Chapter 6: Owned

Miles's POV

The job went wrong in the first ninety seconds.

I was supposed to deliver a package to the laundry room, hand it to a man matching a description Vincent had given me, and walk away without saying more than five words. Simple, according to Vincent's definition of the word, which by now I understood meant nothing.

The man matching the description wasn't alone.

Three others peeled off the walls the second I stepped through the door, and I knew before any of them said a word that this wasn't laundry room business. The air changed. My whole body went cold in that specific way it had on my first day, the way that meant something was about to happen whether I wanted it to or not.

"Hayes's new pet," one of them said, grinning in a way that had nothing friendly in it. He was thick through the shoulders, tattoos climbing out of his collar, a scar tissue knuckle that told me this wasn't his first fight in a place like this. "Heard you started running his errands."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." He stepped closer, and the other two spread out behind him, boxing me in against a row of industrial dryers that hummed loud enough to swallow most sound. "Word is Hayes has taken a real interest in you. That true?"

I didn't answer right away. There wasn't an answer that helped me here. My mind was already running through the room, the dryers, the distance to the door, the odds of getting past four men without a weapon of my own, and none of the numbers came out in my favor.

"See, the way I figure it," he went on, "if Hayes cares about you even a little, then you're worth something to him. And if you're worth something to him, that makes you worth something to me too. Just gotta convince him of that math." He rolled his neck, cracking it slowly, savoring the moment the way some men savored a meal. "Nothing personal. Business is business in here, same as anywhere."

The first hit came from my blind side, someone I hadn't clocked stepping in behind me, and it caught me across the back of the skull hard enough to drop me to one knee. I got an arm up in time to block the second one, drove my shoulder into whoever was closest, and for a few seconds it was just noise and pain and the taste of blood in my mouth, three against one in a room built entirely out of hard surfaces.

Someone grabbed a fistful of my jumpsuit and slammed me back against a dryer, the metal edge biting into my spine, and for a second the whole room tilted sideways. I swung anyway, half blind, and caught someone hard enough in the jaw that they staggered back cursing.

I got a few good hits in. It didn't matter. There were too many of them and not enough of me, and I already knew, somewhere in the part of my brain that hadn't shut off yet, that this was the kind of fight you didn't walk away from clean.

The door burst open before it got that far.

I didn't see exactly what happened next. It happened too fast, and half of it was behind me, but I heard it. Bodies hitting machines. A short, ugly sound that might have been a bone breaking. A voice, low and utterly calm, saying something I couldn't make out over the ringing in my ears. Someone grunted. Something metal clattered to the floor and rolled, slow and hollow, before it finally stopped.

Then it was over.

Two men I'd never seen before stood in the doorway, one of them wiping his knuckles on his jumpsuit like he'd just finished something mildly inconvenient rather than a fight. Neither of them looked rushed. Neither of them looked like they'd broken a sweat. The three who'd cornered me were on the ground. One wasn't moving at all. The other two were making sounds I didn't want to think too hard about.

"Up," one of the men said to me, not unkindly, just efficiently, like this was a task on his own list and I was the next item on it.

I got up. My legs weren't entirely steady under me.

"Who are you?"

Neither of them answered. They helped me toward the door, one on each side, moving fast without looking like they were moving fast, the whole thing over and cleaned up before anyone with a badge or a clipboard had time to notice it had happened at all.

---

Vincent found me an hour later, in the infirmary, holding an ice pack to the back of my skull while a nurse who clearly didn't care one way or another stitched a cut above my eyebrow. The room smelled like antiseptic and old blood, a combination I suspected I'd get used to before this was over.

"You're alive," he said, like that settled something.

"No thanks to whatever that was supposed to be."

"That was a setup. Rival faction, testing whether Hayes actually cares what happens to you, or whether you're expendable." He said it flatly, the way he said everything, like violence was simply another category of paperwork. "Now they know. And they'll spread the word to everyone else thinking about trying the same thing."

"Know what?"

"That touching you gets a response." Vincent pulled a chair over and sat, unhurried, the same unbothered calm he always carried. "You should understand what that means."

"That I can't say no to any of this. I got that part already."

"You got half of it." Something in his tone shifted, quieter now, more deliberate. "The other half is that you're not going anywhere. Not because you owe Mr. Hayes a debt. Because the moment word got out that he had an interest in you, that interest became a target painted on your back. Walking away doesn't remove the target. It just removes your protection."

I sat with that, the ice pack cold against my skull, the stitches pulling tight above my eye. "So I'm stuck either way."

"You were always stuck. You just didn't understand how thoroughly." He watched me for a moment, something almost like patience in his gray eyes, the closest thing to sympathy I'd seen from him yet. There was no cruelty in the way he said it, which somehow made it land harder than if there had been. "There's something else you should know. Since we're being honest tonight."

"What."

"Mr. Hayes had your sister's school schedule before you'd finished your first task."

The words landed like another fist, worse than any of the ones from the laundry room.

"What did you just say?"

"Her school. Her route home. What day she has piano lessons." Vincent said it without any particular emphasis, like he was reading a grocery list rather than detonating something in the middle of my chest. "He didn't have to look hard for it. That's not the point I'm making."

My throat had gone dry. "Then what is the point?"

"The point is that there's nothing about your life Mr. Hayes doesn't already have access to, if he wants it." He stood, smoothing his jacket, entirely unbothered by what he'd just handed me. "I'm telling you this so you stop wondering whether there's a version of this where you have leverage. There isn't. There never was."

"Why tell me now?"

Vincent paused at the door, looking back at me with an expression I couldn't fully read.

"Because you needed to stop fighting the wrong battle," he said. "The sooner you understand exactly what you're up against, the fewer nights like tonight you'll have."

I was off the bed before the nurse could stop me, the needle still hanging loose from the half-finished stitch, my hand closing hard around his arm before he reached the door.

"If anything happens to her," I said, "I don't care what it costs me. I will end you."

Vincent looked down at my hand on his sleeve, unhurried, like it was an interesting detail rather than a threat.

"Nobody's going to touch her," he said. "As long as you keep doing exactly what you're told."

He pulled his arm free, calm and deliberate, and stepped out into the hallway.

"That's not reassurance," I called after him. "That's a leash."

The door swung shut on his back before he bothered to answer.