Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 052

In West Cascadia, in a gated estate somewhere outside the city, the morning had started badly for Warren Voss.

The surface of his desk was bare now, everything swept to the floor in one motion, papers and a phone and a glass all scattered across the carpet. Warren stood in the middle of the wreckage with white hair and red eyes, his whole body shaking with a grief that had nowhere to go.

The door opened. A young woman stepped in carefully, her face tight with concern. "Darling, what happened? What's wrong?"

The question hit him somewhere he wasn't prepared for. His legs went out from under him and he sat down hard on the floor, both hands pressed over his face, and the sound that came out of him was not something he would have recognized as his own voice.

"My son," he said. "My son is gone."

The news of Julian's death had taken the last thing holding Warren together and broken it cleanly. His wife had died years ago. Julian had been everything after that, the center of every plan, every decision, every indulgence. The boy had been difficult from childhood, volatile and reckless, leaving a trail of damage wherever he went. But Warren had always been there to clean it up. He had the money and the connections and the will to make problems disappear, and so they had always disappeared.

Not this one.

He already knew, from the calls he'd received in the early hours of the morning, what his son had done and who he had done it to. Voss Capital. The name sat in his chest like a stone. A conglomerate with reach that extended far beyond anything the Voss family could claim, a name that made mayors return calls and governments pay attention. Against something like that, Warren's local influence in Grayhaven City was nothing. A candle next to a bonfire.

Revenge was a word he turned over briefly and then set aside. Hire someone to go after Scott Voss? Go after the men who had been in that hotel? He was angry enough to want it, and powerless enough to know better.

Allie sat down beside him on the floor and held him while he shook, murmuring the kinds of things people say when there is nothing useful left to say.

After a long while, Warren drew a slow breath, then another, and pushed himself back to his feet. He stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the California morning without really seeing it.

"Allie," he said quietly, "I'm going back to Sunvale."

________________________________________

The private room at the Kingfisher Medical Center was quiet when Soren and Cody arrived, the blinds half-drawn against the morning light. Hank and Evan were both on their feet before the door had fully opened.

"You're out," Evan said, the relief in his voice more obvious than he probably intended.

"We're out," Soren confirmed. He looked past them at the bed. Mark Dalton lay motionless under a white sheet, an IV line in his arm, his right arm immobilized in a splint, his left wrapped in bandaging from wrist to elbow. His face, even in unconsciousness, looked like it had been through something.

"How bad?" Soren asked.

Hank answered steadily. "Stab wound to the left side, significant blood loss. Right arm broken. Multiple deep lacerations on the left arm. He's stable now, but realistically he's looking at a year before he's back to anything like full capacity."

Soren studied Mark's face for a moment. "What happened to him?"

"We don't know the details. When we found him he was barely conscious, on the thirteenth floor of the building across from the hotel. There was another man there, dressed in black. Already dead. Whatever went on between them, Mark paid a serious price for the outcome." Hank paused. "There was blood everywhere."

Evan picked up the thread, his voice carrying the particular edge of someone who had replayed something too many times in their head. "The man in black had a sniper rifle with him. He was clearly the one who'd been watching the hotel from outside the whole time. If you and Cody had been visible from the exterior at any point during the operation, it would have gone very differently." He looked at Soren. "Did you get them? Julian and whoever was pulling the strings?"

"Both dead," Soren said.

He gave them the short version of the night: Duke Calloway, the layout map, the safe room, the grenade trap in the parking garage, the chase. When he finished, Hank was quiet for a moment, and then made a sound of dry, genuine surprise.

"A dog that turns on its own master," Hank said. "Julian really managed to make enemies out of everyone around him."

"He had it coming," Evan said flatly. "I knew from the first time I saw him that he was rotten. Honestly, dying that quickly was too easy for him."

Hank smiled faintly, then sighed. "The only real loss is the cash. The police moved too fast, and with Mark getting ambushed, everything fell apart before we could get to it."

"The cash isn't a problem," Soren said. He let a small smile cross his face and held up the contract. "I know exactly where the hotel's reserves are held. And beyond that, I just signed this."

Evan's eyes went to the document. He leaned in and read the top line, then straightened up slowly. "Two hundred thousand dollars a day?"

"For the team."

A sharp intake of breath. Evan stared at the number for another second as though waiting for it to change.

Hank reached over and took the contract, reading through it carefully and methodically, the way he did everything. Soren watched him and waited.

"This is the first clean money we've made," Soren said, with a lightness in his voice that wasn't entirely a joke.

Hank looked up from the contract and laughed, and Evan laughed too, the kind of laughter that comes partly from relief and partly from the sheer absurdity of where the night had ended up.

"Honestly," Evan said, "this is a lot easier than fighting our way through a casino."

Hank set the contract down on the bedside table and looked at Soren with an expression that had shifted into something more deliberate. "Have you thought about whether we could keep making money like this?"

Soren raised an eyebrow. "Go on."

Hank chose his words carefully. "We can't keep doing what we've been doing. The other kind of work, it's too dangerous and the ceiling is too low. I'm not saying that because I'm afraid. I drive, you're the one who goes through doors. But even you can't fight a thousand people. Even you can't fight ten thousand. The longer we stay in the dark, the more the light is going to hurt when it finally finds us."

The room was quiet. Soren found a chair and sat down, turning the thought over.

"You want more contracts like this one," he said. "More work from Voss Capital."

"That's exactly it." Hank didn't hedge. "I talked to Mark about this before everything happened. Security work is a legitimate industry. Build enough capability and enough connections, and the contracts come to you. Voss Capital is the kind of connection that opens doors. The kind that other clients notice."

Evan frowned slightly. "We're a bit short on personnel for that kind of operation."

"Then we hire," Hank said simply. "And if we can't hire permanently, we contract. Mark has the network for it, or he did before half of it went dark. Once he's recovered, he'll have more pull than ever after what happened last night."

Soren glanced at Mark's sleeping face, then back at Hank. "You think you can talk him into it? Leaving Palisade Security and coming on with us properly?"

"Absolutely."

A quiet voice came from across the room. Cody had been leaning against the wall, listening without interrupting, but now he straightened up. "Can I be part of this? Whatever you're building?"

Soren didn't look at him right away. "That's a strange thing to ask."

Cody blinked. "Strange how? I just meant—"

Soren turned and fixed him with a serious look. "I've considered you one of us for a while now. So either you feel the same way, or you're planning to take your share and disappear once this is over. Which is it?"

Cody opened his mouth, then closed it, then started again. "You know I'd never do that. After everything you've done for my family, I couldn't even think about—"

He stopped, because he'd finally registered the expressions on the other three faces. All of them were smiling.

He let out a long breath and dropped his head back against the wall. "You scared me half to death."

The laughter that followed was warm and genuine, filling the quiet hospital room for a moment before settling back into comfortable silence.

Then footsteps came fast down the corridor outside, lighter than an adult's, urgent in a way that made everyone look toward the door.

It opened, and a girl in a school uniform came through at almost a run. She wasn't striking in any particular way, just a young face with tired eyes and the look of someone who had been holding herself together since a phone call the night before. She saw the figure in the bed and stopped holding herself together entirely.

"Dad!"