Not because I believed a word he said.
Because I figured he’d be easy to play—just another bleeding-heart idiot with a savior complex.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
TWO
Killian
The Cave wasn’ton any official floor plan.
Tucked behind a fake panel in the back of my law office—past the respectable facade with its polished floors, brass door handles, and old-money charm—was a room where the rules didn’t apply. We called it the Cave, short for Bat Cave, because it was hidden, high-tech, and run on secrets. But it wasn’t a playroom for rich vigilantes, it was our situation room. Our war room. Where we waged a kind of justice different from the stuffy law-abiding lawyer shit I had to use to cover up what we were really doing.
About the size of a midtown coffee shop, it had the vibe to match: brushed concrete floors, industrial-chic lighting, a $5,000 Italian coffee machine we all pretended we didn’t worship. Three desks held laptops with enough processing power to scare the NSA, plus, of course, Caleb had his servers, which no one else was allowed to touch. Not that Sonya and I would know what to do if we were allowed past the secure gate. There were sofas for late nights, and then there was the cork board wall. It held our current investigations, and most importantly, the list of people who used power like a weapon.
The list had way too many names, including the senator who covered up a disappearance. The CEO whose charity funneled money into off-the-books“retraining programs”that smelled like trafficking. The judge who let abusers walk because he believed“boys will be boys.”They were on our hit list.
But we didn’t kill them. Hell, I hadn’t killed anyone since I was fourteen when a john had thought a scrawny group home runaway was fair game for anything he wanted. He’d had a knife and a bulky body too used to sedentary work and good food. I was skinny as fuck, had quicker hands and more than enough rage in me to drive the knife into his heart before he could blink. The cops didn’t care—just another john in a dirty, needle-filled alley, and ahooker who’d disappeared into the night. But I remembered the man’s face, and not in a haunted-me kind of way, but in a fuck-yes-asshole way. I didn’t carry guilt over what I’d done, but there was no pride, it was just another day I’d managed to survive. It didn’t make me a killer. It made me someone who lived.
That night carved a line in me that never faded. I’d crossed it once. I’d promised I’d never do it again. So no, as much as I wanted to hurt the bastards who destroyed for fun, I didn’t kill the people on our list. But my team and I made sure they couldn’t hurt anyone else. The people I hunted buried themselves with their arrogance, carelessness, and greed. I simply gave the world a nudge to look in their direction. In fast-moving media, people thrived on having monsters exposed and vilified, not executed.
Headlines were cleaner than blood stained hands.
Our small team didn’t officially get paid. There were no clients, no glory, no name on a plaque. Just four people doing the work no one else could, and paying for it by skimming from accounts of the criminals they’d unearthed—money already soaked in blood and ruin. We weren’t blind to the ethical fog surrounding what we did. We made our peace withoperating in the gray, because up here in the Cave, black-and-white didn’t exist.
Sonya, Caleb, Levi, and I .
An analyst, a hacker, a cop, and a lawyer.
We’d all once been headed for Ivy League careers and corporate success. All disillusioned before we turned thirty.
We’d met on campus, full of ideas about changing the world, and I was a cautionary tale about trusting appearances from the start. The scholarship student who kept his past locked away behind a too-white smile and the polish of a Brooks Brothers suit. They didn’t know, not at first, that I’d grown up sleeping on the street, or that my mother had sold me to a dealer for rent money when I was thirteen. That I’d survived foster homes, back alleys, and youth lockup. They never saw someone who made bank through using their body, and they certainly never knew about the man I’d killed.
Same as I didn’t know at first, that Sonya had been taken in by her uncle after her parents died—a man with a badge and a twisted sense of control, and a propensity for raping young girls. He wore a sheriff’s uniform, protected by the illusion of authority, and when she broke down and told us whathe’d done, he became the first target on the List. We didn’t just ruin his reputation. We annihilated him.
Levi was hardly ever in the Cave, our man on the outside, a detective now, with access to systems and records typically locked down. His father had been a cop with a chip on his shoulder and a gun, and had lit the match that started a riot—seven people dead, including Levi’s little brother, in the backlash. That loss shaped Levi, broke something inside him, and made him razor-sharp. He’d joined the force himself not to honor his father, but to make sure no one like him ever got to hide behind a badge again. He used his connections, not to protect power, but to dismantle it from the inside.
Caleb was the biggest surprise. On paper, the golden boy, with code in his brain and an uncanny affinity for tech. But beneath that bright-eyed techie charm was a fury none of us had seen coming. He’d already gotten revenge for his dad taking his own life after the bank foreclosed on the family ranch. Caleb had broken into their system, siphoned millions, and funneled it to every anti-eviction nonprofit he could find. Robin Hood with a server farm. Of course, all trails he planted led back to the bank’s management, five lives ruined to balance the loss of the fatherCaleb idolized and anyone else who had been damned for the sake of a bank’s profit.
Each one of us had secrets that shaped us, wounds that bled into purpose, and when we shared them with each other, when the dam broke and everything spilled out, we became a team with a common purpose.
And we never forgot.
Because every abuser, every trafficker, every crooked cop, every corporate big guy, walked free. Financial institution, institutions and Big Pharma had money, lawyers, and foundations. Some even had buildings named after them.
So yeah, thelist on our wall was precision vengeance because no one else had taken these people down, and we added more names each month.
Sonya was at her desk, dark curls pinned back, focused on an open file, with paperwork strewn all over her desk. Caleb, our in-house digital god, lounged sideways on the couch with a laptop balanced on one knee, his socked foot bouncing to a beat only he heard.
“And that,” he said, spinning his screen toward me, “is the final file on our favorite hypocrite. Senator Barlowe. All audio, video, and money trail evidenceis packaged, encrypted, and queued. You want me to send it now, or wait until tomorrow? “
“Push it,” I said.
He tapped a single key. “Boom. Enjoy your early retirement, senator.”
I let my gaze drift to the board, where Barlowe’s picture would be pulled down. We’d built an airtight case—audio tapes of the senator whispering payoffs, wire transfers from offshore accounts, a secret condo in Virginia where a missing girl had last been seen. We didn’t fabricate any of it. We didn’t need to. His own hubris had written the story for us. All we’d done was find the threads and pull, and now the anonymous information was being sent out. One more monster down. And this time, the headlines would do the rest.
“And the Redcars project? Have we destroyed all digital footprint for Roman Lowe?”
