“All good,” Sonya said.
“Good” in our world meant more than a thumbs-up. It meant I could look Enzo in the eye and say the team had buried any connection to Roman Lowe so deep that no one would ever find it again. Good meant we’d pulled every thread and cut every tie, scrubbing him from systems both traffickers and governments had fingers in.
“And Mitchell?” I asked, quieter. Mitchell was the monster who’d imprisoned Roman Lowe for so long that the man, who now called himself Robbie, could barely remember when he hadn’t been in chains. Mitchell was a middleman, a cog in a wheel, but the guys at Redcars—Enzo in particular—wanted him found and dealt with. I’d seen Robbie’s scars; I’d witnessed his trauma—it was personal, and while my team wouldn’t be the ones to wipe Mitchell off the face of the planet, we’d clear the path without hesitation, and whatever Enzo did to Mitchell when he found him? He didn’t just deserve it. He had it coming.
And then there was the money. Not only hush money or blackmail caches—these were blood-soaked crypto accounts holding millions, passwords handed over by a trembling Robbie, who had no use for the wealth of monsters. We cleaned it, scattered it through a hundred banks under a hundred names, and every penny would resurface in survivor shelters, legal aid funds, and charities. That wasourkind of laundering. Making dirty money clean, and turning pain into restitution.
“I’m hitting brick walls, even with what Robbie gave us,” Caleb confirmed. “No idea who is above Mitchell, but whoever it is, they’re down a hell of alot of money. I need more to track this upward if that’s what we’re doing.”
I glanced at the hundred or more names on the list on the wall—we may never get through that list, and did we have the resources to discover yet more bad guys?
“Once again, are we agreed to give Enzo the go-ahead to get Mitchell?” I asked, and Caleb and Sonya looked at me and exchanged a glance.
“You’re doubting we should do it?” Sonya asked, confused.
“We don’t do the killing part,” I reminded her and Caleb.
“Oh, I see,” she began, in a super sunshiny tone—always our first warning sarcasm was coming into play. “Someone should call Levi.”
Caleb and I stared at her. “Why?” I asked when she didn’t immediately explain, despite knowing I was playing into her hands.
“Then, the four of us could hold a philosophical roundtable on the ethics of knowingly setting a chain of events in motion that ends with murder? Maybe debate the death of a man who worked for, and with, traffickers, and personally held someone for eight years, in chains. Because if you ask me if I’m good with it, I am.”
Caleb snorted. “Me too. And you know Levi already had his say.”
When we’d presented the information to Levi, our cop, our clean front man, his jaw was tight, he was furious, disgusted and he’d voted yes before anyone else.
“I’ll call Enzo,” I said and pulled out my cell.
Caleb reached out to hold Sonya’s hand. This was big. We’d never gotten to the point where we’d given the go-ahead to ex-cons who wanted to kill.
I walked toward the wall of photos. It was full of faces, but none haunted me quite like Mitchell’s. Robbie’s captor. Violent. Connected. The kind of man who didn’t only hurt people—he broke them.
When I’d first met Robbie, I’d seen a man stitched together with fear, silence, and survival. He’d barely met my eyes. He flinched from sudden movement. Scars mapped his skin like a story no one had the right to read. I’d felt raw and enraged at that moment, but there was also guilt and recognition. I’d lived a version of that life, though my hell had ended sooner than his, and I’d clawed my way out with bloodied hands. But Robbie? He’d been broken by it.
Seeing him wasn’t only a reminder of what monsters like Mitchell could do. It was a mirror. It made me feel the violence I thought I’d buried longago, the kind that lived in my bones like a memory. The kind I’d promised never to use again.
And the system wouldn’t touch Mitchell. Because he paid the right people and the law had too many blind spots men like him knew precisely how to use to slip through.
That was what the list and the Cave was for. The blind spots. The people and pain the system couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see. Sometimes I felt righteous, as if we were the only ones holding a crooked world accountable. At other times, I felt nothing at all. Numb to the lines we crossed, too tired to flinch at the fallout. And then there were nights when it all caught up to me—when I lay awake wondering if we were fixing things or just shifting the wreckage. But even then, I kept coming back because someone had to.
I placed the call on one of Caleb’s encrypted cells. Enzo answered, his voice steady.
“Redcars, how can I help?”
“Hey, it’s me. The parts are ready for the Corvette if someone wants to get over there and pick them up. We’re sending the paperwork now.”
There was a pause. Then: “Thank you for letting us know.”
That was the signal. He knew what to do.
“So, boss,” Caleb said, and I turned to see himgesturing at the rogues gallery on the wall. “Who’s next?
“We find who Mitchell was working with or for, and we take them down.”
Caleb pressed a single button as if he’d been waiting for me to tell him that very thing.
“On it.”
