Chapter 361: Quick Stop! 2

The man looked at the body on the floor.

Then at his associate still being held by the back of the head, his face meeting the floor at an angle that gravity had decided on and was not negotiating, blood coming from his nose now in a slow dark drip that was marking the office floor with the patience of something that had nowhere to be.

Then he looked at Liam.

“Uhh,” he said.

Just that word. Like a specific sound of a brain that had prepared for one situation and had been presented with a completely different one and had not yet finished sorting through what that meant.

“Liam.”

Elsa came around the desk and crossed the office and put her arms around him and held on with the grip of someone who had been frightened and was now on the other side of it and the relief had not yet finished moving through her body.

”You’re here,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here. I knew everything would be fine when you showed up. Oh, James is outside… I think they—”

“He’s fine,” Liam said. “He’s outside. Wounded but he’s fine.”

She pulled back and looked at him. Something settled in her face, the last piece of the fear releasing.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

She stepped back from the scene and moved away from it, which was its own kind of trust in him to handle what remained.

Liam opened his hand.

*Thud!*

His associate hit the office floor and stayed there.

“What the FUCK.”

He had backed up two steps from the desk, his eyes going between the body that had just been dropped and Liam standing in the middle of the office, and whatever his face had been doing before had stopped and been replaced by the rapid arithmetic of a man revising his understanding of the afternoon.

‘When she said her boss was coming,’ he thought, staring at Liam, ‘I was thinking some fat old man. A businessman with soft hands who I could put some fear into and collect from and be gone before lunch.’ He looked at the two bodies on his floor and then at the man standing between them who had delivered both of them without appearing to have broken a sweat. ‘What am I looking at right now. What exactly is this.’

Liam was already walking toward him.

“You’re going to pay for the damages,” Liam said. Calm. Conversational.

“Are you insane?” He pulled a dagger from inside his jacket and dropped into a stance, the blade forward, his weight distributed the way someone had shown him once. “Back up. Right now. Back up or I will open you up and we don’t have to make this more than what it is. This was just a collection. A simple collection. Nobody needed to get hurt.”

Liam did not stop walking.

“I’m definitely going to kill you now,” Liam said. The same tone. The same pace. “I saw you put your hands on her.”

“I am holding a weapon,” the man said, his voice going up slightly, the dagger still forward, his feet taking one involuntary step back as Liam kept coming. “You see this? This is a weapon. Back up. Back up right now or when I’m done with you I’m going to go find her and take my time and there won’t be anything left of you to do anything about it.”

Liam kept walking.

And the man noticed something.

He could not have named it or described it with any technical language but he felt it, the specific pressure of standing in the path of something that had decided on a direction and was not receiving the usual signals that stopped things.

Something in the air between them that pressed against his chest in a way that had nothing to do with the physical distance still separating them.

‘This doesn’t happen in real life,’ he thought, watching Liam walk toward him, the dagger forward and doing nothing. ‘This is the kind of thing that happens in films. People don’t actually give off that. They don’t actually just walk at a weapon like it isn’t there. What is this.’

“Stop.”

A voice from the doorway. Even. Familiar.

Liam paused and turned.

Shay was standing in the entrance in a plain white t-shirt and black jeans, hands loose at his sides, taking in the scene with the expression he wore when he had walked into something that required a specific kind of patience.

Liam turned back to the man.

“Stay out of this, Shay,” he said.

“Just hold on,” Shay said, stepping into the office. “Before you finish him, let’s find out who sent them.”

“We can find it ourselves,” Liam said, still looking at the man.

“Technically,” Shay said. “But why do extra work.”

The man looked between them.

Two people discussing what to do with him while he was still present and breathing and holding a dagger that had apparently lost all relevance to the conversation.

He lunged.

The dagger went forward and Liam was already not where the dagger was going, and before the man’s arm had completed the arc of the swing Liam had the wrist in both hands and broke it.

*Crack!!*

The sound arrived before the pain did and then the pain arrived and the man’s legs made a decision independent of anything else.

“AHHH.”

He stumbled back, the dagger clattering to the floor, his broken hand immediately grabbed by the good one like it could be held back together if he just pressed hard enough.

His back found the wall and he stayed there against it, staring at his own hand with the expression of someone experiencing something they had heard existed but had always believed happened to other people.

“AHH. AHH.”

“You’re making it very hard to keep you alive right now,” Shay said. To him. With the measured tone of someone who had meant what they said and was not performing any of it.

“Fuck,” the man said. “Fuck. Fuck. He broke my hand. My actual hand. It’s broken. He broke it.”

“You deserved that,” Shay said. Simply. The way someone stated a fact about weather.

The man slid down the wall until he was sitting on the office floor, his broken hand against his chest, his face moving through shock and pain and the dawning of something else that had not fully arrived yet.

“I’m going to die here,” he said. “I’m actually going to die in this office.”

Shay walked over and crouched down to the man’s level, elbows on his knees, his face close.

“Let me tell you something,” Shay said. “You and I both want the same thing right now.”

The man looked at him.

“You want to walk out of this building,” Shay said. “Which is exactly what I want for you. So work with me.”

The man looked past Shay at Liam standing in the middle of the office.

“Who are you people,” he said.

Shay looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone deciding how to respond to a question that should not need to be asked.

“You walked in here today pretending to be from the Reaper gang,” Shay said. “And you don’t actually know anything about them.”

Something moved in the man’s eyes.

“So let me help you understand what that means,” Shay said. “I’m the second in charge of that gang. The actual one. That you were pretending to be from today.”

The man looked at Shay.

Then at Liam.

Then back at Shay.

Then the full picture assembled itself.

Every piece of it arriving together, the woman at the desk whose boss was coming, the actual boss of the gang he had been impersonating standing in the same room as the actual second in command of that gang, his broken hand, the two bodies on the floor, the dagger that had accomplished nothing.

He had walked into a business and attempted to collect taxes from the actual boss of the gang he was pretending to represent.

“I didn’t know,” he said. The words coming out small. “I swear I didn’t know this place was connected. Nobody told me.”

“Shay,” Liam said. “You’re taking too long. Get me the name. That’s all we need.”

The man looked at Liam and the arithmetic of what was waiting for him on the other side of giving up that name versus what was waiting for him on the other side of not giving it up produced a clear answer in under two seconds.

He gave them everything.

The writer will leave the specifics of what was said where they belong, which is in that office between those three people, because what matters is not the information itself but the fact that it was complete, delivered without any further persuasion required, the entire structure of whoever had organised this laid out without resistance.

When the man was done talking Shay stood up and looked at Liam.

Liam looked at the man on the floor.

What followed took approximately four minutes.

The man remained alive when it was over, which had been a decision made deliberately and maintained throughout, but certain things had been removed from his future, specifically his ability to put his hands on anyone without being reminded at length of this afternoon and what it had cost him the last time he tried it.

Liam stepped out of the office.

Shay was outside leaning against the wall, arms folded, waiting with the patience of someone who had estimated the duration correctly and had prepared accordingly.

He looked at Liam.

Liam looked at him.

“Let’s go,” Liam said.

“Yeah,” Shay said.

They walked out through the front of the building together into the afternoon, the street doing what streets did, the city moving at its usual pace, entirely unaware of what had just happened in an office building on one of its unremarkable roads.

They got into Shay’s car.

Shay pulled out into traffic.

Neither of them said anything for the first full minute, the buildings moving past the windows, the city filling in around them.

Then Shay said, “You really broke his hand.”

“He had a dagger,” Liam said.

“He had a dagger,” Shay agreed. “Yeah.”

They drove.