Queen of Nothing

Mateo

Werodethebikes going almost twice the speed limit the entire time until we got back to Cove City. Ethan’s call let me know a good amount of our men were dead, but since they came from the roof our guys from below flooded the thirteenth floor before they could get any further down. My heart was pounding a fierce beat at the thought of what I would find when we got up there, even though I knew most of it was likely already cleaned up.

Ronan and I parked the bikes right in front of the High-rise doorway, I tossed the keys to Nate, and he barely had time to react and catch them. The lobby floor was covered in reinforcements, but if you asked me those idiots should have been perched on the rooftop instead.

“Get these bikes back to the Diablos Locos in Grimm’s Reach,” I said to Nate, and he gave me a brief nod. “And get me one just like it before you get back here.” I hadn’t been on anything with two wheels since our deployment, and the freedom and rush that came with the rumble of an engine between your legs was almost as good as the right pussy.

Almost.

“Fletcher, Senior, meet me in tech,” Ronan barked out directions to the room with a sure voice. “Where’s Fletcher?” He doubled back. Ethan’s brow furrowed in the middle before he spoke.

“He’s at St. Murphy’s, in critical care. There was nothing the doc could do for him here. By the time we got to him, I didn’t think there would be any blood left in him. I don’t know how she got out, but she kept him alive.”

“Who?” I questioned, trying to figure out what happened here when we didn’t have enough details. We were going to need every surveillance video pulled so we could piece the puzzle together.

“The Asian girl, she was out of the kennel, keeping pressure on his gunshot wound and screaming some crazy shit by the time we got to him.”

“And where were you?” Ronan pushed him in the chest with a single finger but the strength in it alone knocked him off his balance.

“I was in tech, getting information for Santo, boss.” Ethan hung his head, and I could see the remorse in his expression that he wasn’t where he had been instructed to stay while we were gone. But if this was a full-fledged attack there was no way he alone would have made enough of a difference. Zerkos needed to reign his temper in and out his focus where it mattered.

“You need to chill. No one is to blame here, and if you want to point fingers, point them towards ourselves. We’re the ones who left them here, unguarded.” I put myself between the two of them, Berserk’s nostrils flaring hard with each exhale.

“Tech. Now!” he gritted out through his teeth again, and the two of us followed him. Dezmond Archer Senior was the oldest member of our gang, not only that but his history as a gang banger dated more than four decades now. He was born into it, hell, he had his own side of this town and he ruled it for a long time. When we came around, he saw the opportunity to be swallowed like a mom-and-pop shop bought out by Walmart, and he didn’t miss his chance. He was happy to join our ranks and merge his men with ours, for a fat cut and an early retirement without the guaranteed early grave that came with being a Boss, it was just too sweet a deal to pass up.

He had no real voice when it came to decisions, but Ronan respected the hell out of him and tried to include him in anything that meant anything around here. Sometimes this gave him the impression he still had power when the reality was that he wasn’t even a henchman anymore.

When I saw him talking to Cecilia during the party, I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he was doing, but it pissed me off to see him try to get so close to her. Ronan would have probably shot his aged kneecaps off if he had even known the old bastard was coming onto his girl. But old perv-like habits aside, the guy was harmless, and one look was enough to steer him away from her, so I figured I’d keep this secret for him.

For now.

Tech was on the sixth floor, and those guys were as protected as it got. They alerted everyone they could as fast as possible to the attack but had any of our enemies made our way down here, we would have been fucked. We had the best technical team money can buy, our hackers were as good as Anonymous and could get us intel on nearly anything we wanted. There hadn’t been a challenge we’d sent their way that we’d been given disappointing results for yet.

The doors opened up but there wasn’t anything but a steel, safe door once you stepped outside the elevator. Ronan entered the code, 356937, it was a phone word that spelled out flower and for some fucking reason that was the first code to enter. Once the code was accepted, a slot opened to receive his thumb print followed by a laser that would take his retinal scan. Aside from Myself, Santo, and Berserk the only other fuckers with access to this room were the guys who worked past the heavy steel doors. There were only a few of them, but they all lived on this floor in their own separate apartments past the tech HQ.

“I want two men in each elevator at all times now. Send the command down,” I said to Ethan and Zerkos nodded approvingly.

The locks slowly undid themselves one at a time as Ronan continued to enter different passcodes for each additional manual lock that came after the retinal scan. Fifteen in total, and to be honest I didn’t come down here often because I couldn’t face letting him know I didn’t have them memorized. How could I? The expectation was insane, a few of them changed every six months, and the other half changed even faster than that.

The only code that stayed the same was 356937.

The door opened with a loud hiss that reminded me of an airplane depressurizing, and before the door was fully wide, Taylor was standing there ready to guide us through what happened. Taylor Constance was an epic hacker; she was almost six feet tall and what she lacked in decorum she made up for in intelligence. She kept her hair in a G.I. Jane buzz cut that reminded me of our time served together. The three of us went through basic training together nearly twelve years ago and even though we went our separate ways once Ronan and I got into Seals, we never lost touch. Once we were out, she came to find us, and we were better for it too. A shady operation, with unlimited technical resources and the money to back it up? It was a wet dream for her, perfectly packaged as a powerful syndicate and she immediately signed up.

