Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
I think about this every day. I've thought about it every day for eleven years. And when I learned that Dean Maddox had built his own operation, his own crew of self-righteous vigilantes who believed they had the right to tear down other people's carefully constructed lives in the name of some larger good, I recognized the pattern. The same arrogance. The same certainty. The same willingness to destroy what someone else has built because the mission, their mission, is more important than the consequences.
I took his crew because his crew is what he cares about. Not the company. Not the ALPHA and BRAVO squads with their contracts and their professional detachment. The crew. The misfits. The ones who operate in the margins the way I now operate in the margins, doing work that the legitimate world won't sanction but that someone, somewhere, has decided needs to be done.
I took them. And I’ll use them. And when Dean Maddox finally understands who I am and why this is happening, I want him to feel exactly what I felt in that warehouse eleven years ago. The specific, crystalline helplessness of watching everything you've built be dismantled by someone who doesn't even know your name.
My phone buzzes. A text from a number I recognize as Margaux's.
Mom, are you coming to the recital on Saturday? You said you'd try. Let me know. Love you.
I stare at the text for thirty seconds. The recital. The chamber music ensemble Margaux joined this semester. She plays cello. She's been playing since she was nine years old, sitting in the practice room of the brownstone with her small hands on the bow while I sat at my desk and worked on the framework that would eventually grow into Goldenbell.
She doesn't know. Margaux has never known what I do. What I really do. She thinks Goldenbell is a consulting firm. She thinks her trust fund is her grandfather's money, managed by a financial advisor in Hartford. She thinks her mother works long hours because consulting is demanding and the clients are needy and the travel is constant.
She doesn't know about the warehouse in the Horn of Africa. She doesn't know about Dean Maddox. She doesn't know that the money paying for her university and her apartment and her cello lessons comes from an empire I built out of the wreckage of a life that someone else destroyed.
And now someone’s been through her trust account. Someone has mapped the connection between her college fund and my criminal enterprise. Someone’s pulled her into a world she doesn't know exists, and when the evidence package lands, when the federal agencies begin their investigation, Margaux will discover that everything she believed about her mother, about the money, about the life I built for her, was a lie constructed to protect her from a truth I was never ready to tell.
I text back: I'll be there, sweetheart. Wouldn't miss it.
Then I close the phone and return to the alerts.
The financial system is compromised. The inside asset is confirmed. Render is coming.
I have contingency plans. I always have contingency plans. But the plans were built for a version of this situation where I had time, where the exposure was partial, where the evidence could be managed and the narrative controlled.
This exposure isn't partial. It's total. Whoever mapped my finances didn't leave gaps. They went through everything, including Margaux's account, including the connections I hid behind my daughter's life because I believed no one would look there.
I was wrong. And being wrong isn’t something I've built contingency plans for because being wrong isn't something I've had much practice with.
I open the laptop one more time. Begin moving what can be moved. Closing what can be closed. Destroying the digital trails that can still be destroyed before the evidence package, wherever it is, lands on the desk of someone with a badge and a subpoena.
I’m not fucking ready for this.
16
Render
Just a few hours until the breach. Sawyer comes in from the dark.
I almost shoot him. He slips through the fence gap without warning. No message on the hidden channel. No signal. Just a shape in the industrial dark that resolves into a man I haven’t seen in weeks. Sawyer is Dean Maddox’s right hand for the BRAVO team, it’s also his cousin. Former Navy EOD tech. The kind of operator who can disappear into a city for a month and come back with a complete picture of whatever he was sent to study. Dean trusts him with everything, including the locations of every safehouse we have.
“Easy,” Sawyer says when he sees my weapon up. His hands are open and visible. The posture of a man who knows he just walked into a room full of people with every reason to be jumpy. “Dean sent me.”
“Dean’s been quiet for a week.”