Zach straightened slightly. “We identified the redhead Wilson mentioned. Temporary hire. Maintenance support last summer. Three weeks on payroll, then gone.” His jaw tightened. “No real background. References that don’t exist anymore.”
David’s pulse kicked once. “Marcus placed her.”
“Looks that way,” Zach confirmed. “She knew the back access routes. The blind spots. She wasn’t random.”
David gave a curt nod, his mind already racing through possibilities, calculating moves and countermoves. This was the part he understood—the strategy, the chess match of wits and resources. “His mistake was underestimating us.” Even ashe said it, doubt nibbled at his confidence. Marcus had been planning this for years, possibly since they started the company. How many other pieces were still hidden?
“Are you going to tell Lena?” Nick’s question pierced through David’s analytical armor like an arrow finding a gap in chain-mail.
David hesitated. The only movement was the clock ticking like a distant drumbeat, marking precious seconds. His mind conjured her face—those unusual turquoise eyes that looked at him with trust, with something that might be the beginning of love. How did he tell her she’d been targeted not for who she was, but for what she was to him? How did he hand her that burden without breaking her?
“I don’t know what telling her buys us,” he said, hating the calculation in his own words. “But she deserves to know she wasn’t collateral. She was a target. And she’d kill me if she ever found out I hid it from her.” The admission lay like copper on his tongue. She deserved the truth, to make her own choices about the danger that circled her like a shark scenting blood.
Zach grunted, a sound of dark agreement. “This isn’t a power play. It’s obsession.” His eyes met David’s, and there was something almost sympathetic in that ice-hard stare. Zach understood obsession—he’d devoted his life to learning how to channel it, control it, weaponize it in protection of the people he loved.
Nick slumped back in his chair, exhaling as if it hurt, as if the breath had to fight its way past broken glass. “Marcus didn’t know they were our women when he started, but he does now. He’ll go after them to punish us. Substitute them for Mother. Try to take what he couldn’t touch when she was alive.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “We’re watching him replay his trauma through our lives.”
The psychological profile crystallized in David’s mind with horrifying clarity. Marcus couldn’t have the original object of his obsession, so he transferred that loss to Nick—and by extension, everything Nick loved. Transference, except this version came armed with millions and men willing to kill.
David reached for the folder, closed it, one hand flat over Marcus’s printed face. The paper was flat beneath his palm, smooth and deceptively innocent. His tablet hummed beside him, begging him to dive back into the digital realm where logic prevailed and problems had solutions written in elegant code.
This required more than technical expertise. This required the kind of ruthlessness he generally avoided.
“Let’s show him what we’ve learned over the years,” he said, and something shifted inside him—a door closing on the man who faced obstacles with jokes, firewalls, and encryption, while another door opened on someone harder, sharper.
Nick looked up, locking eyes with him across the length of the table, clearly reading David’s expression. “You have a plan.”
The pieces were falling into place even as he spoke. “We use his own strategy against him. Start tearing his empire apart. Quietly. We make it look like paranoia. We track every hired hand, every endpoint, every fake name. I already have a worm crawling through the web, sending back whatever it finds on him.”
His fingers drummed on the closed folder in a staccato rhythm that matched his racing thoughts. “When he’s desperate enough to surface…”
He dropped his gaze briefly to the tablet. “And we’re still missing one piece.” The words tasted like iron. “The internal assist. That breach didn’t happen without someone on my team opening a door.”
Nick’s eyes sharpened. “You’re sure?”
David nodded once. “Not sloppy code. Not brute force. Someone with credentials. I don’t know who yet.” His jaw tightened. “But Marcus had help inside our own infrastructure.”
Zach’s expression hardened further. “Find them.”
“I will.” No hesitation. No softness. “Before Marcus realizes I’m looking.”
Zach smiled, voice like a blade sliding free of its sheath, steel singing against leather. “Then we end him.”
No one moved for a long moment, their shared history pressing down—every person who had failed them, every lesson earned about relying only on each other. They’d built an empire from nothing because they’d had to: the alternative was drowning in a world that didn’t care if orphaned and low-income boys lived or died.
Marcus had made a critical error in judgment. He’d assumed that because they’d come from nothing, they could be reduced to nothing again. But Nick—Nick had pulled Zach and himself from the gutter. Rescued them. United them. Nothing would ever break their bond.
Marcus didn’t understand that men forged in fire didn’t fear the flame—they became it.
“And if we fail?” Nick’s question carried the influence of every nightmare he’d ever had, every worst-case scenario his telepathy had ever shown. All that fear centered on Kate. Nick wouldn’t care for himself.
David’s voice was steady, anchored by a certainty that came from some place deeper than logic. “We won’t. Because this time, we’re not waiting for him to orchestrate the next move. We’re bringing the war to him.” He let his hand rest on his tablet, absorbing the low thrum of power through his fingertips. Every network Marcus touched, every digital footprint he left, every electronic transaction—they were all threads for David to pull, unravel, shred.
Outside, thunder rolled like a warning shot across the horizon. The storm was building, pressure systems colliding with inevitable force. The island would weather it, the way it had weathered a thousand storms before. Palm trees would bend but not break. The resort would stand. So would they.
Inside, three brothers sat in the quiet aftermath of knowing the truth. The air felt different now—charged with purpose, heavy with a resolve that came from absolute clarity. David’s headache was fading, replaced by the intense focus of a mind fully engaged. His hands were steady. His breathing even.
Not fractured.
