The red 'X' on my phone screen felt like a physical brand on my skin. I stood in the middle of the Iron Rose, surrounded by the groans of the dying and the smell of gunpowder, but the only thing I could hear was the frantic pounding of my own heart. It wasn't the steady drum of a soldier; it was the erratic, panicked beat of a man who realized the walls he had built around his life were made of nothing but glass.
"Boss?" Marcus's voice cut through the haze. He was wiping blood from his knuckles, his eyes scanning the perimeter of the ruined club. "We need to move. That gas... It's a neuro-inhibitor. It'll linger in the vents."
I didn't answer. I couldn't breathe. My lungs felt like they were filled with lead, not from the gas, but from the sudden, suffocating weight of premonition. I shoved the phone into my pocket, the cold weight of the obsidian cufflink Marcus had found earlier pressing against my thigh like a shard of ice.
