Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
It’s brutal. But it’s not weakness. It’s a wound that never closed.
I drag my hand down my mouth, my stomach swarming with bile. I did this. I triggered something terrible and ripped open that wound.
The violent churn in my chest shouldn’t be there.
He’s not my problem. Not my problem.
I slam the keyboard and switch screens. Recordings flicker and bruise the dark as Wolf’s image peels away, replaced by this morning’s footage of Dove’s small, stubborn frame on another feed.
She’s the priority.
Whatever this is with Wolf—primal hunger, animal attraction, ferocious domination, whatever I call it to keep from sounding soft—it changes nothing.
I reach for the burner and set the hardware token into the cradle. When it chirps, the LED turns green, then amber. The VPN light on the chassis breathes a single blue pulse, and I breathe with it, tapping the sequence until the token spits a new code.
The line will hop through a dozen melt-points, a sat relay in the Aleutians, an encrypted node in Cartagena, a tunnel of offshore uplinks, and eventually, into the private mesh of The Shadow Collection.
It’s messy and dirty and will leave footprints for anyone with a microscope. But it will look like nothing if the right hands take it on the other end.
My fingers tremble. Stupid things. A whisper of sweat at the wrist. A tiny hitch in my thumb when I press.
I’m a careful man. Careful hands don’t shake. But this is different.
If I breathe wrong, these people will cleave my head from my body and mount it on a stake in the Bolívar Square. The scariest part? I won’t see them coming.
That’s why I’ve never dialed this number. Never been desperate enough to reach for this favor.
The burner coughs, negotiates, and settles into a slow, hungry ring. The light on the cradle beats as fast as my pulse.
I taste bile.
Servers hum. Cooling fans spin harder. I rub the hell out of my nape, bleeding tension from every joint. Until I hear it.
A click.
Then a voice, thick with accent and smoke. “¿Quién habla?”
I let the silence lean for a heartbeat, a practiced pause to disguise my nerves. Then I supply the name they know me by.
“El Vigilante.”
“Ah. Sí, por supuesto. Hace rato te tengo en la mira, Vigilante.”
My Spanish is shit, but I don’t need it. I have a program at my fingertips, translating his words into English.
The voice belongs to a top dog in the Colombian cartel. I don’t know which dog, but he knows who I am. The cartel gave me this number after all.
“What do I call you?” I ask.
“Jefe.” Two purring syllables meant to disarm.
It’s rumored the cartel uses a decoy in every meeting and phone conversation. If the voice on the line claims to be the boss, there’s a good chance it’s not.
Matias Restrepo, the real jefe, remains elusive to anyone not paying attention.
But I’ve always paid attention.
I was eighteen when I started selling pieces of myself to criminal organizations. Too young to be sentimental, too desperate to care, and too clever to be honest about it.
I didn’t stumble into human sex trafficking so much as trade my hacker skills in small, soulless auctions.
Who would’ve thought the hours I wasted as a skinny gamer kid, balls-deep in code and cheat mods, would turn out to be such valuable currency in the dark net?
“Habla,” he purrs, seductive and threatening all at once. “¿Qué quieres?”
I hear the danger behind the syllables, years of other men’s terror soaked into the simple question.
What do you want?
“I’m calling in that favor.” My mouth goes dry, but I keep my voice even.
The pause lasts long enough to count teeth. Then the man laughs, deep as a dug well, velveted with smoke, the edges worn by time and appetite.
“This favor is not a small thing,” he says in accented English. “You want to waste it on your pretty bird and her wolf?”
There it is. He knows as much about me as I know about them.
The Restrepo cartel and The Shadow Collection are the same machine. Most people don’t know it, but the jefe runs both.
Cocaine keeps the books fat, but flesh is easier to move across borders, harder to trace. Nobody reports a missing girl from a nowhere village. The cartel moves the product. The collection launders the bodies through ports and pipelines, and it all circles back to the same table where one man counts the profit.
At least, that’s the story they’re selling.
It goes so much deeper. But I don’t care about their ethics. I’m only interested in strengthening our partnership and using it to my advantage.
They control the global slave trade, and I sell them dirt and doors. They infiltrate enemy territories, and I give their runners access to move quietly. When a job goes south, I open holes to slip through, patching nodes, scrubbing traces, and tidying feeds.