Chapter 11: The Apartment Invasion
The lock gave way with a splintering crack, too loud in the stagnant silence of the hallway. Coyle shouldered the apartment door open, the cheap wood buckling around the deadbolt. The air inside hit him first—stale coffee, dust, and underneath it all, the fading, sweet-musk scent of her.Bunny.Brynlee. It was already too faint, overlain with the sour tang of male sweat and aggression that made his lip curl.Kellan’s stench.
He moved through the clutter like a shadow, his boots silent on the scuffed laminate. His eyes catalogued everything: the sagging bookshelf, the scarred table, the single flickering bulb over the sink casting jumpy shadows. A shard of glass near the doorframe caught the light, its edges sharp. Evidence of a struggle, or just her frantic escape?His jaw tightened.The bedroom was worse.Smaller. The scent of her was stronger here, woven into the sheets, clinging to the faded curtains. It was layered with something else, a chemical flatness that deadened the natural perfume.He knew that smell.His nostrils flared.
On the nightstand, beside a lamp with a cracked base, sat a small orange prescription bottle.
He picked it up.The plastic was cool in his palm. He didn’t need to read the label; the shape, the weight, the child-proof cap were as familiar as his own scars. He turned it.The pharmacy label was peeled off, scrubbed away. But the embossed symbol on the bottom of the bottle wasn’t.A simple, stark dagger inside a circle.His brand.
A coldness seeped through his veins, sharpening into a razor-edged fury. He popped the cap, tilted the bottle.A dozen small, chalky white pills rolled into his hand. Daggerback Omega Suppressants.His operation.His rules. He only sold them to a handful of trusted clients, omegas in truly desperate situations, and he always, always gave the same speech: For emergency use only.Two doses maximum. Your body needs to cycle.This shit will cage your wolf if you let it.
Bunny had been taking them for months.The chemical pall in the room was proof. She’d been suppressing heats, silencing her true nature, turning herself into this meek, accommodating ghost while these pills neutered her spirit. Someone had put her in a chemical prison.And they’d used his keys to do it.
The cold fury ignited, white-hot and instantaneous. He’d spent years building control, brick by painful brick, over the rage that Facility 9 had bred into him. It was a dam holding back a black ocean.This was a crack, a fault line shivering up the middle.
The plastic bottle crumpled in his fist with a sound like grinding teeth. He was out of the bedroom, across the living room, and through the shattered doorframe in a blur of motion that stirred the dusty air. The hallway smelled of mildew and neglect.He didn’t care.
He hit the speed-dial on his phone, bringing it to his ear.It rang once.
A voice, dry and raspy, answered.“Boss. You’re breathing loud.”
“Ghost.” Coyle’s voice was a low, dangerous rumble, the sound of rocks grinding together deep underground. “The girl.Bunny.Her apartment.I found her suppressants.”
A pause on the line. Ghost was processing, always two steps ahead.“Okay. Not surprising, given the control freak.”
“They’re ours, Ghost.”
The silence this time was different.Taut.
“The batch from last fall.The symbol.The dosage. They’re mine.” Every word was clipped, forced out through a jaw locked so tight it ached. “I didn’t sell them to her.Who did?”
Ghost let out a slow, whistling breath. “Shit.”
“Find out.I don’t care how.Pull the logs.Lean on the distributors. Somebody in our chain handed a bottle of my poison to the bastard who was using it to keep her in a cage.” He was walking now, a fast, predatory stride towards the stairwell, away from the violated space of her life.“This isn’t a side-job. This is the main job now.”
“Understood.” Ghost’s voice lost its lazy edge, sharpening to a fine point.“You think it’s connected? To why she’s a target?”
Coyle hit the stairwell door, shoving it open so hard it bounced off the wall with a concrete thud.“I think someone knew exactly what she was. And they wanted her quiet, docile, and suppressed until they were ready for her. Our product was the tool.” The admission tasted like ash and betrayal.“Find the leak. I want a name.”
“You got it.” Ghost paused. “Where are you going?”
Coyle took the stairs three at a time, the echo of his footsteps like gunshots in the concrete box. “To see a man about a vitamins prescription.”
He ended the call, the screen going dark. The dam was creaking, pressure screaming at the seams.The black ocean of his anger had a direction now, a target. He hit the alley, the night air doing nothing to cool the fire in his blood. He swung a leg over his bike, the machine an extension of his own furious energy.
As the engine roared to life, a single, terrifying thought cleaved through the rage, clear and sharp as the glass shard on her floor.
He’d been experimenting on her, too.