Chapter 255 Chapter 255: Zane's POV

Chapter 255 Chapter 255: Zane's POV
Chapter 255: Zane's POV

The warehouse was a retarded place just as Alonso had mentioned. I'd spent weeks trying to figure out what could easily break him, until I saw the perfect truth to give him.

One which was enough to let him know that he was being used by the lunatic.

He'd crossed the line when he had her kidnapped in the first place, and he'd crossed another one when he let himself get used in this operation.

My phone rang. It was Nikolai. I picked it up in one slide.

"Zane. I don't think you should be walking in there alone."

"I'm not alone."

"I know you're not. But I know you well enough to know you'll make a mistake out of your own anger before someone else's bullet touches you."

Nikolai was partially right.

I was going to walk in there and forget everything about laws and dignity, and blow their heads off until I saw their brains littered on the ground. That was exactly what I was going to do.

"JT just sent me the coordinates of Simon's men, the ones he sent to attack her family and mine. I need you to take them down. Everyone who was involved. If Simon hasn't found out Alonso betrayed him already, he will soon enough."

I stopped talking long enough for the car to swerve hard toward the warehouse, smashing through the wooden barrier, two men scattering from the corner as the front end caught the gate post and tore it half off its hinges.

"My men are on them as we speak," Nikolai said.

"Great."

"Son."

He broke off there, voice coming out low. On a normal day, him calling me that would've felt like nothing. Tonight, after everything, it felt different. In a good way. A way I didn't have time to sit with.

"Yes, Nikolai."

I heard him breathe.

"Please. Be careful. Come back with her. Without a single bullet in you."

I could hear the apprehension in his voice, and for the first time I realized it had probably always been there, underneath everything, and I'd just never noticed it before tonight.

"I'll be sure to take note of that," I said, ending the call, and taking a deep breath before I let the car finish coming apart against the gate.

I play hockey. I'm a beast when it comes to the game.

But when it comes to taking or touching what belongs to me, I'll burn them down so completely they won't find enough left of them for a proper burial.

I pushed myself through the wreckage of the driver's side door before the car had fully stopped moving, glass crunching under my boots, and the first man who came at me out of the dark didn't even get his gun fully raised before I had his wrist twisted backward and his own weapon turned against the side of his skull.

He dropped without a sound worth mentioning.

The second one shouted something. I didn't catch the words. Didn't need them. He fired once, wide, the shot punching a hole through a stack of crates to my left.

I closed the distance before he could correct his aim, drove my shoulder into his chest and put him through a support beam hard enough that the whole structure groaned.

Behind me, gunfire opened up near the perimeter, Nikolai's men finding the rest of Simon's people exactly where JT said they'd be, and I didn't stop to check on it. That wasn't my fight anymore. Mine was further in.

I found the corridor Alonso had described down to the inch. The side door that didn't lock right swung open under my palm without resistance, exactly like he'd said it would, and the dark on the other side smelled like motor oil.

Two more men came around the corner ahead, flashlights swinging wild across the walls before they found me, and I didn't give either of them the half-second they needed to process what they were looking at.

The first dropped from a hit to the throat that put him on his knees gasping.

The second got further, got a shot off that grazed my shoulder very fast, a line of fire I filed away to deal with later , before I closed the gap and ended it with my hands instead of waiting for him to get lucky a second time.

I kept moving.

The corridor opened into a wider space, half-lit, with crates stacked along both walls, and, somewhere ahead of me, I could now hear voices.

More than one. Raised.

Arguing over each other in a way that meant whoever was in that room hadn't heard the chaos behind me yet, or had heard it and decided talking was still worth doing anyway.

Underneath the arguing, fainter, a woman is crying.

I stopped moving.

Not because I was scared of what was ahead. Because for one second I needed to be sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing, that my own ears weren’t lying to me, that this wasn't just twelve hours of dread finally breaking my hearing into something it wanted to hear instead of what was actually there.

It wasn't my pulse.

It was her.

I didn't know the words. Couldn't make them out through the door, through the distance, through the ringing still left in my ears from the shot that had grazed my shoulder a hallway back. I just knew the shape of the sound.

She was close.

She was alive.

And I was fucking late to make her wait.

And I still had a door between us, and whoever was on the other side of it, had no idea yet what they were about to walk into.

If he wants to play games, then let’s play games.