I signal for Amara to stay put. I creep down the hallway, my back pressed to the wall. As I get closer, the voices become clearer.
“—the transfer cleared. Dawn pickup stays.”
“What about the girl? The one from the clinic?”
“Lorenzo wants her handled. She’s a loose end. If the Costas have her, they have the key. We can’t let that happen.”
My blood turns to ice. They’re talking about her. They’re talking about Amara.
I feel a roar building in my chest, a primal, territorial rage that threatens to strip away my control. They want to ‘handle’ her? They’ll have to go through a mountain of corpses first.
I look back at Amara. She’s watching me, her eyes wide, her hand on her gun. She knows. She can sense the shift in the air.
I turn back to the door. There are two of them. Maybe three.
I don’t rush it. I count targets, mark the exits, and reach for the man closest to the door. Someone just put a price on Amara, and I intend to collect the answer, not the body.
One of them reaches to wipe the laptop. That decides it. I take the door.
The wood splinters, the sound like a gunshot in the quiet building. I’m inside before the two men can even stand up from the table.
One of them reaches for a shotgun leaning against the wall. I don’t give him the chance. His hand closes on the shotgun. I fire twice. He drops like a sack of stones, and I clock the papers before the blood can reach them.
The second man dives for the floor, pulling a pistol from his holster. I lunge across the room, my boot connecting with his wrist before he can level the weapon. I hear the satisfyingcrackof bone. He screams, a wet, ragged sound.
I grab him by the collar and haul him up, slamming him against the wall. I shove the muzzle into his mouth.
“Who else is here?” I growl.
He’s gasping, his eyes rolling back in his head. “Just… just us. Please…”
“Where is Alvarado Vane?”
“I don’t know! He doesn’t tell us… he just sends the pings…”
I press the gun harder, the steel clicking against his teeth as his jaw works around it.“Your pulse jumped before your mouth did.”
“Alessio!”
I spin around, my gun still trained on the man’s throat. Amara is standing in the doorway, her face pale, her eyes fixed on the body on the floor.
“There’s a computer,” she says, her voice trembling slightly. She points to a laptop sitting on a crate in the corner. “It’s still logged in.”
I look at the man in my grip. He’s nothing. A foot soldier. A cockroach.
I zip-tie his wrists and drop him beside the table, conscious enough to answer later.
I move to the laptop. Amara is already there, her fingers flying across the keys.
“He was just here,” she whispers. “Session’s still live—he was checking the dead-man’s-switch status. Alessio… look.”
I lean over her shoulder. The screen shows a map of Chicago. There are seven red dots scattered across the city, two of them dimmed behind permissions I can’t read yet.
“The nodes,” I say.
“No,” she says, her voice going deathly quiet. “The switch. It’s not just one server. It’s a network. And it’s being fed by a live video feed.”
She clicks a window open. My heart stops.
