I was taken because I'm a threat. Not because I'm a liability.
The distinction feels important.
I finish the chicken and set the tray by the door. I drink the sparkling water and save the bottle. Glass is useful. Then I sit cross-legged on the cot and close my eyes and rebuild the Apex Meridian map in my head.
Six shell corporations in Cyprus. All registered through the same law firm in Nicosia, Kontos & Demetriou, between March 2022 and September 2023. The firm itself is probably clean, a service provider filing paperwork for anonymous clients. But the timing matters. Something happened in early 2022 that prompted whoever is behind this to start building infrastructure. A decision was made. A plan was set in motion.
The money flows in two directions. Into Castillo-linked accounts for weapons and mercenaries. Out of Bonaccorso operations through skimmed revenue and inflated invoices. The skimming is elegant. Small amounts, spread across dozens of transactions, invisible unless you know what you're looking for. Whoever designed the system understands accounting at a level that suggests corporate training, not street-level crime.
Apex Meridian Holdings. New York address. Two real subsidiaries: a tech consulting firm and a logistics company. The tech firm builds security infrastructure. The logisticscompany moves international freight. Together, they provide the perfect toolkit for someone who wants to monitor and supply a war without getting their hands dirty.
The tech firm is the key. If they consulted on Bonaccorso security systems and installed backdoor access at the firmware level, they had to have a contract. A point of contact. Someone inside the organization who authorized the work and signed off on the installation. That person either didn't know what they were approving, or they're part of the conspiracy.
I need that contract. I need the name on the signature line.
The thought circles in my head like a dog chasing its tail. I don't have the documents anymore. They took them. But I have the numbers, the dates, the names of the shell corporations, the routing information for the Cyprus accounts. All of it stored in the one place they can't confiscate.
My brain has always been my best asset. My father gambled. My mother got sick. The world offered me exactly zero safety nets. So I learned to remember everything, because information was the only currency I could carry without someone stealing it from me.
I check the window again. The light is deepening. Orange sliding toward red. Evening. I've been here six, seven hours. Long enough for Leone to get back to the compound, find the wreckage, lose his mind, and start planning.
He's coming. I need to stay alive until he gets here.
I pace the room. Eight steps wall to wall, ten steps end to end. The cot is bolted to the floor. The plastic chair is flimsy but could be broken into pieces, and a chair leg is better than nothing. I file that away.
The guards change shifts outside my door. I hear the footsteps, the low murmur of voices, the creak of someone settling into position. Two men. One heavy, one lighter on his feet. The heavy one shuffles. The light one is still. I press my ear to the steel and listen to their breathing, their weight shifts, the small sounds that tell me where they're standing and how alert they are.
The heavy one is to the left of the door, three feet. The light one is further away, possibly across the hall. A chair scrapes. The light one sat down. Less alert. Getting comfortable. If I needed to move fast, the heavy one is the immediate threat.
I don't need to move fast. Not right now, anyway. But I memorize it anyway.
I lie on the cot and stare at the ceiling and think about Leone.
Not the soldier. Not the killer. The man. The one who sleeps with his arm around my waist and his face in my hair. The one who checks the kitchen logs to make sure I'm eating. The one who said, "no one takes this away" and meant it with every molecule of his body.
I can’t stop thinking about this morning. His hand on the back of my neck while I worked. The kiss on my forehead. The wayhe paused in the doorway and looked back at me one last time before leaving, like he was taking a photograph with his eyes.
Did he know? Some part of him, some instinct buried beneath the training and the discipline, did it whisper that something was coming? That the morning light on my face was something he should memorize because he might not see it again?
I press my hand against my chest and feel my heart beating. Steady. Stubborn. Alive.
He's coming.
The light outside the window fades to grey, then black.
I sleep in short bursts, never deeper than a doze. Trained myself to do this years ago, back when my father's debt collectors would show up at odd hours. Sleep light. Wake fast. Be ready.
The building is quieter at night. Fewer footsteps. Less conversation. But not silent. I can hear voices somewhere below me, muffled through the floor. Music from a radio. The occasional scrape of a chair. Laughter, once, sharp and brief. This isn't a fortress. It's a safehouse. A building repurposed for holding people and staging operations. Twelve to fifteen men, Lorenzo said. Men with routines and habits and blind spots. Not built to withstand assault.
Leone will know that.
I memorize what I've learned. Two floors below me, based on the stairwell sounds. Main entrance facing south, based on where the vehicle noise is loudest. Guard rotation every four hours. Two men on my door. More downstairs, exact number unclear. The heavy guard snores when he dozes. The light one doesn't.
Hours pass. The radio downstairs goes quiet. The voices thin out. The building settles into the deep hush of late night, when even men with guns get tired.
I'm lying in the dark, eyes open, counting the heavy guard's breaths, when I hear it.
Not the first shot. Something before it. A sound so small it barely exists. A whisper of movement outside the building. Below and to the south. The softest possible scrape of boot on concrete, and then nothing. Silence so complete it has texture.
