Cassian looks at the rest of them. “I swore a blood oath to this man. I was wrong. He’s a parasite. He sold my loyalty to cover his tracks. Now, you can either sit here and wait for the feds, or you can follow me and ensure he never speaks again.”
Kael looks at me, his eyes lingering on the bruises on my neck, then back at Cassian. He slaps the magazine into his rifle with a metallic clack. “What’s the play?”
“We lure him to the Waldorf,” Cassian says, spreading the blueprints on a metal workbench. “He thinks he’s coming to collect a loose end. Team 6 handles the perimeter. Varro has the grid, but Hale is the Chairman—he has a biometric override. Varro is running a hard-line tap into the museum’s junction box to kill that override before we arrive.”
“What about the street-level response?” Kael asks.
“I want a two-block dead zone,” Cassian says. “If a cruiser turns the corner, jam their comms. Use the shill vehicles—the construction van and the staged fender-bender—to reroute traffic away from the plaza. If Hale brings a detail, let them park. Don’t engage unless they try to breach the doors. This has to look like a private meeting.”
“And if it goes sideways?” another man asks.
“It won’t,” Cassian says. “Because I’ll be inside. You are the wall, gentlemen. Nobody gets through you.”
Cassian picks up a tactical vest from the rack and slides it over his head, his jaw tightening as he navigates the stiffness in his shoulder. He checks the plates, then checks the load on his rifle. “Check your comms. If you see a badge that isn’t on our payroll, you report it. We leave in ten minutes.”
The men move. The hesitation is gone, replaced by the focus of a unit given an execution order.
Cassian heads down the narrow concrete corridor toward the armory, his pace hurried. My earpiece chirps.
“Grid is live, Boss,” Varro reports over the comms. “The dead zone is established. I’ve looped the plaza cameras. If a uniform patrol even sniffs that block, I’ll have them redirected before they see the SUVs.”
“Good,” Cassian says into his mic. He stops at the armory door, his hand hovering over the biometric scanner. He turns to me, his dark eyes intense.
“Hale won’t risk uniform cops seeing the Ledger,” he says, his voice low. “He won’t call the police. He knows better than to let a public record start before he has the drive in his hand. But he won’t come alone.”
“The cleaners,” I say, the word feeling cold in my mouth.
“Ex-military or corrupt badges on his personal payroll,” Cassian says. “Men who know how to make a body disappear.”
“Like you,” I say.
He holds my gaze for a fraction of a second, leaving the truth hanging between us. He gestures toward the door at the far end of the bunker.
“Come with me,” he commands.
I follow him down the concrete corridor to the biometric lock. He scans his palm, and the door slides open, revealing the primary armory.
The air inside smells sharply of gun oil, brass, and cold steel. Racks of matte-black assault rifles line the walls. Stacks of ammunition crates sit on metal shelving.
He walks past the ordnance and stops at a locked glass drawer, where he punches in a four-digit code and opens the steel tray. He reaches inside and pulls out a small, sleek, matte-black handgun.
He turns to me, ejects the magazine with his thumb, checks the load, slaps it back in, and racks the slide against his belt with his right hand to chamber a round.
He holds the gun out to me, grip first.
“A SIG P365,” he says, his voice clinical. “It’s a micro-compact nine-millimeter. Small enough to conceal at the small of your back under your shirt, but it packs enough stopping power to drop a man in body armor.”
I stare at the weapon. My heart beats a little faster, but my hands don’t shake as I reach out and take it from him. The metal is heavy and freezing cold against my palm.
"I held your gun in the tunnel," I admit quietly, staring at the weapon. "But I don't actually know how to shoot."
“You aren’t going to be shooting from a distance,” he says, stepping behind me. He wraps his right hand directly over mine, guiding my fingers into the proper grip. He adjusts my thumb, placing it against the safety. “I’m going to handle the heavy lifting. I’m going to drop the cleaners. But if things go sideways,if someone gets past me and puts their hands on you, I need you to know how to pull the trigger.”
He presses his chest against my back, his breath warm against my neck.
“Flick the safety down,” he instructs.
I push the small metal lever down with my thumb. It clicks softly.
