Chapter 25 - Jag
Four walls, no windows, and a single door bolted from the inside. This is my confession booth. A concrete tool shed behind an abandoned house on a dead-end road that no one visits.
Just a couple of blocks from the tattoo shop, dead freight piles up outside. Busted pallets lean against the weathered blue exterior.
Blue princess.
Nobody looks twice.
Inside, though? Inside is mine. Stacks of towers. Rows of monitors. Thirty eyes, all open and unblinking.
Here lies the equipment Wolf asked to see.
My hunting ground.
I lean back in the chair, fingers spidering over the keyboard, pulling up feeds.
Thanks to Frankie Strakh, I can type with both hands again, only slightly limited by the splint on my wrist.
The screen on my left streams in real time, showing footage from the street outside this room. The one above it loops through the morning hours, time stamp after time stamp.
All the rest, dozens of displays, monitor Dove’s walking paths to the mechanic shop, inside the garage bays, the deli where she grabs lunch, the private slips where she comes and goes by yacht. Every angle of her little Alaskan life recorded in grainy black-and-white.
Except the island. The Strakh fortress is impenetrable.
For everyone but me.
I take grim satisfaction in knowing which island is theirs and how to breach the security.
But I’m backed into a corner. If I drag her out now, I’ll lose the bodyguards who are protecting her. If I leave her there, I’ll lose her to Wolf.
Either way, one of us gets hurt.
Better me than her.
She’s safe with the Strakhs. Safer than she ever was with Gavin.
Safer than she is with me.
I hate that.
Since the night I butchered our parents’ murderer, I’ve been on the run, using fake names everywhere, from Colombia to Bangkok, across borders and burner phones.
But Sitka Tattoo carries my real name. A signal flare in the night.
Not because I want to be found, but because I want to see who’s brave enough to come looking.
Last year, the feds found me in California. But the tail on Dove yesterday and today? That wasn’t government-issued.
A far deadlier threat has arrived in Sitka, and I’m not ready. I don’t have the money or manpower to win this war.
It’s time to call in a favor.
I reach for a burner phone and hesitate, the splint on my wrist transporting me back to this morning.
The shape of Wolf’s mouth against mine, the taste of his defiance, the punishing hand job, the way he didn’t pull away, and the moment I realized he isn’t just another mark.
There’s no denying it. He was into it, into me, and goddammit, I didn’t want him to leave.
My fever took hours to break, but I wanted another round with that complicated dark angel and his vicious hands. More conversation, more heat, more of that razor-wire tension that makes me feel alive. But he bolted. Like I knew he would.
Did he run straight to Dove? Put his cruel mouth all over her? Shove his virgin cock up between her legs? Slack all that wild hunger I stirred in him?
Grinding my teeth hard enough to crack enamel, I shove closer to the keyboard and click back to earlier footage, the minutes after he fled the shop.
Where are you, Wolf? Where did you go?
There.
I scrub forward, camera by camera, and watch him stagger down the street. Shoulders tight, gait unsteady, he walks like his legs don’t trust him, like he’s drowning in air.
What the hell is wrong with him?
When he heads to the harbor, I split the feed between two angles. At the entrance, he stumbles, falling down the embankment and tucking under the pier, knees pulled to his chest, and arms wrapped around his skull.
Small as I’ve ever seen him. Like a child hiding from the belt. Shaking, clutching his hair, mouth open on a sound the recording doesn’t capture.
But I feel it. Real, unguarded, paralyzing panic. He’s having a full-blown attack.
A vein throbs in my temple.
I should enjoy this. I should take notes and catalog the weakness. Watch, record, exploit. Every tic, every flinch, every strangled gasp is ammunition. That’s what I do, what I’ve always done to protect my little bird.
But I’m not cataloging. I’m staring with a hundred-pound lump in my throat.
He tries to get up. Tries to board the yacht. The crowd presses too close. Someone bumps into him, and he snaps like a wild dog, snarling and baring his teeth.
People scatter. He bites at the air, chest heaving, face half-mad.
It’s brutal. But it’s not weakness. It’s a wound that never closed.
I drag my hand down my mouth, my stomach swarming with bile. I did this. I triggered something terrible and ripped open that wound.
The violent churn in my chest shouldn’t be there.
He’s not my problem. Not my problem.
I slam the keyboard and switch screens. Recordings flicker and bruise the dark as Wolf’s image peels away, replaced by this morning’s footage of Dove’s small, stubborn frame on another feed.
She’s the priority.
Whatever this is with Wolf—primal hunger, animal attraction, ferocious domination, whatever I call it to keep from sounding soft—it changes nothing.
I reach for the burner and set the hardware token into the cradle. When it chirps, the LED turns green, then amber. The VPN light on the chassis breathes a single blue pulse, and I breathe with it, tapping the sequence until the token spits a new code.
The line will hop through a dozen melt-points, a sat relay in the Aleutians, an encrypted node in Cartagena, a tunnel of offshore uplinks, and eventually, into the private mesh of The Shadow Collection.
It’s messy and dirty and will leave footprints for anyone with a microscope. But it will look like nothing if the right hands take it on the other end.
My fingers tremble. Stupid things. A whisper of sweat at the wrist. A tiny hitch in my thumb when I press.
I’m a careful man. Careful hands don’t shake. But this is different.
If I breathe wrong, these people will cleave my head from my body and mount it on a stake in the Bolívar Square. The scariest part? I won’t see them coming.
That’s why I’ve never dialed this number. Never been desperate enough to reach for this favor.
