anwhile, from behind the door at the end of the corridor, muffled by the walls but still audible, a man’s voice, raised and vicious. And underneath it, barely distinguishable, the sound of a woman’s resistance.
The hotel’s security staff caught sight of Stan and imdiately opened a path. Damien’s guards turned toward the new arrival.
The new ones, the ones who hadn’t been at Neon Pulse, who didn’t carry the specific muscle mory of what had happened there, started to move into defensive positions with the confident expectation of n who believed their numbers gave them an advantage.
They were wrong.
Stan moved through them the way the first wave moves through a gap in a seawall, not around, not over, through. Each engagent was efficient and final.
A guard reaching for his collar got an arm twisted behind his back and a knee driven into the back of his leg. The next one caught an elbow to the jaw before his hands had fully raised. The two who tried to work together, flanking from opposite sides, found that the geotry of their approach was its own problem when the person they were flanking moved faster than they’d anticipated.
None of them could match Stan, whose strength was increasing significantly for unknown reason on daily basis.
Twelve seconds and the corridor was clear. The ignorant courageous ones all lay sprawled on the ground out of breath and in pains...
The veterans, Damien’s original crew, the ones who had been at Neon Pulse, had already taken a significant step backward. So of them had their hands raised. None of them were interested in a repeat performance.
They were looking at Stan as if they were looking at a monster...
Stan reached the door. He raised his foot and drove it through the lock with enough force that the door didn’t so much open as cease to be a door.
The scene inside the room resolved in a single, terrible second.
Damien, red-faced, seething, his expensive jacket askew, his composure entirely gone. He’d been ranting, loud enough that his voice had carried through the walls, and the ugliness of what was being said still hung in the air even as his sentence broke off mid-word.
On the far side of the room, Zoey Lin had her back against the wall, her jacket torn at the collar, her cleavage and part of her breast exposed, her face streaked with tears, one arm raised in front of her in the futile, defiant posture of soone who had been fighting and refusing to stop fighting even when the situation was clearly impossible.
She saw Stan.
The relief that crossed her face was so complete and so sudden that her legs nearly went out from under her.
Damien turned.
His expression moved through surprise, recognition, and fury in the span of a single breath.
"You."
The word was spat with the concentrated venom of a man who had been humiliated twice in three days by the sa person and had been nursing that wound in increasingly toxic ways since.
"You again. You think you can follow everywhere? You think you can keep..."
Stan crossed the room in four steps.
What followed was not a fight. A fight requires two participants with comparable capability and the will to engage. What followed was a reckoning, swift, thorough, and conducted with the cold precision of a man who had no anger in him, only the absolute certainty that this needed to end.
And it did.
He threw a punch...
WHOOSH!
His fist slamd into Damien’s stomach with brutal force, driving the air from his lungs in an instant. Pain churned violently through Damien’s gut as his body folded around the blow.
Damien hit the floor for the second ti in three days, and this ti he stayed there, not unconscious, but comprehensively and definitively finished. Blood on his mouth again. His expensive suit destroyed in ways that no dry cleaner could address.
The arrogance he’d walked into this room with reduced to sothing small and frightened and very quiet.
Stan stood over him for a mont. His breathing was even. His expression was unchanged.
"Last ti," he said, his voice carrying the sa flat, unhurried authority he’d used on the phone with the hotel managent, "I gave you a warning. I told you the consequences for this kind of behavior would be severe."
Damien said nothing. He stared at the ceiling.
"You’re going to spend tonight explaining to the police exactly what happened in this room. The hotel has security footage. The woman behind has testimony. And I have enough connection to this establishnt’s parent company to ensure that every piece of evidence is preserved and presented exactly as it happened."
Stan stepped back.
The door opened. Zack was in the corridor, breathless from the stairs, his face white, and behind him, the Wanhai security staff was finally moving freely through the space that Damien’s guards had vacated.
Zack pushed past the security team and crossed the room to Zoey in three quick strides. She grabbed his arm with both hands and pressed her face against his shoulder, shaking.
"You’re okay," Zack said, low and urgent, his arms going around her. "You’re okay. I’ve got you."
Stan gave them a mont. Then he turned to the security manager who had followed them in.
"I want the police called. I want every cara on this floor pulled and preserved. And I want this man’s na and his guest records flagged across every Wanhai Group property permanently."
The manager nodded with the clipped efficiency of soone who understood exactly who was giving the instructions.
"Imdiately, Mr. Harrison."
Stan stepped back into the corridor and leaned against the wall. The adrenaline was tabolizing, not dramatically, just quietly, the way it always did. He looked at his bandaged hand. Sophie’s careful work was still intact.
His phone buzzed. It was a ssage from Sarah.
Sarah: [Is everything okay? Is the girl safe?]
He typed back: [She’s safe. It’s handled.]
Three seconds later: [Thank God. Thank you Stan. It’s such a sha that people like this exist, if not this world would’ve been a better place..]
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