Chapter 2 - The Bleeding TitanThe Arrival of Brennan ThorneThe alley behind the warehouse smelled of damp asphalt, old rain, and the metallic stench of fresh blood.
A heavy autumn fog hung thick over East Los Angeles, muffling the distant wails of police sirens on the freeway. Valerie moved like a shadow along the brick wall, her eyes scanning the darkness, her hand gripping a heavy iron crowbar.
Beside a line of rusted industrial dumpsters, she saw a large, dark mass collapsed against the wall.
Marcus was gone—his old sedan’s tire tracks were still visible in the wet dirt near the alley entrance, showing he had fled to avoid bringing heat to the location.
Valerie approached slowly, bringing her flashlight down. The beam cut through the fog and illuminated a man.
He was massive—broad-shouldered, tall, dressed in a charcoal-grey tailored suit that was now ruined, soaked in dark, thick blood along his ribs and chest. His dark hair was matted with sweat, and his jawline was hard, carved like stone. Even lying near death in an alley, there was an unmistakable aura of lethal authority around him.
This was Gabriel Brennan—known simply in the underworld as Brennan. He was the undisputed head of the Thorne Syndicate, a man whose name made hardened street gang leaders lower their eyes.
Brennan’s eyes flickered open as the flashlight beam hit his face. They were a striking, piercing storm-grey, completely unclouded by panic despite his fading pulse. His right hand was clamped tightly over a wound in his side, dark blood oozing past his knuckles. In his left hand, he held a silenced 9mm pistol aimed squarely at Valerie’s chest.
"Don't..." his voice was a deep, gravelly rasp, vibrating with pain. "...come any closer."
Valerie didn't step back. She stood her ground, her iron crowbar held low. "Marcus called me. He said you have information about Raymond Cross."
Brennan’s dark eyebrows twitched slightly. The barrel of his gun lowered a fraction of an inch. "Cross... Raymond’s girl?"
"Yes," Valerie said firmly. "And if you want to keep breathing long enough to use whatever secrets you're holding, you need to get off this wet pavement right now."
Brennan let out a harsh, bitter chuckle that turned into a wet, painful cough. "You're small, kid... You can't carry me."
"I dug a three-meter hole through solid river rock with my bare hands," Valerie said, her voice dripping with sharp, unyielding ice. "Try me."
Valerie stepped forward, shoving her crowbar into her coat pocket, and slung his massive left arm over her shoulders. The weight of the man was staggering—pure muscle and deadweight—and as his blood soaked into the shoulder of her jacket, Valerie gritted her teeth, her legs shaking beneath the strain.
"Move your feet!" she snapped in a furious whisper. "I’m not dying in this alley for you!"
Gasping for breath, Brennan forced his legs to work, dragging his weight alongside her. Step by agonizing step, they moved down the alley, through the side door of the warehouse, and into the dark, cold maintenance room.
When they reached the open hatch in the floor, Brennan stopped, looking down into the dark opening with a look of genuine disbelief through his haze of pain. "What is this... a grave?"
"It’s my home," Valerie snapped. "And right now, it’s the only place on Earth where the people who shot you can't find you."
Getting a 210-pound bleeding man down a narrow four-step iron ladder was a brutal, agonizing ordeal. Brennan groaned in white-hot agony as his feet slipped, and Valerie used every ounce of muscle she had forged over forty nights of digging to keep him from falling headfirst. They collapsed together onto the dirt floor of the bunker, the heavy iron hatch slamming shut above them.
Valerie locked the steel bolts on the hatch, pulled the oil-stained workbench over the top using a pulley wire system she had rigged, and clicked on the full LED array.
The bunker was bathed in bright, white light.
Brennan lay on the narrow cot, his chest heaving shallowly, his face pale as chalk. His tailored suit jacket was ruined, and blood was pooling beneath him onto her clean wool blankets.
Valerie didn't hesitate. She grabbed her emergency trauma kit, cut his shirt open with medical shears, and exposed two clean, nasty gunshot wounds—one through the left shoulder, and one lodged deep into the right side of his abdomen.
"You're going to scream," Valerie said, setting out a bottle of high-proof rubbing alcohol, needle, thread, and gauze.
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Brennan looked up at the cedar-plank ceiling of the tiny room, then looked at Valerie’s sharp, determined face. He bit down on a leather strap she handed him.
"Do it," he growled through his teeth.
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