Page 48 of Obsession
The buyer’s gaze flicks toward me before settling on Sol. “I didn’t ask for an audience.”
Sol stops at the table. “And yet you complained about my product.”
“I reported an issue.”
“You reported that my XR3 was dirty.”
“I said the reaction was wrong.” Everyone shifts around the room, just enough to put the buyer on alert. The buyer’s mouth tightens. “My man had tremors. Visual distortion. Onset was irregular. That’s not what I paid for.”
Moth chuckles and blows out a heavy breath. “Batch Fourteen-C cleared internal testing twice. Seal integrity held through warehouse transfer. The temperature remained within tolerance until broker pickup.”
“Then maybe your internal testing is bullshit.”
The room changes immediately as every Obsidian man seems to go quieter at once. Saint doesn’t move, but something drains from his expression until his face looks carved out of restraint. Sol laughs softly.
He reaches for the foam case, lifts one vial, and holds it up to the light. The liquid gleams with that strange, clinical shimmer. The buyer’s men shift behind him, and one of them, broad and red-faced with a thick neck and sweat shining at his temples, takes half a step forward before he realizes stepping forward has made him visible.
Sol looks at him. “You.”
The man freezes. “What?”
“You had the tremors?”
The buyer starts to move. “He doesn’t need to—”
Sol is on the man before the sentence finishes. He catches him by the back of the neck, cracks the vial open with his thumb, and tips the dose under the man’s tongue before anyone on the buyer’s side can decide whether reacting will get them killed. His other hand clamps the man’s jaw shut. The whole room locks around the motion, guns still holstered but suddenly present in every line of every body. The man jerks once, both hands flying to Sol’s wrist, but Sol holds him in place with the bored patience of someone restraining a dog at the end of a leash.
“Let’s test the complaint,” Sol muses, his eyes dancing.
For a few seconds, nothing happens. The man’s eyes roll toward the buyer, pleading and furious at the same time, breath pushing hard through his nose. Then XR3 hits. His pupils blow wide, black swallowing color. A flush climbs his neck and floodshis face, sweat breaking along his hairline as his breathing turns ragged.
His fingers claw at the edge of the table as a low, wrecked sound slips out of him before he can swallow it. The reaction moves through him visibly, sharpening and unraveling him at once, every nerve dragged awake beneath the warehouse lights.
Sol releases him and steps back. “Product seems fine to me.”
The man grips the table with both hands and then his body betrays him in front of everyone. One hand drops to his cock, clutching himself through his pants before he seems to understand what he’s doing. Shame catches up half a second later, violent enough to twist his face. His humiliation turns into fury because men like that would rather die angry than be seen helpless, and he swings at Sol with the sloppy desperation of someone trying to reclaim a room he already lost.
Saint’s gun is out before the fist finishes moving. The shot cracks through the warehouse and the man drops hard, one leg folding under him as he hits the concrete. Blood spreads fast beneath his shoulder and across the front of his shirt. I flinch so violently my shoulder clips Bricks’ arm, Bricks putting more of his body between mine and the buyer’s side.
Guns immediately come up on both sides, voices overlapping in panic and threat, the buyer shouting that Sol dosed his man. The buyer stares at the man on the floor, then at Saint, rage and terror fighting across his face.
Saint stands with his gun still raised, expression empty. “First,” he says, voice cutting through the noise, “that drug works just fucking fine. Second, of all the people your man could have advanced on, the president of a club shouldn’t have been one of them.”
“You shot him,” the buyer says.
“He swung at Sol.”
“You forced the product on him.”
Sol smiles around his cigar. “And proved your complaint was bullshit.”
The buyer’s gaze darts to the vials, the body, the weapons pointed at his men. “This is insane.”
“No,” Saint says. “Insane is thinking you can put a quality complaint on Obsidian’s name and walk into this room without the truth ready. Who told you to say the product was wrong?”
“No one.”
Bricks moves around the table, catches the buyer by the lapel, and slams him down so hard his knees hit concrete with a crack I feel in my own bones. The buyer chokes on a scream and folds forward, but Bricks hauls him upright by the jacket. One of the buyer’s men curses and raises his gun an inch. Cade pistol-whips him across the face before the barrel comes level. Bone meets metal with a sick, blunt sound, and the man goes sideways into the table, knocking the foam case askew.
