The Brotherhood: Price of Blood

The warehouse smelled like money that didn't want to be found. Darius Cole stood in the dark between two rows of cars that cost more than most people's houses, and he did not move. Three minutes in, and he had not moved once. "Talk to me," he said quietly. In his ear, Julian's voice was flat, unbothered, like he was reading a grocery list instead of defeating a six-figure security system. "Cameras are looped. Motion sensors on the east wall are dead. You've got the door, the floor pressure pads, and whatever's in that server room upstairs that I haven't touched yet." "How long." "Ninety seconds, if I don't get interrupted." "You will," Mal's voice cut in, breathless, somewhere near the loading dock. "You always say ninety seconds and it's always three minutes, and then Darius stands there doing his statue thing, and I get old waiting." "Mal." Darius didn't raise his voice. He never did. "Door." "Door's covered. Nobody's coming. Relax, boss, I'm just saying — statistically —" "Nobody asked for your statistics." A soft laugh from Andre, positioned by the van outside. "He's not wrong to be nervous. This one's got a name on the wall, Darius. Whitfield's not some hedge fund kid with a garage full of toys nobody appreciates. Man knows what he owns." Darius looked up at the car in front of him. A 1967 prototype, one of four ever built, the kind of machine that belonged in a museum with a velvet rope and a bored security guard, not locked in a private warehouse where nobody but its owner would ever see it run. That was the part that always got him. Men like Whitfield didn't buy these cars to drive them. They bought them to own something nobody else could have. Darius intended to take that away from him tonight. "Nate," he said. "Talk to me about the car." Nate's voice came through with the particular hum of someone in love with his work. "She's clean, boss. No tracker I can find, no kill switch wired in — old enough that it's all mechanical, which works in our favor. I can have her running in under two minutes once Julian gives me power." "You have ninety seconds," Julian said. "Well. Had. We're at four minutes now." "Copy that. Hurrying." Darius crossed the floor and put his palm flat on the hood, the way he did every time, the way none of the others understood and none of them asked about. It wasn't sentiment. It was a habit from the first job he'd ever pulled, years before any of this had a name, when his hands used to shake and he needed something solid to remind him they didn't shake anymore. They didn't shake now either. "Marcus," he said. "Status." "Clear," Marcus said. Two words. That was usually all Marcus needed. "Andre?" "Clear out here too. Street's quiet. Whitfield's staff logged out at ten. Nobody's due back till morning." Darius exhaled through his nose. "Then let's go." The next ninety seconds were the ones Darius lived for, if he was honest with himself — the part nobody back home in Crown City's quiet, ordinary neighborhoods would ever believe about him. Nate popped the hood and got his hands into the wiring with the tenderness of a man handling something sacred. Julian's voice ticked down numbers in his ear like a countdown to something holy. Mal kept up a stream of jokes at the door that nobody laughed at and everybody needed. Andre stayed exactly where Andre always stayed — steady, watching, the kind of man you built a plan around because you knew he'd still be standing there when the plan fell apart. The engine caught on the fourth try. It didn't roar. It purred, low and old and patient, like it had been waiting fifty years for someone to finally take it somewhere. "Beautiful," Nate whispered, like he was in church. "Roll it," Darius said. That was when the radio in his pocket — not the crew channel, a different one, a scanner Julian had rigged months ago to listen for exactly one kind of trouble — hissed to life. "Unit fourteen, be advised, we have a possible ten-fifty-two at your location, private security requesting backup, repeat, private residence off Ashford Row—" Darius went still again. Ashford Row was two streets over. "That's not us," Mal said quickly, like he needed to hear himself say it. "That's not us, right? That's not us." "It's not us," Julian confirmed, but his voice had lost its flatness. "Different address. Different system. Unrelated." Darius didn't believe in unrelated. Not on a night like this, not two streets from a job that had taken him four months to plan. "Andre. Eyes on the street. Now." A pause — longer than Andre's pauses ever were. "Darius." Andre's voice had changed. Careful. Controlled, the way a man's voice gets right before he says something nobody wants to hear. "There's a car. Parked at the end of the block. Lights off. Been sitting there since before we got here." "Civilian?" "I don't think so." Darius's hand was still flat on the hood of a car worth more than the last three years of his life combined, and for the first time that night, he felt it. His pulse. Just once. Just enough to notice. "Everybody hold," he said. "Nobody moves till I say." Through the warehouse's high, filthy windows, headlights swept slowly across the far wall — the exact rhythm of a car pulling out of a parking spot after sitting still for a very long time, and turning, unhurried, toward the loading dock where Mal was standing. Toward the only door they had left open.