I nod, barely shifting. “How many guards?”
“Four tonight. Routine rotation.”
I allow myself a slow breath. “Anything unusual?”
“Not yet, but they’re spooked. Rafael’s sending new men. Fresh faces.”
“Desperate faces,” I correct.
Viktor inclines his head. He knows I’m right.
I dismiss him with a gesture, and he leaves as quietly as he came.
Once the door closes, I return to the wall of screens on the opposite side of the room. They show live feeds: street corners, warehouse entrances, building rooftops, and underground garages. My men sweep through the footage in real time, tagging suspicious cars, tracking new faces, logging time stamps.
I watch all of it myself. Not because I don’t trust my men, but because obsession is more reliable than loyalty.
My gaze drifts to a particular feed—Pier Nine. A wide-angle camera captures the docks from an old metal pole.
Four armed guards stand near a stack of containers, their patterns tight but predictable. One smokes. One texts. One checks the waterline every thirty seconds like clockwork.
All of them are weaker links than they realize.
My men in an unmarked van sit three blocks away, observing, relaying updates as each guard shifts positions. I listen to the faint chatter through the earpiece resting on my desk.
“Rotation complete.”
“No new vehicles.”
“Runner heading east—appears nervous.”
“Possible stash under the tarp near the forklift.”
I catalog every piece of information, mapping it inward, refining the diagram in my mind.
The clock on my desk ticks past midnight, but I don’t feel the hours. My focus stays sharp, my mind calculating the ripple effects of every minor shift in their behavior.
Rafael will retaliate soon. He’ll think he’s being strategic, but he’ll be wrong.
As I mark another notation—anticipated delivery Thursday; prepare intercept—my thoughts drift, uninvited, toward something else. Someone else.
Eden.
I clench my pen for a moment before forcing my hand to relax.
She has nothing to do with this. She shouldn’t even cross my mind while I’m dealing with threats that could unravel empires.
Yet she lingers in the background of every thought, like a shadow stitched into the corners of my vision. Her face when she turned in the alley. The tremor in her voice when she lied to me. The softness she showed that stranger at the café.
Unwelcome distractions. Unnecessary complications.
Beneath those labels, a truth pushes upward. Something in me is pulling toward her. A thread tightening slowly, quietly, with every day she stays alive.
I push Eden from my thoughts and return to the screens. I zoom in on one guard’s face—the twitch in his jaw, the tiredness in his eyes. Stress fractures. Rafael’s empire already cracking.
“Keep pressure on them,” I murmur to myself. “Let them break before they realize they’ve been bent.”
The earpiece crackles with an update. Another movement on the docks. Another ripple I expected.
