Gage clears his throat, trying to get things back on track. “So we’ve got the name of Julian’s biggest buyer in his drug business. It’s a man named Cyrus Porter.”
“What do we know about him?” Knox asks, folding his arms and leaning against the wall.
“He owns a nightclub in Detroit, but his main business is the illegal shit.”
“Like us,” Ash says.
“And Julian,” I add.
“Right,” Gage agrees. “He’s one of the biggest drug dealers in the city, and he gets his supply from Julian.”
“So... we need to make sure he stops buying from Julian, right?” Knox says. “There’s an easy way to do that. He can’t buy any of Julian’s shit if he’s dead.”
It’s a good point. Losing his main buyer would definitely throw a wrench in Julian’s business and send him scrambling. And it’s not like we’d even have to undercut Julian or try to convince this Cyrus guy to go buy from someone else. Killing him takes him out of the supply chain permanently.
“So let’s do it,” I say without hesitation, looking around at all of them. “Let’s go take him out.”
Gage tugs at his lip and then holds up a hand. “No. We have to be smarter about this. We can’t just go kill this guy ourselves. We have to make sure our fingerprints are far away from any of this shit until it’s all done. If Julian realizes it’s us before we’re ready, it’ll blow everything.”
I frown, agitation stirring within me, but then I nod—because he’s right. I hate having to wait, having to draw this out even more. Especially when there’s that itchy energy burning under my skin to get this ball rolling now. To make Julian pay immediately, so he can’t have a single moment more of comfort. If I have to suffer because of what he did, then I want him to be suffering too.
But things have to be done a certain way. I get that. We can’t let Julian know or even suspect that it’s us, and with the FBI nosing around, that’s even more reason to not be reckless.
I drag in a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “Right. You’re right.”
“So then, what?” I ask Gage. “How do we kill Cyrus?”
Ash grins at me, answering the question instead. “We’ll just need to convince someone else to do it.”
A couple of days pass, and the guys and I settle into deep planning mode. Taking out Julian’s main buyer is an important step in the plan to fuck up his life from the inside out, so it has to be done right.
We look into Cyrus, learning more about him and his business, and the more we learn, the more eager I get to see him dead.
His club is more of a sex club than a dancing and drinking club, and from what I can tell, it seems like a lot of the women who work there are treated badly.
There was definitely a moment where I might have felt a little bit bad that he has to die because he’s caught between us and Julian, but once I realized he’s a piece of shit, I stopped caring.
Fuck this asshole. He deserves exactly what’s coming to him.
The guys keep digging into other aspects of Julian’s life, since this is just the first step in destroying him, but we try to focus the most on the first task to make sure it gets done right. We can’t afford to fuck it up this early in the game.
In addition to his shitty club, we find out that he’s got a rival on the streets of Detroit—someone he’s clashed with before, another drug dealer named Apollo Cabrera. They’ve been fighting over territory for years, having skirmishes here and there. There’s a lot of bad blood between them.
It’s perfect.
From there, our strategy comes together pretty smoothly, and just under a week after we first got the lead on Cyrus, it’s time to make our move.
The last bit of light is fading from the evening sky as I move around my room, getting ready for what we have planned.
I stub out my cigarette and close the window I cracked open, waving my hands to dry the polish on my nails that last little bit. They’re painted black in honor of the occasion tonight. It seems fitting.
Plus, the color goes with my outfit for the night.
Once the polish is fully dry, I get dressed quickly, pulling on the slinky top and tight black pants, then adding a long-sleeved black shirt on top of it. The finishing touch is twisting my long silver hair up on top of my head and putting it under a cap.
My door creaks open, and I turn my head to see Ash coming in.
His gaze lands on me immediately, and he looks me up and down and then back up again, letting his attention drag slowly over my body.
“Damn. You look hot,” he drawls with a grin.
I roll my eyes at him. “I did a second ago, but you missed that. Now I’m just covered in black.”
“You always look hot to me,” Ash says, waggling his eyebrows at me in an over the top fashion.
I just shake my head and go back to putting my shoes on. It’s classic Ash, flirty even when there’s nothing really flirt-worthy going on, but I like it. I always believe him when he says shit like that, which makes it better.
“You ready to go?” he asks me, his tone turning a bit more serious.
I nod and follow him downstairs to where the others are already gathered, geared up and ready. We’re all in head-to-toe black, dressed in tactical gear for this mission.
I can kind of see what Ash meant about it being hot when I see all four of them gathered together, ready for action. They all look sexy as fuck when they’re dressed to the nines in expensive suits and shit, but they look damn good like this too.
Moving as a unit, we pile into the car and make our way toward Cyrus’s club.
Priest drives this time, since Gage is busy in the passenger seat. He calls their hacker friend Harv and has him turn off the cameras in the parking garage under the club. This part of our plan has all been pre-arranged, even though there seems to be a little sass from the hacker that makes Gage roll his eyes and Ash snort with amusement.
Once we know for sure that the cameras are out, we drive into the garage.
“There’s his car,” Gage says, pointing to a sleek black car with a low profile parked in a special reserved spot. “Cyrus will be inside the club.”
“This is my time to shine,” Ash murmurs.
He tosses me a wink and slides out of our car once Priest parks. We get out to watch his back, but I mostly let the guys handle keeping an eye on things, while I keep an eye on Ash.
His skills with his hands come in useful here, and he pulls a little metal tool out of his pocket and crouches down by the driver’s side of the car.
It takes a few seconds of wiggling and squinting his eyes, but then the lock pops on the door, and he pulls it open. No one claps, but he sweeps a grand bow anyway, making me roll my eyes.
Still, I can’t help but smile. He’s skilled as hell at this, and that’s damn sexy.
Priest gives a satisfied nod and steps past him, moving in to do his part of this plan. He slides into the driver’s seat and fiddles with things for a bit, hot-wiring the car to get it to start.
“I could have done the hot-wiring,” Ash says, half talking to Priest and half talking to me. “But I didn’t want to outshine our boy Priest here. He has to have his part too.”