Her hand moved to cover mine, where it rested on the chair’s armrest. "Promise me you’ll be careful."
"Always am."
"No, you’re not." Her grip tightened. "You’re reckless and stubborn, and you think your life matters less than everyone else’s. But it matters to me, Roman. You matter to me."
The words hit me like a physical blow. Sitting there in the morning sunlight, looking at the woman carrying my child, I realized how much I wanted out of this world. How badly I wanted to build something clean with her, something that didn’t require armed guards and bulletproof glass.
"I know," I said quietly. "And that’s exactly why I need to handle whatever this is."
I leaned forward and kissed her—soft, lingering, tasting like coffee and promises I wasn’t sure I could keep. When I pulled back, her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
"Come back to me," she whispered.
"Wild horses couldn’t keep me away."
Connor’s safehouse bunker was a nondescript warehouse in the industrial district, the kind of place that looked abandoned from the outside but hummed with barely concealed technology within. I’d been here twice before—once when my father was still alive, once during the bloodiest year of the Torrino war. Neither visit had ended well.
The heavy steel door opened before I could knock. Connor stood in the doorway, his silver hair disheveled, his kind eyes carrying the weight of bad news.
"You came," he said, stepping aside to let me enter.
"You called."
The interior was exactly as I remembered—concrete walls lined with monitors, servers humming in temperature-controlled cases, enough electronic surveillance equipment to make the FBI jealous. When it came to privacy, Connor had been paranoid long before paranoia became a survival skill in our world.
"Sit down," he said, gesturing to one of the metal chairs facing a wall of screens where Tommy sat hunched over multiple keyboards, his pale face illuminated by the glow of data streams.
"I’ll stand. What’s this about?"
Tommy looked up briefly, acknowledging me with a nervous nod before diving back into his work. Connor stood behind him, one hand on the kid’s shoulder like a proud mentor watching the kid he brought into our network half a decade ago work magic.
"Show him what we found," Connor said.
Tommy’s fingers flew across the keyboard with a speed that made my eyes water. The main screen flickered to life, displaying what looked like phone records.
"Remember that burner phone we found in Sean’s quarters?" Connor asked, his eyes never leaving the screens. "The one that supposedly proved he was the mole?"
My jaw clenched. "Yeah."
"When you gave it to Tommy for deeper analysis, the kid found something we all missed." Connor’s voice was steady, professional, but I could hear the anger underneath. "Tell him, Tommy."
Tommy cleared his throat, still typing. "That phone was never Sean’s, boss. I traced the serial numbers, purchase records, and followed every digital breadcrumb." His voice gained confidence as he spoke about his domain. "The metadata doesn’t lie—someone wanted us to find it."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. "Explain."
"It was purchased three months ago with a credit card linked to a shell corporation. That corporation traces back to a secure account." Connor turned to face me, his expression grim. "Declan’s account."
The words hit me like ice water. "That’s impossible."
"I wish it was." Tommy pulled up another screen with lightning-fast keystrokes, displaying financial records. "But it gets worse. I found the real call logs you asked me to analyze—not just from the planted phone, but from Declan’s personal devices." His paranoid genius was in full display now. "I cross-referenced them with our operational timeline, and the pattern was unmistakable."
Connor nodded grimly. "The kid’s a fucking wizard with this stuff. Show him the rest, Tommy."
I watched the data populate across multiple monitors, each piece of evidence building an undeniable picture. Phone calls to Torrino associates hours before our shipments were intercepted. Text messages to encrypted numbers minutes after our strategy meetings. Financial transfers that coincided perfectly with our security breaches.
"He knew about the Baltimore warehouse before we even finalized the plans," Tommy continued, pulling up surveillance footage with practiced efficiency. "Look at this."
The grainy black-and-white video showed the warehouse district two days before the federal raid. A figure moved between the buildings with practiced stealth, and when Tommy enhanced the image with a few keystrokes, Declan’s face became unmistakable.
