical implications was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

Because if Feraro discovered that she’d survived—if word got back through the network that the cleanup hadn’t been as complete as reported—then the mission would officially be classified as failed.

And they would finish what the bomb had started.

The infiltrators would come first, asking quiet questions in loud places until they found the answers they needed. Then would come the cleaners, professionals who specialized in making problems disappear so completely that they might never have existed in the first place.

His time was running out like sand through an hourglass that someone had cracked.

Mark looked up at the narrow sliver of polluted night sky visible between the alley walls, watching his breath curl and dissipate in the cold air like the last remnants of whatever illusions he’d been harboring about redemption.

He had to get her out of Troas. Had to move her somewhere beyond the reach of Feraro’s network, somewhere she could disappear completely and start over with a new name and a new life that had nothing to do with the nightmare she’d survived.

He had to do it before anyone else discovered she was alive.

And if that meant betraying the hand that had fed him for the last 5 years—if it meant burning every bridge he’d built in the criminal underworld and painting a target on his own back that would never fade…

Then so be it.

Some things, he was beginning to realize, were worth the price of damnation.