Not tonight.
Dom could be anywhere out there.
And. She. Couldn’t. Find. Him.
She had six separate tracking algorithms running across the monitors. Traffic camera intercepts from every borough on one. Signal analysis on another, scanning for Dom’s phone even though she knew it was dead—Praetorian, or whoever hadtaken him, would have ditched it within the first ten minutes. A third screen crawled through dark web chatter, automated filters flagging anything related to Wilde Security, abduction, ransom, or a dozen other keywords she’d programmed in a haze of adrenaline at three in the morning. The other three were running variations on the same hopeless theme: find a digital footprint where none existed.
Because whoever had taken Dom and Vivianna Cavalier had done it clean. Surgically, infuriatingly clean.
Daphne pulled up the traffic camera footage she’d already watched forty-seven times—she was counting, because counting kept her from screaming—and forced herself through it again. The nightclub’s exterior camera, angled toward the street, had resolution just good enough to be useful if you knew how to enhance it. Which she did.
2:14 AM. Dom and Vivi exited the club. They stumbled out together, Dom’s arm slung around Vivi’s waist in a way that could have been romantic or could have been two people who’d had too much to drink holding each other upright. Daphne couldn’t tell. She’d never been great at reading body language in person, let alone through grainy surveillance footage.
2:17 AM. They reached Dom’s car. He opened the door and disappeared into the backseat.
2:23 AM. A black van—no plates, no distinguishing marks, the kind of generic panel van you could buy at any used lot in the tri-state area—pulled up alongside Dom’s car. Three figures emerged.
2:24 AM. Dom and Vivi were extracted from the backseat. Neither resisted. Neither moved under their own power. Drugged, then. Something fast-acting. The figures loaded them into the van with the skill of people who had done this many, many times before.
2:25 AM. The van pulled away at a conspicuously unhurried pace. They weren’t worried about pursuit because they were sure they’d already won.
Bastards.
But they didn’t know they were up againsther.
Daphne pulled up the van’s trajectory and traced it through the camera network she’d hacked—illegally, technically, but legality was a luxury she couldn’t afford when her cousin was missing. The van was captured on camera at the intersection of M Street and Wisconsin, heading northwest. Then another camera at Whitehurst Freeway. Then nothing. It vanished somewhere between the freeway on-ramp and the next camera cluster near Canal Road.
Professional. Not a crime of opportunity.
This was Praetorian.
She just couldn’tproveit yet, and she didn’t traffic in gut feelings. She believed in data. Evidence. The kind of airtight digital forensics that held up under scrutiny and couldn’t be dismissed.
The elevator chimed somewhere behind her, and she heard the distinctive uneven cadence of Davey’s walk before she saw him. The slight drag of his left leg, the compensating rhythm his body had built around the metal in his femur. He appeared at the edge of her workstation, looking like he hadn’t slept either, which he probably hadn’t.
“Anything?” he asked.
“No.” She swiveled her chair to face him and didn’t sugarcoat it. He wouldn’t want her to. “No digital footprint. No ransom demand. No chatter on any channel I’m monitoring, and I’m monitoring all of them.” She pulled her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I sent Liam and Bridger to find the van. It was scrubbed. No plates, no VIN.”
“Praetorian.”
“That’s my assessment. The execution was too clean for a standard snatch-and-grab. And the timing—right after the Antarctica situation, right after Cade—” She stopped herself.
The name still stung, and she could see it hurt Davey, too. There was a flinch behind his eyes, but he’d never admit to it.
“Keep digging.”
She nodded. He didn’t need to tell her that. Obviously, she would. But he’d said it anyway, because Davey needed to give orders the way other people needed to breathe—it was the only thing keeping him upright.
He lingered for another beat and looked like he wanted to say more. Maybe something human, something about Dom being tough or resilient or the kind of person who always found his way home. But he didn’t. He just gave her a short nod and walked back toward the elevator.
Yep. He was holding on by a thread and sheer stubbornness.
Daphne turned back to her screens. The algorithms churned. The data streams scrolled. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
Ugh.
She was pulling apart metadata from a cluster of cell tower pings near the Lincoln Tunnel when the door to the lab burst open with enough force to rattle the glass, and Celeste blew in like a weather system.
