He runs all of it. He picks who. He picks where. He calls everyone son. None of us know his name.
I wrote the handle down.SaintMichael.Up until tonight he’d been a username on three platforms and a cluster of metadata. I started a new file.
“Well, he’s got us a step further,” I grudgingly admitted as I collated the information and uploaded it to the new file.
Sonya watched me. “Doc uses Novak because he gets results, and after the last year, we shouldn’t be surprised by how he functions.” She gestured at the wall split now between the photos of the current white-collar cases and then the other side, which was Doc’s side, the human trafficking… the kids. I stared at the photo of the reverend, then took a yellow sticky note and placed it over his face, right over the purple one. I wouldn’t take his photo down until the case was finished and every single child rescued, but purple had meant he was a fucked-up asshole, and now yellow meant he was dead.
I knew every single person who worked directly or indirectly with the Cave. I knew Jamie still needed to burn; I knew Killian loved that about him. I knew Enzo had stabbed a guy in a bathroom for cornering Robbie in a coffee shop just a month ago. I knew Rio was all violence, and that Lyric had killed one of the most famous billionaires on the planet. Doc made no secret that he’d cross any line possible to get justice for kids, and Levi, one of my closest friends, had crossed the law to work right beside him.
I even knew a ton about Sonya, my ride-or-die best friend, wife, mother, all-around sweet woman with a strength that astonished me daily. To my knowledge, she’d never killed anyone, but I eyed her suspiciously. Maybe the mother/wife thing was a cover.
But Novak, a man we used far too often as a tool to extract information or clean up scenes, was a mystery. On paper, he was ex-military, with a stint in a military prison; in reality, every instinct I had told me he was something far colder and less human.
I’d seen him in action. He’d kidnapped a trafficker who thought the fact that he was the DA’s second cousin meant he was untouchable. I wasn’t even supposed to be there, pulling off-the-books security at one of the satellite warehouses Killianhad quietly acquired under three layers of shell companies, the kind of place that didn’t officially exist and wasn’t meant to have witnesses. I knewwhyit couldn’t have spectators, and I stayed anyway—not out of obligation, not by accident, but because some part of me wanted to see how Novak worked, as if I were auditing his performance. I mean, it couldn’t be as bad as I’d imagined. Right?
Novak hadn’t touched the man tied to the chair for the first ten minutes. He’d just stood there, slightly to the left of his line of sight, watching. The guy started sweating first, offering innocence, deals, and pleas, and Novak had stayed silent. Then he’d asked one question, and when the answer had come back wrong, Novak hadn’t blown up. He’d moved closer, curious. Then he’d described, in clinical detail, exactly how long it would take to die after surgically removing the man’s cock with his knife.
The trafficker had folded in under three minutes and was dead within the hour. Although I didn’t stay for that part.“Plausible deniability”, Doc had said when he arrived on scene, but it seemed more like avoiding responsibility to me, as if not seeing it meant it didn’t happen. If I’d stayed, would I have understood Novak more?
Novak didn’t get off on noise, fire, fighting, or blood. He got focused. The way he held eye contact a fraction too long, and left silences hanging until people rushed to fill them.
Except with me.
And the worst part was it worked because some traitorous part of my brain registered that control as attractive.
The night in the warehouse, when he’d stepped forward and done what he’d described—when he’d cut, methodical and unhurried, as the man screamed himself hoarse—I should have looked away. Instead, I’d held his gaze like an idiot, as if the blood on the floor mattered less than the fact that Novak waswatchingme. The trafficker had gone from pleading to sobbing to broken animal sounds, and still Novak’s eyes had never left mine. It was as if we were standing in the eye of something unholy together, and I couldn’t tell whether he was testing me or inviting me in. I didn’t realize how far things had gone until Doc arrived, demanding I leave, shattering whatever twisted connection had formed between us.
I hated noticing the difference in how Novak stared at me, and I wished I understood what was going on in his head. I hated that when he was here in the Cave, infrequently but enough to mess with me, he stood close to me, and the same steadiness that made him dangerous also made him magnetic. My brain cataloged threat, but my stupid body did something else entirely.
For a second, I focused on his voice in the recording and something in it caught under my skin before I shut it down hard and kept going.
Sonya was wrong.
Novak didn’t do affection or boyfriends; I was his obsession.
The security alert chimed on the elevator, and I glanced at the screen to see Levi’s former cop partner and the newest member of our team, Frank Mullins, stepping into view. Frank had been a cop for thirty-two years before he retired, the kind who’d worked homicide long enough to stop being shocked by what people were capable of. He worked with us now, which meant he knew what we did and how close to the line we sometimes stood. After three decades of chasing paperwork, corrupt supervisors, and cases that collapsed in court, he thrived on knowing things were getting done.
Frank stepped out of the elevator carrying a pink-and-white pastry box from Sugar Rush Café—the place with the best donuts in a five-mile radius—and set it beside the coffee machine. “Morning!” he said, reaching for a mug. “Anyone else want coffee?”
“You’d better have gotten me a strawberry cream one,” Sonya said, heading straight for the box.
“Anything for you, Princess,” Frank said, opening the box theatrically. “I even got Wiz a choc-hazelnut with extra sprinkles.” Frank loved giving everyone nicknames. Sonya was Princess, and I was Wiz—short for wizard—because I could find info out of thin air, according to him, not me. I didn’t want a donut right now. I wanted to put my headphones back on and focus on Novak’s message. The bastard was messing with my life when I didn’t care about the most amazing donut in the world.
I took way too long to answer, and Frank paused when he got a proper look at me. He frowned. “What’s wrong? Everyone okay? Is Levi?—”
“We’re all good,” I cut in, sharper than I meant to.
Frank had been Levi’s training supervisor and partner when Levi was still a cop, and the two had since settled into something that swung between father-and-son and two retired cops trying to outdo each other with bad jokes. They ribbed each other about procedure, about suspects, about paperwork, and somehow made the worst stories sound survivable.
He studied my face for a beat longer than I liked, then nodded once, accepting the answer even if he didn’t fully buy it. “Good,” he said, pouring the coffee anyway. “Because I’m too old to start burying kids I like.”
He placed the donut next to me, along with black coffee as I liked it, and then backed away to his desk in the corner, talking to Sonya about our latest white-collar case.
I put the headphones back on, isolated the relevant timestamps, and began transcribing, extracting usable data from the noise.
I must have eaten the donut at some point because my fingers were sticky, and there was a scattering of sprinklesground into the desk beside the keyboard, while the coffee sat untouched and cold.
I uploaded the forum handles to the server, started running searches, and took a moment to sit back in my chair as two matches came up instantly.
