Something Wicked 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)

20: Everything I love

It wasn't mere sewer-shit blocking the manhole exit. It was a mangled corpse. The remains of some poor fucker who'd succumbed to Alcor was blocking my exit. I kicked at the rotten thing, my boots skidding desperately in mud and grime to carve out a path to the manhole beyond. My palm landed on cold metal as I shoved at the corpse's chest. Armour? A weapon?

Grasping at the slippery metal, I tugged it out of the dripping brown mass and stared at the object in my hand in horror. Covered in filth, still I knew it. Its dull glint had been burned into my gray matter years earlier. The nicked blade of my kris stared back at me. He'd been one of my victims.

Some unfortunate bastard, marked for death by her, had been mutilated by one of my wavy blades in the depths of a Demon-frenzy and flung into the sewer by Alcor's fixers. Who was he? A debtor? A spy for another gang? An employee who'd fucked up? Whoever he'd been, I'd killed him for her.

As haraam a gesture as it was, I held out my hands and recited four takbirs for the man I'd murdered, before pushing his body into the deepest of the sewer's pissy streams of water. The most pitiful burial, performed by the murderer of the deceased, but it was the best I could give him.

How many sewers, drainage ditches, shallow graves in Riyadh, hid the rotting corpses of my victims?

The kris tucked into my belt loop, I hauled myself up the first steel rung of the step ladder to Alcor. Lucky me, the manhole cover popped up in the inner courtyard just as a security guard turned a corner to face me.

Barely outta his teens, his eyes bulged in terror like he was staring at a fucking swamp monster and not a man. I flung the manhole cover away and ran straight at him, shit and filth flying off me before he could even wrestle his gun from his belt. A low kick to the ankle, two blows to the chest, and I grabbed his rifle. A sharp twist, and I drove the stock into his temple before dragging his knocked-out ass into the courtyard's gloom.

I adopted my victim's little trot through the inner courtyard, throwing a noncommittal "Salaam" to a guard atop a gantry, before hurrying to the shadow of the courtyard wall. A deft swipe of my tattoo at the scanner checkpoint, and I sailed through the gate before he'd so much as turned from his station. Security protocols had taken a dive since I'd left, alhamdulillah.

Rayan was surely in the residential compound with her. But Dante? He coulda been anywhere in the sprawling village that was the Alcor complex. As brilliant an operative as Dante was, if she knew his relationship to Stephanie Grey, she'd use him as a warning kill. I couldn't let her find him.

Her whitewashed stone compound's garden looked as pretty and well-tended as it had always been. Outta place amid so much death and hate, the sweet fragrance of jasmine and tamarisk wafted toward me on night breezes. My knees wobbled and my stomach knotted at the dissonance of the memory; the sweetest of fragrances always marked the darkest of my deeds every time she summoned me to her rooms.

But my terror could wait; I needed to be strong for Dante, and for Rayan. As well-meaning as it was, Sylvia's advice to wait in hiding until Dante or Rayan showed up was gonna get me shot in the face by a sentry. I had a better idea.

Minutes passed as sentries on meandering patrol routes skirted close by my hiding place behind a cloud of jasmine cascading over a trellis. Then, in the quiet of the garden I saw her, a bulging laundry basket wedged against her hip, her face obscured by shadows as she walked. The housemaid.

She pressed a tiny door scanner with swift fingers and swept into the building's kitchens. I made my move, springing up behind her and wedging my foot in the door. She clambered past me with a yelp and lunged for the keypad alarm to alert sentries.