Chapter 10 – Cyril
The study is too quiet.
Even the fucking clock has stopped ticking.
The only thing on my desk is a single notecard. Plain. Cream-colored. My name for him written in black ink, my own handwriting looping across the top like a challenge.
Kai Crane – Crane Properties, Inc.
That’s it.
No numbers. No address. Just a name and a company too clean to be real.
I flip it over again and again. The edges are soft now from how long I’ve been at this. I tap the corner against the polished wood, a slow rhythm keeping time with the thoughts grinding behind my eyes.
Enya’s voice floats in, uninvited. From the balcony.
“He’s just a real estate agent.”
Right.
And I’m a fucking stockbroker.
Real estate agents don’t walk like that, nor do they stare down a room like they’re weighing exits. They don’t put their hand on a woman’s back like they own them.
They definitely never look at me with menace in their eyes. Real estate agents worship me. They know that if I buy a property, I can turn them into millionaires within hours.
I crack my knuckles just to hear something break.
I rise from my chair and head toward the elevator hidden behind the bookshelf. The panel shifts with a soft click, revealing the path down to where the real decisions get made.
The Vault lives under fifty feet of reinforced concrete, beneath my estate, behind a biometric lock, and past three men with guns. It’s not a room. It’s not even a bunker.
It’s where the world bleeds when I say it should.
The lights flash on overhead, cool, sterile strips that cast a dull glow on the maps and monitors spread out across the war table. It smells like steel, sweat, and secrets in here.
Alvise’s already waiting, leaning back with his boots up, arms crossed like he owns the place.
Gael’s perched in the corner, with a black jacket, gloved hands, and eyes like a hawk.
Aldo, my tech and intel chief, is flipping through three monitors with split screens and digital footprints blinking like Christmas lights. He’s lean and sharp-eyed, with fingers that move faster than most men can think. I found him when he was seventeen, after he broke into one of our encrypted networks for fun. Didn’t even try to hide it. Just left a signature in the code like it was graffiti. I fired my old head of cyber on the spot and hired Aldo that same night. Best decision I ever made.
“You want this guy followed?” Alvise asks without looking up.
“I want him dissected,” I say, voice low. “Every connection. Every client. Every slip of paper. I want to know what he had for breakfast in 2009.”
Alvise whistles, low and sharp. “Alright, then.”
“Any reason we should be worried?” Aldo asks.
I meet Aldo’s eyes. “He’s close to someone I care about. That’s enough.”
Alvise tilts his head. I can feel the question he doesn’t ask. Doesn’t need to. He knows.
“What do we know so far?” I snap.
Aldo gestures to the screen. “Crane Properties has no financial debt. None. Not even a delayed payment. That alone is suspicious. He’s been involved in over a dozen real estate deals in the last two years, but none of them show up on standard state databases.”
“Shells?”
“Layered. Thornbridge Capital handles most of the funding. They’ve changed names four times in three years. And that last name?” He clicks, zooms. “Thornbridge used to be Maven Global Holdings.”
Alvise curses under his breath. “Maven? Fiore’s shell.”
“Exactly.”
I let that sink in.
I’ve dealt with Fiore’s games before. Quiet, slow, patient. Like a snake curling in the grass, waiting for the perfect ankle.
Not this time.
“Start tailing him,” I say. “Quiet. I want eyes on him at all hours. I want to know who he’s fucking, who he’s paying, and who he thinks won’t turn on him.”
“No contact?” Aldo asks.
“None,” I snap. “If he twitches wrong, I want to know where the nerve ends.”
Gael steps forward, nodding. “I’ll take it. Daylight surveillance. You’ll never know I was there.”
“Good.”
My eyes fall back to the card on the desk, the name I can’t shake.
At the gala, Alvise asked me if I wanted him to dig into Crane. I told him no. I wasn’t going to obsess over a man Enya clearly has history with. I didn’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want to let jealousy cloud judgment.
But now? Now I’m not so sure.
He rubs me the wrong fucking way. Everything about him feels manicured to perfection. And people like that are not who they’re pretending to be.
I walk to the glass board mounted behind my desk and pick up the black marker.
