Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 66697 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 333(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66697 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 333(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
She came with a shudder and a soft cry into my shoulder, and I followed her a few thrusts later, buried deep, my forehead pressed to hers while I emptied my balls deep inside her greedy little pussy.
We stayed tangled like that a long while after, both of us dozing lightly. The city outside had stayed quiet these last three weeks. Some small cold part of me that never fully slept kept turning that fact over in my mind. I expected the biggest nest of vipers to swarm up from the ground and attack. So far, though, all looked and sounded quiet.
Knight swept every fallback site we’d flagged the night of the raid, Rourke’s party house downtown, the warehouse spurs off the river road, and every single one of them came up scrubbed clean, stripped of paper and product before our men ever cleared the doors. The handler I’d pulled out of that trunk had bought himself a hole in the head instead of a drawn-out death with the useless line about a Memphis contact, and Knight had filed it and moved on because there was nowhere else to take it. That man was now dead and would never be seen again.
Darby had the Éclipse women settled inside two weeks, moved through club channels and family money with no paper trail leading back to any of us. She made sure everyone had housing and names and new lives, if they’d wanted or needed it, like she’d been doing this very thing her whole career instead of three weeks. I watched her work a laptop at the kitchen table most mornings now, calling in favors, coordinating with Nadine on medical, and I saw something new in the way she looked up at me when I came into a room. She genuinely gave me welcoming smiles now. I thought maybe she’d needed to know I was killing for the right reasons and not just to salvage my honor so I didn’t show weakness or some shit. Once she knew my reasons and my head was in the game, she’d followed me to the bitter end. Darby wasn’t a follower.
My phone vibrated against the nightstand. Tessa stirred against my chest as I reached for it but settled easily enough. The combination of natural pregnancy hormones and several orgasms a day helped her sleep longer and more easily. Knight’s voice came through low and clipped, none of his usual ease in it. “I’m done with the records, boss. You need to come see this. In person.”
Ten minutes later, having managed to slip out of our room without waking Tessa, I walked into Knight’s office. Three monitors ran feeds and spreadsheets. Knuckles leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, watching the door. Seth already stood at Knight’s shoulder, which told me whatever waited on those screens was important enough that my father had gotten here before me.
“Sit down or don’t,” Knight said, not looking up from the keyboard. “This isn’t going to take long, and it isn’t going to feel good.”
I stayed on my feet. “Talk.”
He pulled up a spreadsheet, columns of numbers scrolling clean and organized. “Every account, every route, every name on the client roster going back four years. I traced every dollar, every shell company, every wire transfer that ever touched Éclipse.” He tapped the screen. “All of it terminates in Denton. Every thread. No path up from him to anybody bigger.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “A man doesn’t run a network that size alone.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Knight finally looked at me. “I tore that server cage apart drive by drive. Four years of operations, every buyer, every route, every dollar, and all of it stops at Denton. The ledger that should’ve named all the names was missing from everywhere. Whoever curated that cage knew exactly what a raid would find, and he made sure the one document that mattered never sat inside it. That cage was a gift, Tonio. He wanted you to have every byte of it.”
“What about his Memphis contact?” I asked. “The number he gave up?”
“Burned an hour after we hit the building. Dead number, dead SIM, no tower ping since.” Knight pulled up another window, a timeline with two flagged entries running side by side. “Here’s the part that’s going to sit wrong with you, boss.”
He zoomed in on the timestamps. Two lines, both red, both stamped within the same sixty-second window.
“Denton’s upstream contact went dark right here.” He tapped the first line. “Same minute, same second window, the handler’s encrypted flag from the truck went dark too.” He looked up at me. “That’s the guy you had in the trunk on the drive to Éclipse. His line to Denton’s boss burned at the exact same moment as Denton’s own line on up the chain. Both, mid-assault. While you guys were still inside that building shooting. Before anybody on the outside could’ve known how the night was going to end.” The room went quiet enough I could hear the drives humming.