“Roman!” I scream again, but the night swallows my voice.
The last thing I see before they haul me through the window is the flickering TV screen behind me—my father’s face still frozen there, crying fake tears for a daughter he just sold to hell.
Chapter 22 – Roman
The sun is sinking low by the time we reach the outskirts of Dallas, the orange wash of dusk stretching across the highway. The convoy moves in silence—three matte-black SUVs, engines humming low. Beside me, Dimitri loads his rifle, humming off-key like we’re not driving straight into a warzone.
“This is it,” I say, eyes fixed on the GPS blinking on the dash. “Chang’s warehouse. Intel says it’s one of his biggest depots. He’s got men moving cargo, and according to our tip, he’s there himself.”
Luka’s voice crackles over the comms from the lead car. “We guess they’re about fifteen, maybe twenty. Could be more.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I reply. “We move fast. No one gets out unless I say so.”
Dimitri grins, checking his weapon. “And the main prize?”
“David Chang stays alive,” I say sharply. “If anyone finds him before I do, you bring him to me. Breathing.”
The words hang heavy in the air. No one argues.
The warehouse looms up ahead, all steel and shadows, the kind of place that reeks of money and blood. We park a few hundred meters out, engines off, the only sounds the click of safeties coming off and the wind whispering through the dry grass.
I step out first. The air tastes of dust and oil. Every sense in my body is electric.
“Positions,” I order.
Dimitri signals the others, his expression suddenly serious. The men fan out, moving low and quiet through the dark. The faint buzz of the security lights flickers against the side of the building as we close in.
I can feel it—something coiled, dangerous, waiting inside.
“Let’s end this,” I mutter, and motion for Luka to breach.
He nods once, raises his fist—three, two, one—The explosion of movement is instant.
The door crashes open, gunfire lights the air, and the night erupts into chaos.
Instead of finding Chang, we find it stripped bare, a decoy left to waste our time.
Empty pallets, a few cigarette butts, and the bitter tang of diesel in the air—that’s all. The forklifts are gone, manifests torn from their hooks. Someone scrubbed this place clean the way a surgeon scrubs a wound. The lights hum like a lie.
“Decoy,” Luka says, crouching to study a fresh tire gouge in the dirt. He points at a skid mark where a crate used to sit. “They moved product out fast. Less than twelve hours.”
Dimitri kicks at a rusted drum and swears. “Someone wanted us here.”
I run my glove along a wooden pallet and find a smear of industrial grease. It tells me what I already feel in my gut: they cleared the site on purpose. A trap to pull us away—or a smoke screen while something bigger moves elsewhere.
“Check the DVR,” I order. “Looped footage or blackout window?”
Luka’s tablet blinks. “Looped. CCTV blackout from nineteen hundred to twenty-oh-two. They patched it clean.”
“Traffic cams,” I say. “Toll booths. We pull every plate that hit the highway out of here in the last four hours.”
Dimitri’s jaw sets. He kneels and picks up a scrap of torn synthetic from a fence—navy industrial fabric, snagged on a shard of rebar. He stuffs it into his pocket and meets my eyes. “They left bait. Someone clever enough to stage a decoy and scrub the feeds.”
As Dimitri and Luka circle the space, tossing theories back and forth, I stand still and think.
This was too neat. Too organized. Too clean.
I trusted Oleg’s intel—the coordinates, the timing, everything—and it brought me here. I should’ve verified. Cross-checked. But I was desperate to strike first, to finally corner David. Lukin warned me not to rush. He was right.
