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ONE

Shane

The blood swirled to a pink color as it circled the drain in the sink The skin around my knuckles was raw but hadn’t broken open That was thanks to the endless years of toughening them up It was damn near impossible to make me bleed anymore

I dried ht off in the bathroom to find hi roo a bit of a pussy to be honest It wasn’t that bad A broken nose, a couple nasty bruises At worst, a busted rib frootten off relatively easy but only because he’d been screahbors to call the cops

See, when you fucked over ood First, ive you a warning, try to ith you, keep it amicable and blood-free If that didn’t yield results,shadow darkened your door

And then there was blood

Then, last course of action, ifdidn’t make you fork over the money you oe sicced Eli on your sorry ass If you were still able to h Likely along with a shitton of blood and half your lungs

I was a violent fuck; Eli was an animal

That was hoere raised

That was also hoewith crime like Navesink Bank If you weren’t hard, if you weren’t a strong united front, you didn’t survive in the criminal underbelly

If you wanted to be a big dog, you had to fucking fight when soe

“You have until the fifteenth, Van, or I swear to fuck you’ll regret it”

With that, I closed the door and went down the hall, taking the stairs two at a time I had just made it out onto the sidehen the squad car came to a halt out front

“Shane,” Collings said as he hefted hier side

“Collings They got you in a squad car? Not enough open cases to put your detective cap to work on?”

“Let’s just say we got a call about someone who matched a description of several open assault cases I’ve had sitting on ured I would cut to the chase and see if this was another one to add to the pile You wouldn’t know anything about a call we got about screa, noould you?” he asked, brow raised, knowing I sure as fuck did, but also knowing that he wouldn’t find much to pin on me