Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MORGAN
By two in the afternoon, I know something is wrong.
I don’t realize it all at once; it settles into me gradually. The office hums with its usual noise—phones ringing, keyboard clicking, and the distant murmur of staff conversations. On the surface, everything is operating exactly as it should.
But she still hasn't come back yet.
Constance is rarely absent from my awareness. Even when she’s not physically in the room, I know where she is.
I check the time again.
She left this morning on errands. I know that they were personal errands that I can only assume have to do with Chance. But she also said she’d make a stop to hand-deliver documents, get them signed, and return them back to me. She should’ve been back already.
I tell myself I’m being impatient. She could be stuck in traffic, or ran into an old friend. Hell, she could have decided to treat herself to a mani/pedi.
But I know how she works, and Constance Hale would've notified me if she was running behind or not coming back in.
That’s the problem.
I call her; it rings longer than I like. Once. Twice. Three times. Voicemail.
My jaw tightens.
I hang up and call again immediately, irritation flaring first because irritation is easier than acknowledging the slow tightening in my chest.
It rings and rings until I once again get her voicemail.
I set the phone down carefully instead of throwing it, because I still have a sliver of control.
I open my laptop and pull up the security portal. Constance’s phone has GPS, and I should be able to easily see her location. I’ve never checked it before and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier instead of nearly chucking my phone against the wall.
The map loads slowly, pixel by pixel, until a single dot appears.
Okay…see, Morgan, she’s downtown in a parking garage. Totally reasonable…expected.
I lean back in my chair and fold my arms, staring at the blinking icon as if it might start moving simply because I’m watching it.
Five minutes pass.
Then ten.
The dot doesn’t shift.
I refresh the system.
Still there.
I check the timestamp and see the signal is still live, with no battery failure and no dead zone warning to explain why it hasn’t moved.
Fifteen minutes.
Twenty.
The feeling in my chest shifts, losing its edge of irritation and settling into something heavier that drops low in my gut and stays there.
No one sits in a parking garage for twenty damn minutes.
I don’t waste another second.
Most city garages operate on third-party security networks. Most of those networks are poorly protected because no one thinks anyone would bother hacking a parking structure. I’ve never been “no one.”
Within minutes, I’m inside their system.
Camera feeds flicker across my screen in a grid of concrete and fluorescent glare. Level one. Level two. Level three.
I find her car almost immediately.
It’s parked clean and centered between the lines, close to a support column in a slightly darker stretch of the structure. The driver’s side door is closed, windows intact, nothing outwardly damaged.
The only thing that looks askew, is that she’s not in the frame.
My pulse begins to thud harder against my ribs, not faster, but heavier.
My body goes very still. It’s not panic. Panic is loud and sloppy and wastes oxygen. What settles over me instead is something colder.
I close the laptop slowly and stand.
My office door opens harder than I intend, and I’m halfway down the hall before I can think better of it. By the time I reach the elevator, I’m already calling in a containment team.
“Downtown parking structure on Madison,” I say evenly into the secure line. “Seal it. Pull every feed. No local police. I want this internal until I decide otherwise.”
“Yes, Sir.”
The drive is silent except for the hum of the engine and the faint beat of whatever is playing low on the radio. Outside my windshield, the city moves exactly as it always does. It infuriates me how normal everything looks.
When I pull into the garage, the air smells like oil and concrete, and trapped heat. My men are already there. One of them approaches with a clear evidence bag.
Her phone rests inside it, the screen cracked faintly in the corner.
I take it from him and turn it over in my hand. “Witnesses?” I ask.
“None so far. A few vehicles moved through. But nothing that raised alarm.”
Which means practiced and planned.
I hand the bag back and look up at the security camera mounted in the corner of the concrete pillar.
“Pull every feed from the last three hours,” I tell them.
“I want angles from entry, exit, interior, everything. Every vehicle that came through, I want a plate, make, color, and tire tread if you can get it. Don’t assume anything is irrelevant. ”
They move immediately.
I walk to her car and crouch near the driver’s side door. No shattered glass or sign of forced entry. I stand slowly, jaw tight.
“They grabbed her close,” I say, mostly to myself. “She didn’t even get the door open.”
One of my techs calls my name from the portable monitor they’ve set up on the hood of a car. “We’ve got something.”
I walk over, jaw already tight.
He rewinds the footage and lets it play.
A large black cargo van rolls into the frame and parks across the garage from her vehicle, not close enough to draw attention, not far enough to lose sight of her. It sits there with no one getting in or out and no plates visible from this angle. The front windows are tinted darker than is legal.
Constance comes into view, walking toward her car with her phone in her hand, head slightly turned as if she’s about to make a call.
A door on the van slides open, and a man steps out wearing full tactical gear and a black mask that covers everything but his eyes. He crosses the distance between them in seconds and grabs her from behind, dragging her toward the van.
She fights. I can see it even in the grainy footage. Her legs kick, her body twists, and her phone, bag, and keys hit the concrete.
Another figure inside the van reaches out and helps haul her in.
The door slams shut.
They sit there.
Two minutes. For two long, excruciating minutes.
Then the van starts and peels out of the garage without hesitation.
