Chapter Five #3
Kade spoke less than everyone else. He listened while Luca complained about a delayed vehicle and a security change that had inconvenienced someone important.
When he answered, he had a habit of turning slightly away from me, or lowering his voice just enough that the pool music ate the end of the sentence.
Raven noticed too.
“Audio on him is poor.”
I shifted half a step closer to the group.
Wolf said, “Don’t.”
I stopped, annoyed at how quickly the command worked. Kade looked at me again.
“Di dove sei?”
“N-New York.”
His gaze stayed on mine. “In origine?”
I kept the cover smile in place. “Originally? Connecticut. E tu?”
“Europa,” he responded.
Fucking Europe, broad enough to answer without giving me anything useful.
Luca scoffed beside him. “L’Europa non è un paese!”
Europe’s not a country. Finally something I agreed with Luca on, but Kade just ignored him.
“Che lavoro fai?”
“Private capital. Soprattutto immobiliare, qualche investimento distressed.”
Mostly property, with enough distressed investment work mixed in to make Mia Morgan sound useful without making her memorable.
“Quindi compri problemi.”
In his version of finance, I bought problems.
I smiled. “Solo quando rendono.”
Only when they paid.
One corner of his mouth pulled slightly as he studied me, the closest he had come to smiling.
“Ti piacciono i problemi, a quanto pare.”
Apparently I had a taste for problems. I held his eyes a little longer than the cover required.
“Solo quelli interessanti,” I responded.
Only the interesting ones.
I could hear my own heartbeat through the sudden awareness of the microphone at my hip. Something moved in Kade’s face again but Luca asked him about Morgenstern. My attention sharpened, and the next several minutes unfolded slowly enough that I could feel every decision I made inside them.
Luca wanted to introduce Kade to two men waiting near the lower cabanas.
The blond woman, Sofia, came with us because she was apparently incapable of letting Luca go anywhere without finishing whatever story she had started.
I let them move first and deliberately hung back far enough to make it look as though I had no reason to care.
Wolf spoke immediately.
“Hold where you are.”
I slowed.
Then Luca said, “Morgenstern can replace the driver. They already handled Ulm.”
Kade answered too quietly for me to catch the first part.
I moved again.
“Mercer.”
“They’re talking about Ulm.”
“Raven heard it. Stay open.”
“He didn’t hear Kade.”
“Not your problem.”
“It is literally my job.”
“Your job is not to disappear because you got excited.”
His insults were cutting deeper and deeper each time.
I kept walking.
The cabana path dropped slightly below the pool terrace, music fading behind us as the hedge rose along one side. Hawk’s angle disappeared first and I knew exactly when it happened because Raven told me.
“Lost visual from north. I still have slight visual and audio.”
I looked toward the open side of the cabana. “I’m right below the terrace.”
Wolf answered. “That’s far enough.”
Luca turned and walked back. “Coming?”
I smiled. “You keep promising interesting people. I’m starting to think this is a scam.”
“You wound me.”
“Apparently that’s our thing. And you never actually formally introduced him.”
Luca glanced after Kade and smiled. “That’s because he doesn’t ‘actually formally’ do names.”
He let his hand find my lower back again. Wolf inhaled over comms without saying a word, but the small sound was enough to tell me he had noticed, and the realization sent a pulse of panic through me right before we caught up to Kade.
The two men waiting by the second cabana looked different from the rest of the party.
One wore linen and a watch that probably required a safe.
The other wore civilian clothes but stood with his weight distributed too evenly, checking the path behind us often enough that I filed him immediately as security.
The conversation returned to Italian. A driver had been removed, Morgenstern would replace him, there was a property near Ulm where staffing had become a problem and a vehicle would move Thursday instead of Friday.
Raven’s voice crackled slightly. “Repeat Ulm if you can.”
I found an opening. “You mean the Ulm property? I thought Morgenstern handled Austria.”
Luca looked at me. “You know them?”
“Only by reputation.”
“Then you know enough.”
Kade said something to the security man, too low for the microphone. I moved closer under the excuse of letting Sofia pass behind me.
Wolf’s voice came in hard. “Back up.”
I ignored him.
“Mercer, move.”
Kade spoke again, still in a tone that I couldn’t catch. Luca asked a question that disappeared under a sudden rise in music from the terrace.
