I looked at Kayla through the windshield. She was shaking.Small tremors running through her shoulders, her jaw tight, her wrists straining against the plastic. Her blue eyes blinked out at me, terrified.
I drew my sidearm with two fingers and set it on the asphalt.
Because Kayla.
If it were me, I’d take my chances. But I wouldn’t take a chance with Kayla’s life.
I glanced at Vance, still looking at me but pointing his gun at her. He knew that. He knew that keeping me in line was just a matter of keeping her in danger.
Vance picked up my weapon and tucked it into his waistband, then stepped back to a distance that gave him a clear line on both of us.
“Walk toward the guardrail. Hands where I can see them.”
I walked. The metal was cold under my palms when I turned and leaned against it. The void at my back pulled at me like a physical thing.
Vance opened the passenger door. He reached in with a folding knife, cut the zip tie securing her to the steering wheel, and stepped back. “Out.”
Kayla climbed out. Her legs were unsteady, but she didn’t stumble. The severed zip tie hung from one wrist. She stood beside the sedan, and her eyes found mine and held.
I kept my voice level. “What the fuck is this, Vance?”
“Thisis a problem I’d rather not be solving.” He reached into his jacket and produced a small medical-looking case. He held it at his side without opening it. “But you didn’t leave when you were supposed to, and now we’re here.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you were supposed to leave. Investigation closed, Martinez conveniently took the fall as being the leak, and you should’ve moved on.” His eyes were flat and steady. “Instead, you stayed. And somehow got fucking intel about us moving the operation tonight.”
The guardrail bit into my palms. I had no weapon. Kayla was still directly in his line of fire. The gorge was behind me. I had no angle, no advantage, no play I could see that didn’t end with her getting hurt.
That was not fucking happening.
The best I could do was keep him talking. As long as he was talking, he wasn’t acting, and as long as he wasn’t acting, I had time to figure out something.
“It was you. The whole time. You were the leak.”
“I was never just the leak.” Something shifted in his voice. The way a CEO would correct someone who’d called him the receptionist. “A leak implies someone else is in charge.”
The world I’d been operating in for weeks—the assumptions, the hierarchy, the chain of command I thought I understood—crumbled right in front of me. None of it had been right.
Vance wasn’t just the leak. Hell, he hadn’t been the leak at all. He’d been controlling both sides simultaneously.
“I run it, Ben. Every distribution point, every supply line, every dealer. I built the whole operation, and I run it. And it’s making me very, very rich.” He let out a breath like he was relieved to be finally telling someone. “And nobody suspects me at all.”
He was admiring his own work out loud, the way an architect might stand in front of a building he designed and point out the load-bearing walls to someone who’d only ever seen the lobby.
“You didn’t suspect me, did you?”
“Fuck off.” I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
But he aimed his Glock closer at Kayla. “Did you suspect me? Answer me.”
I ground my teeth so hard my jaw ached. “No. I didn’t suspect you. Not even for a second.” It was the truth.
Vance smiled. Slow, full of teeth. “Neither did Donovan. You two, the big hotshots from the private sector, couldn’t see what was right in front of you. Couldn’t even catch me as the leak, much less as the person running the whole syndicate.”
“You made sure of that.” God damn it. We’d been played from the beginning. “You set up both raids.”
He loved that I was finally starting to understand just how smart he was. “Fuck yes, I did. The first one had some of my people who actually knew something. So I had to tip them off and get them out.”
