He freezes.
Then he exhales through his nose like he hates that I’m right and mouths,Fine.
We wait through one slow sweep.
One.
Two.
Then we move—two quick strides across the gap and into the shadow of the next rack, backs to cold metal, breath held until the camera turns away again.
Vito leans in, barely moving his lips. “We’re wasting time.”
“We’re not wasting anything,” I whisper. “We’re buying the seconds you keep trying to throw away.”
His eyes cut to the aisle ahead.
A soft scrape answers somewhere to our right.
Closer than before.
Vito’s mouth tightens.
“Still want to leave?” he whispers.
I stare down the aisle toward the pallet section we found earlier.
“No,” I whisper back. “Now we take them. Quiet. Fast. And we do it without getting boxed in.”
Vito’s grin flashes for half a second and disappears.
He nods once.
And we move.
We move in a stagger, using the racks as cover, cutting across intersections only when the camera sweeps away.
The warehouse feels tighter now. We know there are people in here, but we don’t know where or how many.
We reach the edge of the pallet section again and stop in the shadow behind the tall stack we used before.
The three target pallets are still there. The fixed camera is still pointed straight at them like an eye that doesn’t blink.
I lean in close to Vito’s ear.
“We don’t touch the pallets until that camera is blind,” I whisper.
Vito’s jaw ticks.
“How,” he whispers back.
I tilt my chin up.
Catwalk. Metal stairs. The maintenance platform running along the upper wall.
Vito follows my gaze, then looks at the pallets again like he wants to rip them off the floor with his bare hands.
“Up and over,” I whisper. “You go first. Quiet.”
