Apocalypse Queen: My Space, My Rules Chapter 201: Sliced

He was convinced it had to be an inside job.

And then there was Roxanna, the woman Black Bear had taken from Tigre as his newest prize, who had simply vanished without a trace.

By the time the sky had gone pale with dawn, Goldilocks had reached his conclusion. "It had to be Roxanna! She did it for Tigre and took out our boss!"

The raiders found that reasoning solid enough.

But certain details still refused to line up, like where exactly Roxanna had disappeared to.

She couldn't have grown wings and flown out.

Goldilocks erupted into a fit of raw, seething frustration. "Something is seriously wrong with this place!"

They'd had everything going their way in the city. Their influence and manpower had been growing without resistance, strong enough that even law enforcement had learned to stay out of their path.

They'd claimed the Elmgrove Estates and moved through it like they owned every inch of the ground.

But Celestine Ridge had dealt them one crushing blow after another. Five brothers had come in, and now only he was left. And now Black Bear was gone too.

Goldilocks hadn't slept a single minute all night, and the exhaustion had hollowed him out completely.

He bitterly regretted ever setting foot in Celestine Ridge.

He waved off his men with a heavy hand. "Get the boss buried first."

His men cleared the bodies from the room and filed out one by one.

Then Goldilocks felt it, a cold that crept up his spine without warning.

A sharp instinct snapped him alert. His head came up, his eyes swept the room, and his hand closed tight around the grip of the pistol at his waist.

The door slammed shut with a heavy, resonant crash.

"Who closed that? I didn't tell anyone to close the door!" he bit out.

No one answered.

Before he could even push to his feet to check, the window slammed shut with the same abrupt force.

Goldilocks was a hardened killer, and his instincts hadn't dulled in all that time. He recognized the wrongness immediately and launched himself behind the nearest dresser.

Footsteps reached him, and he fired without hesitating.

A body hit the floor heavily, eyes fixed open and staring.

Goldilocks leaned out to look and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. That was one of his own men.

He had walked right into a trap.

He hadn't even pulled his head back in when a slender silhouette materialized out of thin air directly in front of him.

Mariella appeared from nothing once more, the antique dagger drawn and gleaming in her grip, and she brought it down straight toward Goldilocks's skull.

The blade caught the light like a sliver of ice, and it moved faster than thought.

Goldilocks felt a sudden cold bite between his brows, and then his nose, his mouth, and his chin split open in a single devastating line.

Blood erupted from the wound between his eyes, and he toppled straight back with his gaze still wide and frozen.

Mariella let out a short, contemptuous laugh, then reached into the space and hauled out Roxanna's unclothed body, dropping it squarely onto Goldilocks.

"There she is! The one you were looking for!"

Too bad his wide-open eyes couldn't see a thing anymore.

Chandler stepped in from the hallway. "Everyone inside is dealt with. Are we pushing out now?"

"Not yet." Mariella waved him off.

The lethal strike had landed perfectly. The condemned raider crew was nothing but a leaderless rabble now, and that meant it was time for the Celestine Ridge residents to make their move.

After she and Chandler had retreated into the storage space, she'd edited the footage of Black Bear's killing, cutting out every frame of Harvey revealing her secret and leaving only the clean, compelling record of her and Chandler taking down their enemies.

"Once both the Celestine Ridge residents and Black Bear's people know he's dead, nobody'll be scared of that rabble anymore. Let the Hancocks rally the other residents and clean up what's left."

She finished, then turned to Chandler with a sharp gesture. "Now let's strip this place clean!"

...

The two of them worked their way through every body in the room and collected every single firearm they found without exception.

The suite had been claimed first by Tigre and then by Black Bear, so naturally it held a substantial cache of supplies.

Chandler applied his considerable expertise and located the hidden door to the concealed room with no difficulty at all.

This time there was no lock to deal with. Mariella pulled him into the storage space with her, and they stepped out directly inside the hidden room.

The room itself wasn't large, somewhere between three and 400 square feet, but what it held made Mariella genuinely pleased.

Gold, silver, and precious stones covered the floor in abundance, and alongside them sat stockpiles of grain, cooking oil, packaged food, and canned goods.

It was obvious at a glance that Tigre had looted all of it from the villas he'd taken.

He hadn't captured many properties, but every family in this estate had been wealthy, and each one had kept a well-stocked household.

Tigre had likely been counting on the gold and jewels to translate into enormous wealth once the catastrophe finally ended, and so he'd put together this hidden room to keep it all secure.

His greed had worked out rather well for Mariella.

She helped herself without reservation, sweeping every pile of gold, silver, and precious stones into the space, then taking the grain, oil, food, and canned goods along with it.

She also found a small number of firearms, though the count and the ammunition were both modest. They looked like Tigre's personal reserve, kept back for himself.

Mariella collected those too.

The original owner of No. 101 had long since turned to bone, and the residents of the looted villas had all met the same end.