Someone fucked up.
Seiran Shi crouched atop an elevator crawling down the greasy innards of a five-star hotel in Atlantic City. He hated grease and he hated Atlantic City. One was too dirty and the other too slick. Which was which was a toss up.
Dirt made him sick to his stomach. He swore he'd never be dirty again after surviving the stinkhole he'd been imprisoned in as a child. Still, being dirty, and not just on the surface, came with the job.
Despite his considerable revulsion, he locked one arm around the oily cable that lowered the elevator rapidly to the basement parking garage. His other hand desperately clung to a black 9mm Beretta, his index finger twitching against the trigger like it was a woman's clit ready to climax. The metal barrel, still warm from overuse, winked at him under the garishly bright yellow light in the elevator shaft. That lady had saved his ass more times than he could remember, tonight included, so she deserved a nice stroking.
He smirked. Someone fucked up, all right. He was still alive.
Before the elevator touched bottom, Seiran rose like a coiled cobra, ready to strike. He secured his pistol in his ankle holster, freeing him for his next move. If he didn't fuck up, he'd get out of the building without firing another shot. Once he got out though, he would have to improvise. The original extraction plan incinerated in a blaze of gunfire, and now he was on his own. Someone had betrayed him—someone with top clearance, someone with juice. That someone was as good as dead. He wouldn't fuck up.
Seiran leapt onto the frame above the shaft door, clinging to the smooth, cold metal with the tips of his manicured fingers and the toes of his gloss-black Versace shoes. He shimmied quickly across the frame and stretched across a chasm to reach a metal ladder that led to the shaft floor. He wedged his body into the small space between the back of the ladder and the shaft wall, and waited.
Through a sliver of space between the elevator car and the shaft door, he caught a glimpse of two thugs still alive to pursue him, exiting the car into the garage. The other three that had been with them, whom Seiran's sweet lady Beretta had taken care of, had simply been meat shields for these guys.
This was a bad lot, killing their own, but that was nothing new to Seiran. Obviously, the people supposedly on his side were no better. That prick Shou would sell out his own mother if he hadn't been spawned straight from hell. The only reason Seiran hadn't slit his throat already was because his brother Ryuuki wouldn't let him.
For the time being, Seiran allowed Ryuuki to have his way, but his kid brother wasn't cut out for this bullshit business. He trusted too much. He was a good kid. A good man. He still had hope. He was trying to make things right for their family, so they'd have a future despite all their father had done to destroy everything. If anyone could do it, Ryuuki could, but he had to survive. Seiran lived to make sure of that. Truthfully, Seiran admitted, if he had to betray everyone he knew to ensure his brother's safety, he wouldn't blink an eye.
He smiled, imagining Ryuuki's gentle face, and bowed his head against the cold steel ladder. He felt the ascending elevator brush lightly past his fingers gripping the ladder. Once the elevator was out of the way, he'd climb down and exit the shaft through the maintenance entrance out to the garage and to…what?
One fucked-up plot at a time, Black Wolf. Get out of here first.