“The whole thing was wild boss,” she started out, leading us to the array of monitors covering the walls of the technical lab. “They were here for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes total? Whatever they wanted was either in the kennels, or they ran out of time before they could get down any further. But I think they didn’t expect they would need to get any further down.”

“You think they knew where the girls were? So, they came here for them?” I asked her, and she twisted her face in an unsure way before responding.

“That’s my best bet. We’re still translating some of the audio grabbed from the surveillance, but I can play the video back to you from the moment their helicopter landed on the rooftop. They didn’t bring enough men to get further than a few floors, and the fact they didn’t come up from the bottom makes me think they either came for the kennels, or for you boys, and just your luck you weren’t there.” She stated in a matter-of-fact kind of way, but Ronan scoffed.

“Or lucky for them,” he corrected, and she shrugged her shoulders.

“Alright, let’s start from the top shall we - here’s when the helicopter lands and they take out the four guys guarding the rooftop.” She looked at Ronan disapprovingly, like she couldn’t believe we didn’t have more men at the top. How were we supposed to expect something like this though? We didn’t even have a landing pad out there, that motherfucker ruined our rooftop bar, and it was going to take weeks to clean the debris from the infinity pool.

Taylor continued walking us through the attack, making sure to thoroughly reprimand us anytime she saw a flaw in our security as the reason for the whole thing progressing or whenever they got through another layer of our defenses. There were thirteen of them total that came out of the ’copter and they made quick work of our unsuspecting guys. A few tore through our penthouse shooting their automatic rifles into our furniture and they ransacked through our things.

My heart broke as a guy with a face like a goddamn dog tore into my room and released dozens upon dozens of rounds into my most precious instruments. My Cello splintered into thousands of shards of wood right in front of my very eyes, and the piano collapsed after enough bullets hit the legs hard enough to break them. I felt Ronan’s heavy hand on my shoulder, and I knew he could feel what I was feeling at this very moment. I etched that ugly bastard’s face to my memory because no matter who he was, he was going to choke on breathing his last breath with my knife in his throat.

It was a promise.

Once they got past the penthouse our men were already starting to flood up the stairs and take on these fuckers. They were big though, each one of them towering over our guys, and they were well trained. Not just with the guns they were using but with sheer brute force. Dogface was easily twisting heads off of necks like little Barbie dolls. And a few of the guys around him had been shot multiple times but weren’t going down so easily.

What the fuck were they on?

It was like listening to that story in elementary school back in the D.A.R.E program where they talked you out of doing drugs by telling the story of the guy who was on PCP and ripped his thumb off before jumping out of a window and beating up a bunch of cops. It seemed like a crazy story they told at every single school to ward kids off of drugs, but after watching these guys take bullet after bullet and keep going, I was wondering if that was exactly what was going on here. Maybe they were just fucking mutants.

“So, this part was interesting,” Taylor spoke up and pulled up a second screen on the side with footage of the Kennels. It showed Cecilia looking alarmed, like she could hear something happening, then all of a sudden, she was shoving Chiyo under the bed and covering it with a blanket. Fletcher and a few others were waiting for the elevator to open, and the last three standing giants came out swiftly.

The first guy reaches out for the first head he can and immediately twists it and throws the body like a ragdoll over his shoulder. Fletcher gets a shot into Dogface’s stomach, but it barely phases him as the guy throws his fist into Fletcher’s face and then breaks his hand to remove his gun from his hold. The rest of our guys that have made it to the kennel’s lobby are fighting the other two when Dogface shoots Fletch in the side with his own gun. Even Zerkos flinched watching our close friend and most trusted man getting hurt because we weren’t here to help.

The other two giant assholes make a mess of our men but the other surveillance from other floors shows the flooding of our men as they try to move through the stairs and make their way to the level where the kennels are at. The three men yell at each other in another language and they must have realized they were running out of time, Dogface fucker kicks Fletcher and forces him to stand and lead him to the kennels while the other two stand back and guard the entrances and exits.

Yeah, they came here for the girls.

Or they came here for her.

She came here for protection, is this who she was running from?

The ugly fucker nudged Fletcher to open the kennel door but instead, I see the moment he resigns his fate and decides loyalty was worth the price. He throws the key into the kennel towards Cecilia and Dogface guns him down right there. Cecilia screams but he doesn’t give her time to react before he uses his fingers to count down and give her a warning.

The panic is written all over her face but there’s something else there too.

There’s a strength that says she knows this isn’t how she dies, that this isn’t her time, and that she’s stronger than whatever he threatens to put her through. There’s a calmness to her as she picks up the keys and jams them into the lock, turning it and just as quickly squeezing her way through before shoving her knee into the bulldog’s junk. She tossed the keys back into the kennel, but he didn’t realize it or assumed she was the only one in there and didn’t bother to check.

It was a calculated move, and she saved two people in the process of it.

He threw Cecilia against the wall so hard that both Ronan and I tensed up at the visual of someone putting their hands on her like that. And then I see red when he knocks her out with the butt of his gun and throws her over his shoulder while the two others try to hold back our men. They get back into the elevator and try to beat our men back up to the rooftop, but it turns into a free for all shootout. Dogface threw Cecilia into the helicopter and for one split moment, I saw the face of our enemy inside, waiting, before they lifted off.