Chapter 11 · He Takes the Badge on the Scrubber

"Whoever's got Drake on a leash better start pulling it tighter." The voice came off the yard speaker tinny and pleased with itself, bouncing hard off container steel. "Radio-king's gone soft for a badge."

Milo's forearm caught my throat before the echo even finished.

He walked me backward into the bio-lock wall so hard the emergency strip lights rattled in their steel cage above us. Bone on bone — his elbow against my collarbone, the back of my skull cracking flat against cold metal. I got a hand up between us, tried to lever him off, and it did nothing. He had forty pounds and pure fury on his side and we both knew it the second I tried.

"You hear that?" His voice had dropped into something that wasn't cartel-business anymore, something lower, rawer. "Somebody on my own crew just said your name like it belongs to him."

"Get off me, Drake."

"He said it like a joke." Milo's nose dragged along my jaw, down to my throat, and he breathed in slow, cataloguing me like evidence on a table. "And you're standing here smelling like you don't hate that idea as much as you should.