The front windshield catches the light as it passes the camera. The driver is wearing a ski mask, hiding everything.
“No plates,” my tech says quietly. “Front or back. And nothing distinctive on the body. We can try to track it through traffic light cams and exterior street cameras once it exits.”
I stare at the frozen frame of the van as it turns toward the ramp.
“Do it,” I say. “Pull every intersection within a five-mile radius. Expand outward if you lose it. I want movement patterns, possible routes, toll sensors, anything.”
The image of her being dragged into that van burns into the back of my skull.
I get back into my car and shut the door harder than necessary. I pull my phone from my pocket and type a message to Miles.
Me: Any word on who pulled the background on Constance?
I hit send.
The bottom reads delivered. Minutes pass. No response.
Impatience burns through the edges of my restraint. I open the browser on my phone and log into the backend myself. I should’ve done this earlier instead of delegating it. That’s why I have a COO though, why I promoted him. To handle the messes before they hit the floor.
But this isn’t a mess…this is her.
I type in my password and pull the Westbridge files. It takes longer on my phone than it would on my office system, and I have to start over twice when the session times out. I grit my teeth and keep going. I scroll past old disputes, severed contracts, archived vendor notes.
Then I see her name.
Constance Hale.
Attached to a background inquiry.
We already knew that. So, I click deeper into the request routing page that tracks who initiated and approved the pull. The line is encrypted, masked behind authorization codes.
“Come on,” I mutter, fingers moving fast across the screen.
It takes me a minute to break it. I have to reroute through a secondary administrative access I haven’t used in years. My phone screen is too small and I nearly miskey the override twice. I slow down and focus.
The encryption cracks.
And there, staring back at me in bold black letters, is the one name I never expected to see.
Miles Hunt.
“What the fuck?” I whisper.
The words barely make it past my teeth.
Why is Miles digging into Constance? And if he was, why didn’t he say something when I confronted him this morning? Why play it off? Why point at Westbridge?
Something’s wrong.
I open a secondary window and start digging through Miles’ internal digital footprint at Nocturne. Every authorization he’s signed in the last six months. Every approval, inquiry, and person he’s handled.
My stomach rolls and rage like I’ve never felt before washes over me.
There it is.
The document Constance read.
The one that I’d put money on started this entire chain reaction.
It wasn’t an external manipulation, but it sure the fuck was an internal issue.
It was Miles.
My grip tightens around the phone until my knuckles ache.
When Constance read the forged document, she became visible. When I had her fire the secretary and take that position herself, she became interesting.
Miles must not have anticipated how fast I would connect the dots. Or maybe he did and thought I wouldn’t care enough to look this deep.
The forged document wasn’t the only one.
I scroll further.
There are more authorizations buried under financial restructuring language. Movement orders disguised as asset recovery. Civilian designations flagged as operational liabilities.
He’s been moving people…children. Anyone willing to pay enough and keep their mouth shut.
He didn’t care about the lines I drew. He didn’t care about the limits I enforced. He cared about revenue streams and deniability.
My breathing slows.
This is not the moment to explode.
This is the moment to dismantle.
I don’t call Miles.
I log into executive controls and begin severing him quietly.
Accounts frozen, access revoked, internal communications restricted, and authorization tiers downgraded under the guise of system recalibration.
I reroute his clearance requests to a holding queue he won’t see until he tries to use them.
I isolate him piece by piece without alerting him to the cage forming around him.
Then I initiate a sweep.
Every property Miles has touched financially in the last three years comes up on my screen in a slow, methodical scroll: shell trusts, off-ledger holdings, storage units, remote parcels bought and forgotten.
It takes less than five minutes for the system to start feeding me what I need, lines of data stacking in quiet succession until one address lights up brighter than the rest. A low-use residential property with utilities active but barely registering, power draw is consistent yet irregular.
It’s exactly the kind of place someone would choose to hide something they never planned on explaining, or someone they never intended to give back.
I start the engine before the sweep finishes processing.
If he took her, he wouldn’t put her somewhere obvious. He wouldn’t leave her where I could trace her easily.
But this is the first lead.
I pull up to the property twenty minutes later. It’s forgettable, with faded siding and overgrown shrubs.
Two of my men pull in seconds after I do, and we breach clean, moving through the house with disciplined efficiency that confirms what I already feel in my gut. It’s empty, not staged or ransacked, just abandoned in a way that speaks of time rather than haste.
Dust lines the baseboards undisturbed, old furniture sits exactly where it was left, the refrigerator hums around nothing but stale air, and there’s no bedding in the closets, no recent imprint of life.
The place smells closed up and forgotten, like a structure that has been waiting for someone who never came back.
It’s a dead end, but it’s not meaningless.
It tells me Miles planned, built buffers, scattered locations like breadcrumbs meant to mislead.
This house was insurance or a decoy, which means Constance was never meant to be found on the first sweep.
I step back out onto the porch and look across the empty street, the quiet neighborhood giving nothing away, and I let my mind shift from reaction to precision.
I won’t panic. I need to strategize, and focus on the endgame. Where I’ll dismantle him piece by deliberate piece until I find exactly where he put her.