Chapter 272
Wesley
The acrid stench of gunpowder hung thick in the air, mixing with the metallic tang of blood and the rot of decades-old decay. I stood in what used to be some kind of foreman's office—now just four crumbling concrete walls and a door that barely hung on its hinges. Through the grimy window, I could see the skeletal remains of massive cranes silhouetted against the darkening sky, their rusted arms reaching up like the fingers of dead giants.
My hands were still shaking. Not from fear—I'd burned through that particular emotion hours ago—but from the adrenaline that had been flooding my system since we'd rolled up with fifty SUVs and eight hundred men at our backs.
Eight hundred. Christ. A month ago, I couldn't have organized a decent poker game. Now I was commanding an army.
The door creaked open, and Elijah sauntered in, a shit-eating grin plastered across his scarred face. He was one of Marcello's—had been one of Marcello's—old guard, a Brooklyn native who'd been running numbers since he was twelve. Now he was my right hand, whether I'd asked for it or not.
"Boss." He pulled a Cuban from his jacket pocket, bit off the end, and offered it to me. "They're mostly dead. You sure we shouldn't bounce? This place is isolated as hell, but someone's gonna call the cops eventually. All this noise..."
I took the cigar but didn't light it. Just rolled it between my fingers, feeling the smooth wrapper, focusing on something tangible. Something that wasn't the image of Miles's body sprawled across that mansion floor, blood pooling beneath him while I ran like a fucking coward.
"We're not leaving," I said quietly.
Elijah's grin faltered. "Boss, I get it, but—"
"Marcello is dead." My voice came out harder than I'd intended. I threw the cigar on the floor and ground it under my heel, watching the tobacco shred and scatter. "Fuck. Our leader died at their hands, Elijah. We leave now, what does that say about the Obsidian Brotherhood? That we're just a bunch of rich kids playing gangster?"
That was partially true. Marcello had taken me in, given me purpose when I was drowning in self-loathing and rage. His death mattered.
But that wasn't what was tearing me apart inside.
Miles. My brother in everything but blood. The only person who'd looked at me—really looked at me—and seen something worth saving. He'd died buying me time to escape. Died because I'd been too slow, too stupid, too weak to protect him.
And the Crimson Syndicate had been there. Oh, they weren't the ones who'd pulled the trigger—that honor belonged to Thomas and Felix, and I'd deal with them soon enough—but they'd helped. They'd enabled it. They'd profited from it.
I felt my jaw clench, felt the familiar heat rising in my chest. The same heat that had carried me through the last six hours of non-stop violence. We'd driven straight from Manhattan, convoy after convoy, SUVs packed with every soldier we could scrape together. No rest. No planning beyond "find them and kill them all."
When we'd hit this place—this rotting corpse of Brooklyn's industrial past—the Syndicate hadn't been ready. Why would they be? They'd thought I was still tied up somewhere, thought Marcello was dead and the Brotherhood was in chaos.
They'd learned differently.
We'd torn through their front lines like paper, cutting down maybe half their number in the first hour alone. The rest had scattered into the maze of the Navy Yard—this sprawling graveyard of dry docks and warehouses and god knows what else. They knew the terrain. We didn't. So they'd gone to ground, playing rat in a very large, very dark trap.
But I didn't care about strategy anymore. I cared about blood.
"Get everyone ready," I told Elijah. "I want teams sweeping every building, every ship, every fucking storage container. Anyone wearing Syndicate colors gets put down. No prisoners. No mercy."
Elijah nodded slowly, his earlier levity completely gone. "You got it, boss. But Wesley—"
The sharp crack of gunfire cut him off.
Not the scattered pops of someone taking potshots from cover. This was sustained. Automatic weapons, multiple shooters, coming from the direction of the main entrance we'd blown through hours ago.
Elijah's expression shifted from concern to confusion. "The hell? Did those idiots finally grow a spine and come out to—"
"No." The word came out flat, certain. I was already moving toward the door, my Glock suddenly feeling very small in my hand. "That's not them."