Raven cursed softly. “Didn’t get it.”
I took another step.
The security man looked directly at me.
My instincts tightened.
Then Kade said, finally louder than before, “Südweg.”
The name landed cleanly, and Raven responded at once. “Got it.”
That should have been enough, but a second later the signal broke and static filled my ear, cutting Raven’s voice into pieces.
“Mia... move... losing...”
Wolf came through once, colder than I had heard him all day.
“Mercer, get the fuck out of there.”
Then the audio vanished completely, leaving a sudden silence that felt enormous after having ARC pressed into my ear all afternoon.
No Raven breathing quietly over a laptop, no Wolf ordering me around, no Hawk confirming another angle and no Viper telling me he was moving closer.
There was only the music above us and Sofia talking beside me while the men around the cabana had no idea I had just lost every person positioned to protect the lie I was standing inside.
I became acutely aware of the transmitter against my hip with Kade only a few feet away and the security man looking at me again. I forced my shoulders to stay loose when Sofia asked whether I lived in New York full time and answered her as though nothing had changed.
Luca made a joke about Americans pretending Connecticut was not New York when it was convenient. I told him Italians were not allowed to criticize geography while calling everything north of Rome “Milan adjacent.”
He laughed, and my body kept performing even while my pulse climbed. Kade watched me through the exchange, then let his gaze drop briefly toward my right hip. The transmitter was hidden well enough that there was no reason he should know it was there, but the look still made my skin go cold.
I decided I had enough.
“I’m finding the bathroom before you people start another argument about logistics.”
Luca smiled. “Come back.”
“Convince me.”
I turned toward the path and kept walking toward the entrance I came in from with the silence still filling my ear.
Now completely out of the property, I walked further down, around the first hedge before a hand closed hard around my upper arm and pulled me off the visible path. I reacted on instinct, twisting toward the grip.
Wolf’s eyes met mine from inches away.
He had come up through the service side in full dark gear with the plate carrier stripped down enough to move quietly and the same black mask covering the lower half of his face.
His other hand caught my waist before I could stumble into the hedge.
Relief hit first, followed almost immediately by anger because his grip hurt.
“Let go.”
“Move.”
His voice was low enough that nobody above us would hear.
“I was moving.”
“Forty-eight seconds late.”
“I got Südweg.”
His fingers tightened around my arm.
“I don’t give a fuck what you got. Move.”
The words shocked me into silence. He had been mean to me from the moment we met but this was different. There was something underneath the anger that made his eyes look almost black.
“You’re hurting me.”
His grip loosened immediately without releasing me.
“Service route,” he said. “Now.”
I turned back and looked through the hedges, mere feet from where Kade was standing with Luca and Sofia right now.
Wolf followed my attention.
“Don’t.”
“He’s right there.”
“And you’re done.”
“We finally have him in front of us.”
“You had him. Then you ignored two extraction orders and vanished off comms.”
“For less than a minute.”
Wolf stepped close enough that the front of his carrier almost touched me.
“You think the clock matters when I can’t fucking hear you?”
The question came out so quietly that it felt worse than shouting. I stopped walking and his eyes held mine for one second longer. Then the operator in him returned over whatever had just broken through.
“Move, Mercer.”
I did.
We cut through the service path where Viper waited near a maintenance gate in plain dark clothes with a compact weapon concealed beneath a light jacket. He looked at Wolf once, then at me, and apparently decided questions could wait.
Raven’s voice burst back into my ear as soon as we cleared the dead area.
“Oh my God.”
The relief in it was obvious enough that I felt guilty for approximately half a second.
“Hi.”
“Do not hi me.”
Jackal came onto the channel. “Mercer alive?”
“Yes.”
“Great. I had twenty on Bear carrying her out, so this is financially disappointing.”
Bear said, “Shut the fuck up.”
Viper muttered, “Focus.”
We reached the vehicle behind the service road where Bear had positioned it beyond the estate cameras. Wolf opened the rear door and pointed inside without speaking. I climbed in because arguing on the road would have proved every terrible thing he thought about me. He followed and shut the door.
Raven was in the front passenger seat now, tablet balanced against the dash. The moment the vehicle moved, he began reading back what the system had captured.