System Of Retribution

Chapter 2

The light came back slow, gray and watery, and for a second Ryan thought he was still in the alley.

Then he realized he wasn't lying on concrete anymore. He was lying on something soft, a couch maybe, in a room that smelled like cologne instead of garbage, and the voice talking near him wasn't laughing the way the men in the alley had laughed.

"Mr. Lin, please, stay back from the windows until we clear the perimeter."

That voice belonged to him. Younger him. A version of Ryan that still had two working knees and a job that meant something.

He understood, somewhere underneath the confusion, that this wasn't real, not exactly:?, not the way the alley had been real. This was a memory, or something close enough to one that it didn't matter, pulling him backward through time like a hand dragging him by the collar.

Three years ago. The day everything started.

Marcus Lin had been twenty four then, soft around the edges in the way that money made a person soft, more interested in his phone than in the three black sedans that had pulled up outside the restaurant where he was supposed to be having a quiet dinner with his father's business partners.

Ryan remembered thinking the kid didn't take any of it seriously, the security detail, the threats that came with being the only son of one of the richest families in the city, like it was all just inconvenience dressed up as protection.

"Mr. Lin," Ryan said again, sharper this time, stepping between Marcus and the wide glass front of the restaurant. "Now."

"It's fine," Marcus said, not even looking up. "Nobody's stupid enough to try anything in public."

"That's exactly when people try things," Ryan said.

He felt it before he saw it, the particular wrongness of a car slowing instead of passing, the side door already sliding open before the vehicle had even fully stopped.

Years of training did something to a person's instincts that no amount of arguing could override, and Ryan's body moved before his mind finished the sentence forming in his head.

"Down," Ryan said, and shoved Marcus hard toward the restaurant's interior wall, away from the glass.

The first shot took the front window out entirely, glass spraying across the tile in a sound like the world cracking open.

Marcus screamed, more out of shock than pain, scrambling backward on his hands while two men in dark jackets stepped through the broken frame like they'd rehearsed it.

"Stay down," Ryan said to Marcus, and then, to the men, in a voice that didn't shake even though his hands were already reaching for the weapon at his hip, "Wrong night for this."

"Move and we put one in the kid," the taller one said, his gun already swinging toward Marcus's huddled shape against the wall.

Ryan didn't think. There wasn't time to think, only time to do the thing his body had trained for across nine years of exactly this kind of moment, stepping directly into the line meant for someone else.

The shot caught him in the shoulder, not the kill zone the man had been aiming for, but close enough that the pain that followed felt like the whole left side of his body had been set on fire. He didn't go down.

That was the part nobody believed later when they heard the story, that Ryan Cole took a bullet meant for the heir to one of the largest companies in the country and somehow stayed on his feet long enough to put the shooter on the ground before backup even arrived.

"Are you hit," Marcus kept saying, over and over, crouched beside him on the floor while sirens grew louder outside, "are you hit, are you hit," like the question itself could undo what had already happened.

"I'm fine," Ryan said, which was a lie, the first of many small lies he would tell in the years that followed. "Stay down till it's clear."

Marcus's hand found his, gripping it hard enough to hurt, and for one strange, suspended moment in the wreckage of broken glass and overturned tables, the kid actually looked at him, really looked, like Ryan was a person and not a line item on a security budget.

"Thank you," Marcus said, voice cracking. "I mean it. Thank you."

The memory dissolved the way memories do, fraying at the edges first, color bleeding out of it, until all that was left was that one sentence echoing in a quiet that didn't belong to the restaurant anymore.

Thank you.

Ryan surfaced into a different room entirely, fluorescent light instead of restaurant chandeliers, and the steady mechanical beep of a heart monitor somewhere near his head.

A hospital. His shoulder didn't hurt the way it had three years ago. His ribs did, and his jaw, and pretty much everywhere else, which told him enough about where he actually was without needing to ask.

Nobody sat in the chair beside his bed. Nobody had signed the visitor log, he'd have bet money on it, not Marcus, not anyone wearing the Lin name, not after everything that came after that night, the promotions that never came, the demotion dressed up as a transfer, the slow public unraveling of his reputation until "thank you" had curdled into something that tasted a lot more like nothing at all.

Ryan stared at the ceiling tile above his bed; one corner of it sagged slightly, water damaged, and he found himself fixating on it because it was easier than thinking about the obvious question sitting right in the middle of his chest.

If saving Marcus Lin's life had been worth a "thank you" and nothing else, what exactly had the last three years been for.

He didn't have an answer. He wasn't sure he wanted one yet.

What he did notice, finally, lying there in the gray hospital light with his whole body screaming in low, steady protest, was a small flicker at the very edge of his vision, the faintest outline of blue text waiting for him to look directly at it before it would fully resolve.

It had not been a hallucination after all.