Damian FINUCANE's Arc

Chapter 24 of 57

The bolted door held. Behind Damian, boots pounded up the stairwell. He counted the seconds and knew he could not break the lock in time. So he ran to the service lift instead. He hauled the cage door shut just as the first guards spilled into the room. The lift dropped fast. Damian pressed his back to the crates and caught his breath. He had lost the mastermind. But the man had left one thread, and Damian meant to pull it. He returned to the juice shop at the tower's base. The cheerful sign still glowed above the bright counter. Damian pushed inside. The nervous worker who once passed Parker his envelopes was gone. In his place stood the mastermind himself, apron tied over his fine clothes, hands flat on the counter. He had fled down, not out. He had hidden in the last place Damian would look for a man who hired killers. "You," Damian said. He drew the gemmed sword. The blue stones threw light across the smoothie cups. The man raised his hands slow. "I have money. More than your father ever saw." His calm was gone now. His eyes flicked to the door, to the kitchen, to the blade. "I hire men like you. Name your price." "You called Parker careless," Damian said. "You called his work sloppy. You thought a boy with a sword was nothing." He stepped closer. "You were wrong about both of us." The man's hand darted under the counter. He came up with a short pistol, older and clumsy. He fired once. The shot cracked wide and shattered a shelf of bottles behind Damian. Before the man could cock it again, Damian struck. He brought the flat of the blade down on the wrist. Bone snapped. The pistol clattered to the floor. The man screamed and stumbled back into the kitchen. He grabbed a knife from the block. He swung it wild, no training in the arm, only fear. Damian read the swing the way his master had taught him. He stepped inside it. He drove the point of the gemmed sword through the man's chest. The mastermind's eyes went wide. He looked down at the blade, then at Damian's face, as if the math had finally come clear. He slid to the floor and did not move. Damian stood over him in the quiet shop. The man who paid for his father's death was dead. He had underrated Damian to the very end, and it had cost him his life. Damian pulled the signed envelope from his coat and set it on the counter beside the body. Proof. A record of everything. But the masked swordsman had scarred his family, and that debt was Parker's, already paid. This man had only bought the blade. Damian searched the body and found a second envelope, sealed, addressed in a hand he did not know. Someone above the tower. Someone still giving orders. The hunt was not over yet.