I write his name in bold, capital letters.
CRANE
“I’ve let strangers into my world before,” I say quietly. “It cost me blood.”
I set the cap back on the marker.
Click.
“I won’t pay that price again.”
My phone buzzes.
I pull it out without thinking, ready to ignore whoever the hell is trying to pull my attention, until I see her name.
Enya.
The message is short, casual, but it hooks me.
Enya: Just a heads-up: Ren scraped his elbow running through the hall. Nothing serious. He insisted I send you this.
There’s a photo.
Ren, holding up a cartoon Band-Aid like it’s a Purple Heart. He’s smiling, proud, even though there’s a smear of dried blood on his arm. That kid. Tough as hell when he wants to be.
I stare at the screen longer than I should. Type out three different responses. Delete them. Try again.
Finally, I settle on:
Me: Tell him he’s tougher than half my crew.
A second later, she replies with a laughing emoji and a quick: Will do.
That’s it.
Just that.
And still, my chest tightens.
I don’t fucking have time for this.
I shove the phone face down on the desk and turn back to my screens. Stock reports. Asset transfers. A half-dozen emails flagged urgent by people who never learned in school what that word means.
I answer two. Forward another to my broker. Flag the rest for later.
But I’m not focused.
I keep thinking about that Band-Aid. That smile. That fucking emoji.
When the Vault door opens again, I don’t even look up. Not until Alvise slams his iPad down like he’s slamming a fucking gavel.
“You were right to dig.”
I raise a brow. “That right?”
He taps the screen. “Crane’s holding company bought two properties in the last six months. Both near our shipping lanes. One of them’s across the street from our Red Hook warehouse.”
I swipe through the records. It’s all there. Too fucking convenient.
Alvise leans in, voice low. “That building? The one in Red Hook? Got flagged in a Fiore hit report a month ago. We never confirmed the source of the breach.”
I stare at the screen. My blood’s gone cold.
“Coincidence?” I ask.
“Or cover.”
“Guy’s got no official underworld ties. No priors. No flags.”
“Then he’s hiding it real fuckin’ well,” Alvise says.
I nod, not trusting myself with words.
“He’s not who he says he is,” I mutter. “And I’m going to find out why.”
Alvise leans on the table, brows drawn tight. “If that’s the case, and he’s hidden himself this well so far…why the hell show up at the gala?”
I sigh, dragging a hand over my jaw. “That’s the part that doesn’t make sense.”
“Too public. Too exposed. That’s not the move of someone trying to stay invisible.”
“Exactly.” I glance back at the board, my gut twisting. “He had to know I’d be watching. That I’d notice. So, why risk it?”
Alvise narrows his eyes. “You think he came for you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” I shake my head. “Maybe it was about Enya. Maybe it was about someone else in that room. Or maybe the arrogant son of a bitch was just curious.”
We both fall silent.
But the anticipation in the room spikes like a live wire.
Because nothing about Kai Crane is adding up.
And in our world, when someone doesn’t fit, it usually means they’re bad news.
Later, when the Vault is cleared and the night has gone quiet, I sit alone in my office.
The board still glows under the lamp.
I grab the marker again and draw a thick line beneath CRANE.
And I write:
CONNECTED TO FIORE?
Then, I light a cigarette. The flame flares, steady and calm, as I bring it to the end. I inhale deeply, let the smoke burn through my lungs like gasoline catching fire. It doesn’t soothe me, it never fucking does, but the bite is familiar. Grounding.
The ember glows bright. Hot and controlled. Like me. Like what I’ve trained myself to be when the rest of the world wants to see me snap.
I stare at the glass board across the room. At his name. At the red circle around it now. My handwriting looks like a threat.
“I don’t care if he’s just a man with secrets…or a soldier with orders,” I mutter into the quiet.
I lean back in my chair, but there’s no comfort in it. This man is bothering me, and it’s not just how he made me feel when he kept touching Enya; it’s the way he kept stealing glances at me while doing it, like he was fucking trying to prove he owns her.
“If he touches what’s mine, I’ll burn his world to the fucking ground. And I’ll do it slow.”