Chapter 98: The Accident That Wasn’t
Liam left the hotel a full hour before he needed to, cutting through a side street instead of the main one, doubling back once just to see if anything doubled back with him.
Nothing did. That didn’t make him relax.
By evening he’d checked into a new room, smaller, the kind with a single elevator and a fire stair nobody used. He noted the stair on the way in, he noted most things now, without deciding to.
The two men who let themselves into his room that afternoon, while he was out, didn’t need long. One kept watch by the door.
The other went straight to the gas line behind the wall unit, loosened the fitting just enough, and left it to do its slow, quiet work.
No explosion anyone would question. No mess, no witnesses, no story. Just a man asleep in a room that would fill with gas so gradually he’d never wake up to notice it happening.
Clean, patient, exactly the kind of accident Derek had asked for.
They were careful. But were also wrong about one thing they assumed that Liam would be careless about the one room he was actually sleeping in that night.
Liam smelled it before he was even fully through the door. Faint. Almost nothing.
He cracked the window first, then found the loosened fitting behind the unit within a few minutes of looking, his fingers going still the second he touched it.
He didn’t try to fix it himself. He didn’t need to be a professional to know the difference between an accident and something built to look like one.
He left the room exactly as he’d found it, walked down to the front desk, and mentioned it.
By the time hotel maintenance had shut the whole floor’s line down for inspection, Liam was two streets away, watching from a diner window as the fire department’s lights bathed the building red and blue for a problem they’d never trace back to anyone at all.
Whatever those two men had built never got the chance to finish what it was built for.
The failure report reached Derek before sunrise.
"He wasn’t even there when the sweep confirmed it. Somehow he’d already"
Derek’s hand moved before the sentence finished.
The gunshot was flat, and final in the empty warehouse room, and the man who’d been speaking a half-second earlier folded against the wall without another word.
Nobody else at the table moved. Nobody dared to.
"Three," Derek said, quiet, to everyone. Three guys... three fucking guys against one dude and you guys can’t even kill him.
The remaining two said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t sound exactly like the excuse that had just gotten someone killed.
The boss arrived without being summoned.
Derek heard the door before he saw him, and by the time he turned, the barrel of a gun was already leveled at his forehead.
"I told you," the boss said, voice utterly calm. "No third mistake."
Derek didn’t flinch, didn’t reach for anything. "This is the third."
"I’m aware." The gun stayed exactly where it was for a long. Then, slowly, it lowered.
"You get to keep breathing because you’re still useful to me," the boss said.
"Understood."
"I’m ending this myself. Tonight." The boss turned toward the door. "You’ll stay here."
Derek stepped forward despite everything that had just happened. "Let me come."
The boss glanced back at him, something unreadable in his face. "Give me one reason."
"I know him. I fought him once already and lost, and I’m the only one in this building who understands exactly what that means."
Derek’s jaw was tight, the words coming out harder than he meant them to.
The boss studied him for a long moment. "Fine," he said finally. "But if you hesitate once tonight, the gun won’t lower a second time."
Liam felt it before he saw them the particular stillness of a parking garage at an hour when it should have had at least some noise in it.
He turned as Derek came around the concrete pillar, and behind him, unhurried, a second man he didn’t recognize older, composed, dressed like money rather than muscle.
"You’re a hard man to find." Derek said.
"Guess losing to me once wasn’t enough of a lesson." Liam didn’t move from where he stood, weight already shifting onto the balls of his feet.
Something flickered across Derek’s face, old humiliation still sitting raw. "I’ve thought about that fight more than you’d guess."
"Could’ve fooled me. You keep sending other people to finish what you could have done."
"Not tonight." Derek’s voice went flat. "Tonight I finish it myself."
The older man studied Liam with curiosity, hands still in his coat pockets. "He told me you weren’t trained. Looking at you now, I believe him. And yet you’ve cost me three operations."
"Four, if you count tonight going the same way as the others."
"It won’t." The boss said it without heat, a simple statement of fact.
Derek came first, fast .Liam caught the first strike on his forearm, felt the impact all the way to his shoulder, and answered with an elbow that caught nothing but air as Derek pulled back at exactly the right moment.
"You’ve gotten better," Liam said, circling.
"So have you." Derek’s second strike landed harder, catching Liam’s ribs and folding him half over. "Not better enough."
The boss didn’t join immediately. He watched, until Liam drove Derek back a step for the first time, and then he moved too, closing the distance with a speed that didn’t match his age at all.
Liam took a hit from the boss square across the jaw that put white light behind his eyes, staggered, and barely got an arm up in time to block the next one from Derek coming in low.
Two against one, both of them better than anyone he’d faced in that alley, and for the first time since this whole thing started, Liam understood with total clarity that this fight was not one he was guaranteed to win.
A soft, cold chime sounded anyway, arriving in the middle of the worst moment of the night.
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Threat Probability: Critical.
Combatants Identified: 2.
Recommendation: Survive.