Grinding my teeth hard enough to crack enamel, I shove closer to the keyboard and click back to earlier footage, the minutes after he fled the shop.
Where are you, Wolf?Where did you go?
There.
I scrub forward, camera by camera, and watch him stagger down the street.Shoulders tight, gait unsteady, he walks like his legs don’t trust him, like he’s drowning in air.
What the hell is wrong with him?
When he heads to the harbor, I split the feed between two angles.At the entrance, he stumbles, falling down the embankment and tucking under the pier, knees pulled to his chest, and arms wrapped around his skull.
Small as I’ve ever seen him.Like a child hiding from the belt.Shaking, clutching his hair, mouth open on a sound the recording doesn’t capture.
But I feel it.Real, unguarded, paralyzing panic.He’s having a full-blown attack.
A vein throbs in my temple.
I should enjoy this.I should take notes and catalog the weakness.Watch, record, exploit.Every tic, every flinch, every strangled gasp is ammunition.That’s what I do, what I’ve always done to protect my little bird.
But I’m not cataloging.I’m staring with a hundred-pound lump in my throat.
He tries to get up.Tries to board the yacht.The crowd presses too close.Someone bumps into him, and he snaps like a wild dog, snarling and baring his teeth.
People scatter.He bites at the air, chest heaving, face half-mad.
It’s brutal.But it’s not weakness.It’s a wound that never closed.
I drag my hand down my mouth, my stomach swarming with bile.I did this.I triggered something terrible and ripped open that wound.
The violent churn in my chest shouldn’t be there.
He’s not my problem.Not my problem.
I slam the keyboard and switch screens.Recordings flicker and bruise the dark as Wolf’s image peels away, replaced by this morning’s footage of Dove’s small, stubborn frame on another feed.
She’s the priority.
Whatever this is with Wolf—primal hunger, animal attraction, ferocious domination, whatever I call it to keep from sounding soft—it changes nothing.
I reach for the burner and set the hardware token into the cradle.When it chirps, the LED turns green, then amber.The VPN light on the chassis breathes a single blue pulse, and I breathe with it, tapping the sequence until the token spits a new code.
The line will hop through a dozen melt-points, a sat relay in the Aleutians, an encrypted node in Cartagena, a tunnel of offshore uplinks, and eventually, into the private mesh of The Shadow Collection.
It’s messy and dirty and will leave footprints for anyone with a microscope.But it will look like nothing if the right hands take it on the other end.
My fingers tremble.Stupid things.A whisper of sweat at the wrist.A tiny hitch in my thumb when I press.
I’m a careful man.Careful hands don’t shake.But this is different.
If I breathe wrong, these people will cleave my head from my body and mount it on a stake in the Bolívar Square.The scariest part?I won’t see them coming.
That’s why I’ve never dialed this number.Never been desperate enough to reach for this favor.
The burner coughs, negotiates, and settles into a slow, hungry ring.The light on the cradle beats as fast as my pulse.
I taste bile.
Servers hum.Cooling fans spin harder.I rub the hell out of my nape, bleeding tension from every joint.Until I hear it.
