Chapter 170: Derek’s Play

Liam’s footsteps faded into the rain, and then it was just the two of them, the gunfire around the terminal thinning as Dexter’s men mopped up what was left, the storm doing more to clear the room than either side’s bullets had.

Derek rolled his shoulders. "Before you start."

"I don’t want to hear it."

"You need to."Dexter closed the distance in three strides. "I’ve been waiting years to hear it. Now I don’t care."

His voice dropped, low and flat, worse than if he’d shouted it. "You put your hands on my sister."

"I never touched her."

"She stood in that courtroom and cried in front of forty people."

"She lied because Liam told her to. Both of them lied." Derek held his hands up, palms open, the closest thing to surrender he had left.

"The target was never you, Dexter. It was never even your sister. It’s always been Liam. Everything since that night".Dexter hit him before he finished the sentence.

The blow caught Derek’s jaw and spun him half a step sideways, rain flinging off his hair in a bright arc under the emergency lights.

He came back up fast, forearm raised, but Dexter was already inside his guard, driving a knee into his ribs hard enough to fold him.

"You don’t get to say his name to me like it excuses anything."

Derek swung anyway, wild, more instinct than plan. Dexter caught the wrist, twisted, and put him face-first into the concrete.

"Get up," Dexter said. "Or don’t. I genuinely don’t care which."Derek got up. Blood ran from his eyebrow into the rain pooling at his feet, pink threads spreading across the concrete.

He’d trained under this man for six years, had learned every one of his tells, and it didn’t matter, because Dexter wasn’t fighting like a man testing an opponent. He was fighting like a man closing an old account.

Another exchange, quick and brutal, ended with Derek on one knee, ribs screaming, one eye already swelling shut.

He understood then. This wasn’t a fight he was going to win tonight. Maybe not ever.

He didn’t try to finish it. He ran.

Three blocks from the terminal, soaked through and moving on adrenaline more than legs.

Derek found Adam waiting exactly where he’d told him to be, leaning against a parked car with a cigarette he hadn’t lit, unbothered by the rain soaking through his shoulders.

"You look like hell."

"He’s coming."Adam straightened. Who

It’s dexter. "Right behind me. Maybe two minutes." Derek pressed a hand to his ribs, breath ragged.

"I need you to handle him."

"Handle him."

"If it comes to it, kill him." Derek met his eyes, steady despite everything else about him being wrecked.

"I’m not asking you to win a fair fight. I’m asking you to slow him down long enough that he stops being my problem tonight."

Adam dropped the unlit cigarette and ground it under his heel. "And you?"

"I’ve got somewhere else to be."

He didn’t wait for an answer. He was already moving, disappearing into the maze of wet streets behind the block, leaving Adam alone under the streetlight with his coat still buttoned and his hands loosening at his sides.

Dexter arrived less than two minutes later, exactly as promised, walking, not running, the calm of a man who knew running wouldn’t change the outcome, his jacket dark and heavy with rain.

Adam stepped into the middle of the road.

"You’re not him," Dexter said.

"No." Then move.

"Can’t do that."

Dexter didn’t slow down. Adam threw the first real strike, fast for a man his size, a hook aimed at Dexter’s temple. Dexter ducked under it and answered with a short elbow that cracked against Adam’s jaw, snapping his head sideways.

Adam recovered faster than most men would have and came back with a low kick that Dexter caught on his shin, absorbing it without a flinch.

He drove forward, using the momentum, and slammed Adam into the side of the parked car hard enough to spider the window.

"You picked the wrong week," Dexter said.

Adam spat blood onto the wet pavement and smiled anyway, teeth pink. "He said you’d say something like that."

He came off the car fast, driving a shoulder into Dexter’s chest and forcing him back two full steps toward the curb.

Dexter let the momentum carry him, rolled with it, and used the retreat to plant his foot against the base of a lamppost, pushing off it hard enough to reverse the whole exchange.

His fist caught Adam under the jaw on the way back in, snapping his head up toward the rain.

Adam staggered, shook it off, and swung again anyway, wild now, more desperation than technique.

Dexter read it a half second before it landed, sidestepped, and drove his elbow into the back of Adam’s shoulder, folding him toward the ground.

"You’re better than whoever sent you thought you’d need to be," Dexter said, circling once. "Not better than this."

Adam pushed himself back up on one knee, breathing hard, blood running pink down his chin into the gutter water pooling beneath him. He came up swinging a third time.

They traded again, faster now, Adam landing two solid hits to Dexter’s ribs before Dexter caught his arm mid-swing and used his own weight against him, dropping him hard onto the wet asphalt with a sound like a dropped sack of concrete. Adam tried to roll free.

Dexter didn’t let him, pinning him with a knee and driving one final blow down that ended the fight before Adam’s body finished registering the last one.

Dexter stood over him, breathing hard, rain running down the back of his collar.

"Where is he going."

Adam laughed, thin and wet. "Ask him yourself. If you catch up."

Dexter looked toward the empty street where Derek had vanished, the rain already erasing whatever trail he might have left.

He didn’t chase it. Not yet. He pulled out his phone instead.

"Liam. Derek’s coming for you. Not for me."

Derek moved through the back streets with his jaw throbbing and one hand pressed against his ribs, each breath a small, deliberate cost, the city lights smearing past him through eyes that hadn’t fully cleared since the last hit.

He’d known walking in that Dexter would never let him finish the sentence. Some part of him had wanted it anyway, wanted the man who’d trained him for six years to at least hear the truth before deciding it didn’t matter.

It hadn’t mattered.

Fine.

He hadn’t come back for Dexter’s forgiveness anyway.Somewhere ahead of him, in a city that had spent an entire night rearranging itself around one man, Liam Sterling was still out there, still chasing a van he wasn’t going to catch in time, still convinced Harrison had been the whole of it.

Derek wiped the blood from his eyebrow and kept walking.This part had always been his to finish.