I’m ready to brawl, but he grabs my jacket and yanks me close. I struggle to get out of it, if only to shed the clothing he’s holding, but Castor pushes me back just as I get my arms out, sending me to the ground as the van tears toward us.
Castor throws my jacket over me, temporarily blocking my sight, but panic fuels my flight as I leap up and away from the van’s swerving. Bullets cut through the jacket at multiple points, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I got hit, but my mind can’t process pain at the moment. I rip the jacket off and chase after Castor as he limps away.
For the fourth time, I collide with him and we hit the ground, dirt filling my mouth. I spit, get up, and punch him in the side, my knuckles cracking down on ribs. Castor groans and goes still.
Sirens cut through the cacophony. I hold Castor down as I watch the van peel out of the construction site. Who called the cops? I shake my head. After all that gunfire, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole city called the cops.
Castor gets one good look at my arm—and my tattoo—and then stares up at me. I feel ice run through my veins when he gives me a look of recognition.
“You’re with the Vice family?” he hisses. “You fucking traitor. You’ve made a huge goddamn mistake.”
CHAPTER TEN
I ROLL down my long sleeves and search for my gun. It’s in the dirt, still loaded with a few bullets, and I scoop it up, ready to solve my latest problem. Miles jogs up to me from the other side of the construction site, a bruise over his right eye but otherwise unharmed. The sirens continue to shriek in the distance, closing in faster and faster.
“What’s going on?” Miles asks.
I level the gun at Castor’s head. “Nothing. I’m just correcting a mistake.”
Miles grabs my arm and pushes it away, a look of incredulous disbelief written across his face. “You can’t shoot him! This isn’t street justice—we have to hand him over to the police!”
I pull Miles close. “He knows who I am,” I growl. “He has to die.”
“How? You two know each other from before?”
“My tattoo.”
Castor, under my knee and thrashing about, spits at me, missing. “You’re living on borrowed time, asshole! I don’t know what you thought you would accomplish here, but going against us was the stupidest mistake you’ve—”
“Shut up,” I state, cutting him off. I get it. They’ll come after me. That’s not news.
Sirens. They make my skin crawl. A shiver goes down my spine when I think about what Castor could say to them.
“We can’t give him to the cops,” I say. “Then they’ll figure me out.”
“We can’t kill him,” Miles replies. “We can’t. Not when we have him subdued. It’s straight-up murder at this point.”
“If we let him go, he’ll go straight to the Vice family with what he’s seen.”
We’re running out of time. Every second adds a whole new layer of stress. What have I gotten us into? Fuck me. This is all my fault, and I need to pull it together. I pick up my ruined jacket and grit my teeth. Anything is better than inaction.
“Help me grab him,” I command. “We’ll decide this later.”
“What do you mean, later?”
“When we aren’t swarmed by the cops!”
Miles nods.
Castor, on the other hand, flails about. I take my gun and smash it across his face, and then repeat the action, blood and saliva splattering onto my knuckles. Miles grabs my arm, a look of panic and concern etched into his face. I stop. Castor isn’t unconscious, but he’s dazed to the point of stunned compliance. I grab him by his armpits and Miles takes his ankles.
Kidnapping a kidnapper. How ironic.
We get to the fence, and I know we’ll never be able to carry a grown-ass man over the chain-link barrier. Miles knows it too, and drops Castor’s feet in order to fling himself to the other side of the fence and jog to the car. Within seconds he’s turned our vehicle around and speeds toward me. I drag Castor out of the way, just in time to see Miles smash a portion of the fence open enough for me to get through.
I open the trunk and unceremoniously heft Castor up into the thing. The smell of oil stings my nose, but I push it from my mind as I slam the hatch shut. After I get into the passenger seat, Miles peels away from the construction site, his eyes glued to the road. I grab another cigarette and light it up. Anything to relax.
“I can’t believe what we’ve done,” Miles mutters.
He speeds out of the area but forces himself to slow once he pulls out onto a busy road. The oppressive nature of Noimore is comforting—almost like the city is lulling us back into a world of crime—and I know that no one is going to bother us as long as we keep our heads down. Police vehicles speed by in the opposite direction, their sirens disrupting the peace.
“What happened?” I ask Miles, my mind going over our plan a hundred times in order to see what went wrong.
“I found my guy,” he replies. “But when I jumped him, there were these other guys I hadn’t even seen. I got away from them, well, after one guy tried to punch me and another tried to shoot me, but then they jumped in a van. When I got outside, you were already there and in a fight.”
“So there were others?”
“Yeah. Two others.”
“And your guy got away?”
“All three of them did! You saw the van.”
Which means the cops will walk away empty-handed. I exhale a
