Chapter 204: The Rat Trap.

The apartment was quiet except for the buzz of the bare bulb overhead.

Drake lay sprawled across the sagging couch, one arm dangling toward the floor, staring at a water stain on the ceiling that kept drifting in and out of focus. The burnt foil sat on the folding table beside him. The high had crept up and settled thick and warm over everything, dulling the throbbing in his jaw to a distant, manageable ache.

That was the point. The pain was always there otherwise. Every time he chewed, it reminded him of that alley.

And of him.

The hooded man.

Drake had replayed those few seconds a hundred times. There was no way the man could have heard him coming, and yet he’d turned and dropped Drake like it was nothing. He hadn’t even flinched. Hadn’t even looked worried.

"Who the hell was he?"

Drake wasn’t much of a fighter, and he knew it. Never had been. He’d never needed to be.

Who needed to know how to throw a punch when they had no problem pulling a trigger?

A gun didn’t care how good you were with your hands. It didn’t care if you were a nobody off the street or prime Mike Tyson. One squeeze, and everyone went down the same way.

But right now, he couldn’t afford to use it. His face might not be on the news but every cop in the city had his description. One wrong move, and it was over. He had to lay low and stay invisible, at least for now.

Enrique was out, which suited Drake fine. The silence gave him room to think.

He fumbled for his phone on the cushion beside him and squinted at the screen.

Days ago, he’d set up an alert. Any time the name Darren popped up online, his phone pinged.

It had been mostly useless. Darren was a common name, and the alerts were constant: a Darren selling a used truck in Tacoma, a Darren arrested for drunk driving in Spokane.

He knew how it looked. Like an obsessed ex refreshing someone’s page at three in the morning.

He didn’t care.

Because Darren was worth it.

-

Back in the day, Darren had been something else. Fearless, sharp, and capable of things that still made Drake’s stomach tighten when he thought about them. With Darren back at his side, Drake could rebuild everything he’d lost.

But it also made him wonder.

What had Darren actually done when he was younger? Drake had only seen pieces of it. Stories that ended abruptly whenever he asked too many questions. Some things couldn’t be forgiven, no matter how many years passed.

And yet Drake respected him in a way he’d never respected anyone else. It wasn’t normal, and he knew that too. It was half admiration, half something closer to fear, all of it wrapped in mystery.

The phone buzzed in his hand.

Another alert. He almost swiped it away.

Then he saw the photo.

A local combat sports blog. [Unknown Fighter Pushes Kessler to the Limit.] Below the headline sat a picture of a broad-shouldered man in a ring, gloves raised, face hard and focused.

Drake’s breath caught.

He knew that face and his eyes lit up.

His eyes raced down the article. A full name. The name of a gym.

It had to be some kind of promotion. Some gym owner trying to drum up business with a flashy write-up about a new fighter.

But it had also brought in the wrong kind of attention.

Drake grinned wide, not caring about the white-hot pain tearing through his broken jaw.

"I found you!"

-

Hundreds of miles away, in another city, a man sat alone in a room with no lights on.

The blinds were drawn tight. The only glow came from the thin strip of streetlight bleeding in beneath them and the slow, orange pulse at the tip of a thick, hand-rolled Cuban cigarette held between his lips.

Each time he drew on it, the ember flared, and for half a second it lit the edge of a jaw, the curve of a heavy gold ring. Then the darkness swallowed him again.

That was all anyone could have made out of him.

On the desk in front of him lay two sheets of paper.

Two faces.

The first was Drake. A booking photo from years ago, eyes sunken and arrogant, mouth twisted into the smirk of a man who had never once believed he’d face consequences.

The second was Enrique. Long hair, the ink crawling across his cheekbone and down his neck. Beneath both photos, newspaper clippings had been stapled together. Their names. Their descriptions. Their faces on every evening broadcast in Seattle.

The man exhaled. Smoke curled through the dark.

He was disappointed.

The job had been simple. Get in, finish it, get out. No witnesses. No mistakes. No noise.

Instead, he had this.

Sloppy. Careless. Two men so stupid they’d managed to get themselves splashed across the news within days. And now every cop in Washington was hunting them.

Threads like these didn’t stay loose for long. Sooner or later, someone would follow one far enough to reach him.

He tapped the ash from the cigarette into a crystal tray without looking.

He didn’t like loose ends. He never had. A man didn’t build what he’d built by tolerating mistakes, and he certainly didn’t keep it by forgiving them.

If Drake and Enrique couldn’t carry out something this simple without leaving a trail behind them, then they were of no use to him.

Worse, they were a liability.

He reached for the phone on the corner of the desk and pressed a single button. It rang once before someone answered. He already knew their location as they had contacted him, and told him about their location, he was also the one who gave them the instruction to lay low.

"Seattle," he said, his voice low and rough with smoke. "Clean it up."

He set the phone down, picked up a pen, and drew a slow, deliberate line through both faces.

In that moment, Drake and Enrique stopped being his men.

They became his targets.