I've filled half this notebook.
I reach for the cover.
My hand stays there.
I sit with my hand resting on the cover for a long time. The city darkens outside. The lights come up across the bay, one grid block at a time. Somewhere forty floors below and several blocks east, Logan Cruz is running a war and hunting a mole and making decisions in a cold precise voice that sounds nothing like the voice that said of the moments I capture in my notebooks,they matter, in the steam of a shower this morning.
20 - Logan
Two days since the war council. Two days since I sent her back to the penthouse. Two days since everything became another life I’m conducting from a distance.
The van report lands at 11:40 AM.
Gunner delivers it standing in my office doorway, clipped sentences, no editorializing. The supplies were intercepted on the I-95 interchange north of the port. The driver walked away. The cargo didn't. A calculated strike, exactly what I planned — not an escalation, not bodies, just a message written in destroyed inventory:we see you. We reach you. Don't mistake our restraint for weakness.
"Any blowback?" I ask.
"None yet."
"The Zayas will know it was us."
"That's the point." His look is flat. We both know what comes next. They'll respond. We'll respond to the response. The game plays itself until someone flinches or someone dies.
Andrei Cebotari is dead because he followed a trail that led somewhere it shouldn't. The van strike is the Delgado accounting for that. Clean and surgical. This is how the game is played.
Nico checks in by phone twenty minutes later — he's across the city coordinating the secondary thread. He confirms the message landed where it needed to land.
"Good," I say, and end the call.
The office settles back into its usual register. The monitors, the files, the low hum of the building running beneath me. My coffee has gone cold beside the keyboard, as usual. The light through the office windows is Miami-flat and white, ten degrees past comfortable.
I go back to the access logs.
The mole hunt is still live, the bait threads still running, the trap waiting for something to move. The timestamps are beginning to resolve — three access windows, each from internal terminals that require physical proximity, each bearing a slightly different credential signature. The pattern is almost elegant. Whoever built it understood how I think.
But there's a gap in the room that has weight to it.
She should be here.
The thought surfaces without warning. There's a frequency missing from the background of my day that wasn't missing before. The shape of someone who isn't present.
I set down my pen.
The pool at 5 AM. The breakfast containers on her counter, the smell of sofrito still in the air when Gunner's text came through. Her hand finding mine in the dark when my father died. The kiss in this office, two days ago, her hand resting on my lapel, leaning toward me by a fraction. She has become a fixed point in a life I built without fixed points, and I am apparently incapable of pretending otherwise.
I pick up the phone and call the penthouse.
She answers on the second ring.
"Come to La Sirena," I say.
A pause. "When?"
"Now. I'll have a car sent."
"I can take a rideshare."
"I'll send a car."
