Ivy Sinclair did not knock.
She walked straight through the chain-link gate hanging half off its hinges, past two men who scrambled up from a card table like she'd lit a fuse under them, and stopped in the middle of a garage that smelled like motor oil and cheap beer. Four men, by the count she'd been given. One exit behind her, one door to her left, and a stack of unmarked crates against the far wall that told her everything she needed to know about tonight, whether anyone in this room wanted her to know it or not.
"You're late on payment," she said. "Three weeks late."
The biggest one, a slab of a man with a shaved head and a tattoo of a snake curling up his neck, laughed like she'd told a joke at a funeral. He looked her up and down the way men like him always did, deciding she was something soft before she'd given him a single reason to think so.
"Iron Wraiths send a girl to collect now?"
"Iron Wraiths send whoever gets the job done." She let her jacket fall open just enough to show the knife at her hip, not drawing it, just letting him see it was there, letting the weight of it do the talking she hadn't gotten to yet. "You've got two options. You pay what you owe, or I take it out of something that isn't cash."
Nobody moved for a second. That was the part she liked, if she was honest with herself, the held breath before people decided whether to be smart or stupid. She'd learned to read that breath the way other people read weather, and she already knew which way this one was going to break before Snake-neck's shoulders squared up.
He came at her fast for a big man. She let him get close, closer than instinct wanted, and pivoted at the last second, driving her elbow into his ribs hard enough to hear something crack beneath the leather of his jacket. His own momentum did the rest, carrying him face-first into the card table, cards and poker chips scattering across the concrete floor in a bright, useless spray.
The second man reached for something inside his jacket, and she was already moving before his hand cleared the fabric. She was inside his guard, her forearm catching his wrist, twisting until he dropped whatever he'd been reaching for with a yelp that had nothing tough left in it. He went down hard, gasping, and the third man had gone very still by the door, the kind of stillness that only came from hoping he'd become furniture.
It didn't work.
"Anyone else feeling brave?" she asked, and let the silence answer for her.
That was when she heard it. Boots on gravel, more of them than she'd counted for, coming from behind the crates where she hadn't thought to look because the intel had said four men, not six, not eight, and now shapes were peeling out of the shadows on both sides of her with the kind of coordinated ease that told her this had never been a simple debt collection at all. It had been a setup, and she'd walked into it with her eyes open and her guard exactly where someone had wanted it. She catalogued the exits again, faster this time, and didn't like the math any better the second time through.
Ivy's hand went to her knife as the first swing came for her head, and for one long, suspended second she understood she might not walk out of this garage the way she'd walked in.
Tires screamed against gravel outside. Headlights cut white across the open garage door, and a motorcycle engine roared into a growl that meant someone had killed the throttle hard and dropped the bike where it stood without bothering to park it properly. Boots hit the ground already running, fast enough that whoever it was hadn't waited to see how bad things had gotten before deciding to move.
Ronan Vale came through that garage door like the building owed him money too.