The burner coughs, negotiates, and settles into a slow, hungry ring. The light on the cradle beats as fast as my pulse.
I taste bile.
Servers hum. Cooling fans spin harder. I rub the hell out of my nape, bleeding tension from every joint. Until I hear it.
A click.
Then a voice, thick with accent and smoke. “?Quién habla?”
I let the silence lean for a heartbeat, a practiced pause to disguise my nerves. Then I supply the name they know me by.
“El Vigilante.”
“Ah. Sí, por supuesto. Hace rato te tengo en la mira, Vigilante.”
My Spanish is shit, but I don’t need it. I have a program at my fingertips, translating his words into English.
The voice belongs to a top dog in the Colombian cartel. I don’t know which dog, but he knows who I am. The cartel gave me this number after all.
“What do I call you?” I ask.
“Jefe.” Two purring syllables meant to disarm.
It’s rumored the cartel uses a decoy in every meeting and phone conversation. If the voice on the line claims to be the boss, there’s a good chance it’s not.
Matias Restrepo, the real jefe, remains elusive to anyone not paying attention.
But I’ve always paid attention.
I was eighteen when I started selling pieces of myself to criminal organizations. Too young to be sentimental, too desperate to care, and too clever to be honest about it.
I didn’t stumble into human sex trafficking so much as trade my hacker skills in small, soulless auctions.
Who would’ve thought the hours I wasted as a skinny gamer kid, balls-deep in code and cheat mods, would turn out to be such valuable currency in the dark net?
“Habla,” he purrs, seductive and threatening all at once. “?Qué quieres?”
I hear the danger behind the syllables, years of other men’s terror soaked into the simple question.
What do you want?
“I’m calling in that favor.” My mouth goes dry, but I keep my voice even.
The pause lasts long enough to count teeth. Then the man laughs, deep as a dug well, velveted with smoke, the edges worn by time and appetite.
“This favor is not a small thing,” he says in accented English. “You want to waste it on your pretty bird and her wolf?”
There it is. He knows as much about me as I know about them.
The Restrepo cartel and The Shadow Collection are the same machine. Most people don’t know it, but the jefe runs both.
Cocaine keeps the books fat, but flesh is easier to move across borders, harder to trace.
Nobody reports a missing girl from a nowhere village.
The cartel moves the product. The collection launders the bodies through ports and pipelines, and it all circles back to the same table where one man counts the profit.
At least, that’s the story they’re selling.
It goes so much deeper. But I don’t care about their ethics. I’m only interested in strengthening our partnership and using it to my advantage.
They control the global slave trade, and I sell them dirt and doors. They infiltrate enemy territories, and I give their runners access to move quietly. When a job goes south, I open holes to slip through, patching nodes, scrubbing traces, and tidying feeds.
I’ve met three names in person. The rest are voices, packets, and time stamps.
Twenty-two years of dirty work bought me more than a feared name in the black market. It bought a favor from one of the deadliest criminal groups in the world.
I attach myself to them because they’re the enemy of my enemy. I’ve always known that one day, I would need their reign of terror on my side.
That day is today.
“Yes.” My stomach hardens. “I need your help.”
“Sí, lo necesitas. Reconozco que te lo has ganado, Vigilante. ?Qué tanto te quemó para venir a mí?”
My fingers freeze, missing the translation. I’m too focused on that cadence, the tiny swallowed consonants, and the way his vowels curl at the end.
Oh, fuck.
There’s a distinct shape to the sound of that rumbling voice, not just a timbre but a posture.
I blink. The room tilts, and the air leaves me like a fist.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I’ve watched the cartel for years and listened to hours upon hours of surveillance. I memorized the smoky laugh threaded through static in Buenos Aires, the clipped consonants in the Austin recordings, and the deep intake before each execution is ordered.
It’s not data in a file for me. It’s an obsession with details. That’s what terrifies me now. Hearing the cadence, the unmistakable pattern, the pronounced pauses… I’m not speaking with a decoy.
Matias Restrepo, the most feared cartel capo in Colombia, is the voice on the other end of the line.
Every bargain I made with blood and code folds like a trapdoor. Every drop of humanity I’ve traded away has come due.
My throat chews. My pulse drums in my teeth.
“Respirá, Vigilante. Que los nervios no te delaten.” The mob boss exhales. “You saved mi vida. A debt is owed, and I deliver.”
Mi vida. The endearment he uses for his wife, Camila Dias.
Years ago, I pulled Camila out of a job gone sideways. With some spoofed IDs, forged metadata, and fake time stamps, I made her vanish from all surveillance cameras until she escaped the assassin on her tail.
Camila is no damsel in distress. She runs The Shadow Collection alongside her husband. But I saved her life that night, and the jefe hasn’t forgotten.
“We will talk terms,” he says, his accent silky dark and twice as lethal. “But not on the phone. You come to me.”
“That’s not… I’m…”
“Broke? Homeless? No plane? Out of time? Completely fucked?”
Yeah. All of those. Colombia is a long goddamn way from Alaska. How the hell does he expect me to come to him?
I grit my teeth, sort my voice out of a cluster of wrong ones, and keep it respectful. “Yes.”
“I’ll send for you.” He hangs up before I can reply.
Fuck me.
The cradle clicks down like a cocked gun, and my hands stop being hands. Frozen and shaking, I feel the splint against my wrist, the sweat beneath my forearm, and the struggle for breath that doesn’t come.
Dove’s footage loops before me, replaying her morning walk to work. I watch her breathe on the screen, and the cold, gnawing thing that is fear hardens into something useful.
Purpose.