“See?” he tells me, sounding so proud of himself. “Doc was wrong. I can be gentle, too. Can’t I?”
I’m speechless. There was nothing gentle about what he just did to me.
But numbly, I nod.
“Doc will be looking for you,” Viper tells me. He slides the pad of his thumb over my cheek, scooping up the tears there and bringing them to his lips to lick them off. “Time to go. Run back to safety, little rabbit.”
Wordlessly, I do. My legs shake with every step that takes me closer to my apartment door.
37
ALEC
Makingthe decision isn’t the hard part.
It’s the hundred little steps that come after, the things that must be done flawlessly. But that’s the work. That’s what my brothers and I have always excelled at.
Sebastian's role comes first. His team hacks into Pastor Daniel’s financial records, flagging several suspiciously large deposits before emptying the account entirely, leaving nothing behind. Tomorrow morning The Sterling Children’s Foundation will be thrilled to receive an unexpected anonymous donation, generous enough to fund them through the next financial year. He does the same for the other two ex-members of the Sterling Enterprises’ board of directors, tracing the bribes they all received back to a handful of shell companies routing cash through Empire City.
It takes days. But the final result is a full dossier detailing Dante’s underground network, spanning the East Coast. Impressive that he was able to build so much from the shadows, without drawing our attention.
It’s almost a shame to burn it all to the ground.
He could have operated for years in Empire City like this without us noticing. Maybe could have even infiltrated FortuneCity—our home—and syphoned enough money out from under us to live like a king, and we would have been none the wiser. But he made one big mistake.
He threatened our woman.
Viper’s role comes next. He’s surprisingly calm and steady when he returns to the compound. Focused.
He leaves for Empire City the following morning.
What we need is a rat, someone with fresh intel on Dante’s operation. We need to know where it’s really going to hurt to hit him, where to stick the knife.
If there’s one lesson the orphanage taught me, it’s this: when someone pushes you down and takes your toy, you do not respond in kind.
You break their fucking arm.
That’s what they don’t teach you in business school. No one ever got ahead in this world by responding to an act of aggression with a proportional response. You respond with something so horrible, so devastating, that you guarantee they never look at you without fear again. You hit them hard enough others won’t even consider making a move against you.
You make them fear you.
And Dante is about to be reminded why he should fear us.
Viper finds us not one, but two rats. People high enough in Dante’s crew to know where he’s vulnerable, but not high enough to be missed for forty-eight hours while we painfully extract the information we need.
What Viper finds confirms that Ashton was right to be worried all those years ago. Dante was only testing the waters with our little mission, the one that finally broke us, that pushed Ash too far. Turns out, human trafficking was far too lucrative for him to try just once. Our old mentor now has himself a horrible little side hustle financing the rest of his empire.
Or… He did, before today.
“FBI is moving,” Sebastian confirms, after he gets the call. His voice is flat, matter of fact.
I grin.
Dante held the local police department at arm’s length through a combination of blackmail and bribes, but that knife cuts both ways. There’s always someone higher up the food chain to pay off or frighten, always another level of oversight.
When we worked for him, Dante taught me how to buy off police and judges. But Sebastian was the one who made sure we had our fingers in the pockets of all the major bureaus: FBI, ATF, CIA. Insurance, for just such an occasion.
All we had to do was hand them the information we gathered and pull their strings. It wasn’t even hard. Our contacts at the FBI were thrilled to do it.
