“What is?” I asked, stepping closer.
“DaemonRaze. But that can’t be right.” He glanced up at me expectantly, as if I might know what he was talking about, and I waved for him to continue, with an added roll of my eyes. “DaemonRaze was a gamer, a hacker, huge when I was getting started. One of the names peoplerespected. Ethical hacks, leaks with purpose, whistleblowing-level shit. Then nothing for years. And now he’s back and working with some lowlife asshole like Mitchell? That’s not the guy I remember. He had a code. He gave a damn. I looked up to him—not like a hero or anything, given that we started doing our thing around the same time—but still… I expected better.”
“Show me where his name is on this.”
“Hmmm,” Caleb muttered, eyes flicking across multiple screens as he opened and closed tabs with the kind of speed that looked like sleight of hand. Windows stacked, collapsed, reopened. Lines of code blurred past before he froze, sat back slowly, and stared.
“Oh wait. No. DaemonRaze’s code is embedded in files Mitchell had stashed on a deep server. The name isn’t screaming from the metadata, but it’s here. Shit…” He clicked some more. “This is sloppy work. This was taken from Mitchell, then rerouted through DaemonRaze’s systems to get to us. Thank fuck he’s not turned to the dark side.”
“It can’t have come from a hacker. Enzo saidJamiewas sending these files usingyourencrypted software.”
“Nope,” Caleb popped the P. “They arrived directly, already encrypted. Oohh…” He sat forward. “Does this mean Jamie is DaemonRaze?”
“He can’t be. He was locked up formurder, not hacking, and he’s a mechanic. You keep saying how fast things change, so how would he have kept up when he was locked away?”
“True,” Caleb murmured. “But I’m adding it to my list of things to research.”
Still, doubt itched at the back of my mind even as I said it. He wasn’t like Rio or Enzo. Not only in the killing-people-without-blinking way; though, that was part of it. There was something else. An edge. An intensity. He didn’tlookat me—hesawright through me. Every movement in a room, every shift in body language. When he wasn’t locked in that all-consuming need for revenge, there was a precision to him, as if his mind was constantly assessing threats.
“I’ll work it out,” Caleb said, fingers flying. Then he froze—completely. The blood drained from his face.
“No,” he whispered. A beat of silence. Then, he swore under his breath and shoved himself away from the desk as if the keyboard had burned him. “Have you seen what’s on here?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“What is it?” Sonya asked, stepping behind him. She stopped short, lifting her hand to her mouth as files began flashing across the screen, line after line, projected onto the wall. Then, the photos started. One after another.
“Killian…” she murmured. “Have you seen this…”
Image after image. Children. Women. Men. Eyes blank. Faces hollow. No names—just numbers.Shipping manifests. Dates. Routes. Ledgers of drugs and guns and flesh, detailed down to the last gram and heartbeat. The weapons were bad. The drugs were worse. But it was the people who stopped me. Each photo and file proved the kind of crime you didn’t come back from. And it was all here. Neat. Documented. Organized.
I felt sick.
Sick to my soul. But turning away was wrong. I owed these people more than that; if I couldn’t save them, the least I could do wasseethem.
I pulled Robbie’s notebook from my coat and flipped through it with shaking fingers. “I have this as well.” My voice came out rough. His notes were frantic, raw. Some of the pages were barely legible, the ink smeared as if he’d been crying when he wrote. One line had been underlined so many times the paper had torn.
I tore it out and dropped it next to Caleb, who was still frozen, pale and staring, his jaw locked as if he were trying not to be sick.
“This isn’t just blackmail, or money laundering, or dirt on powerful people,” I said. My throat was tight. “This is more than we thought. This is Hell.”
The board was filling up.
Strings of red, yellow, and black connected names, photos, and fragments of information, a spider’s web of decay stretching wider with every lead. We didn’t have much on Kessler—according to Caleb, he was a ghost with a sealed financial portfolio and no digital footprint worth a damn. We’d have to take him down the old-fashioned way, through Levi and his fellow cops. However, we had more than enough on Lassiter to start examining his side hustles. Enough to start pulling threads, digging into the shadows he operated in.
So that was where we started.
And from Lassiter, the rot spread fast.
We uncovered connections to shell companies, fake charities, real estate fronts, and offshore accounts that facilitated a complex web of money laundering. But it wasn’t numbers and transactions. It waspeople. We traced names from Lassiter to private security contractors, unlicensed clinics, and encrypted networks involved in trafficking more than weapons.
We followed his connections like blood trails, and the deeper we went, the clearer it became. We might not have had dirt on the billionaire, Kessler, but for Lassiter, we had trails running the gamut from trafficking to laundering to blackmail.
Lassiter. Friend of the undocumented, on the board of several charities. A smile hiding the devil inside.
The man now at the top of our list needed to be taken down.
SEVEN
