Chapter Eleven Leone
The morning starts well. That should have been my first warning.
Alexandra is at the desk by seven, coffee in one hand, pen in the other, already deep in the Apex Meridian files.
I watch her from the bed for a few minutes before she notices.
She's muttering to herself, circling figures, drawing lines between entries.
Her hair is piled on top of her head in a messy knot, and she's in a spaghetti strap that accentuates her curves, and the sight of her bare legs crossed beneath the desk makes it difficult to think about anything that involves leaving this room.
But the war doesn't pause for bare legs.
I dress, holster my weapon, and stop behind her chair on my way out. My hand finds the back of her neck, thumb pressing into the muscle where tension lives. She tips her head back and looks up at me, upside down, and smiles.
"Find anything new?" I ask.
"Hard to tell. The logistics subsidiary, the one moving weapons off the books, their shipping manifests overlap with three known Castillo resupply dates. Not approximately. Exactly. Same ports, same carriers, same twenty-four-hour windows." She taps the page. "It seems like a supply chain."
I lean down and kiss her forehead. "Write it up. I'll take it to Aurelio after the convoy briefing."
"Be careful."
"You keep saying that."
"You keep needing to hear it."
I leave with her voice in my head and her scent on my skin and the steady, grinding awareness that every hour she spends unraveling Apex Meridian is another hour closer to whoever is behind it realizing she needs to be silenced.
The convoy briefing is standard. Resupply run to the north warehouses.
Weapons, ammunition, medical supplies. Three vehicles, eight soldiers, a route that's been cleared and scouted twice.
Claudio is running point. I'm overseeing from the mobile command post three miles out, close enough to respond if things go sideways, far enough to maintain strategic oversight.
I don't like leaving the compound. Every time I step outside these walls, the distance between me and Alexandra becomes a variable I can't control. But Aurelio needs me operational, not hovering, and the terms of his approval were clear: the war takes priority.
So I go.
The first hour is clean. The convoy moves north on schedule, no contact, no complications. I sit in the back of an armored SUV with a laptop and a radio, tracking their progress on a map while Emilio drives and cracks jokes I don't laugh at.
"You're extra fun today," Emilio says, glancing in the rearview.
"Drive."
"I'm saying, for a guy who finally got laid, you're remarkably tense."
I look up from the laptop. He raises both hands off the wheel in surrender, then quickly puts them back.
"Driving," he says. "Driving and shutting up."
The convoy reaches the first checkpoint at 10:15. All clear. Claudio reports in, voice flat and professional. No contact. No surveillance. Clean run.
That's when my phone rings.
Not the operational line. My personal phone. The one only three people have the number for.
I answer.
"Leone." It's Aurelio. His voice is wrong. Not angry. Not panicked. Controlled in a way that means something terrible has happened and he's already past the reaction phase. "The compound has been hit."
The blood drains from my face.
"When?"
"Fifteen minutes ago. East gate breach. Professional team. In and out in under four minutes."
"Alexandra."
The silence on the other end lasts two seconds. It feels like twenty years.
"She's gone, Leone."
The world goes white.
Not metaphorically. My vision actually blanches, the color washing out of everything. The interior of the SUV, the laptop screen, Emilio's face in the rearview. All of it drains to pale grey, and I can't hear anything except a high, thin ringing in my ears.
Emilio is speaking. His mouth is moving but the words aren't reaching me. I stare at the phone in my hand and watch my fingers tighten around it until the case creaks.
"Leone." Aurelio's voice, cutting through the static. "Did you hear me?"
"I heard you."
"Come back to the compound. Now."
I hang up.
"Turn around," I tell Emilio.
He looks at me in the mirror. Whatever he sees makes him slam the brakes, wrench the wheel, and execute a U-turn that throws me against the door. He doesn't ask questions. He drives.
I call Claudio. "Abort the convoy. Get back to the compound."
"What happened?"
"They took her."
Silence. Then: "How long ago?"
"Fifteen, twenty minutes."
"That's not enough time to get her out of the city. If we move now—"
"I know. Move."
I hang up and open the laptop. My hands are steady. My mind is clear. The white-out has passed, replaced. Something cold and sharp and utterly focused. The way the world looks through a rifle scope. Everything extraneous falling away until only the target remains.
They took her.
They came to my compound, killed my men, and took the woman I love.
The word surfaces without permission. Love. I haven't said it to her. Haven't said it to anyone since Dahlia. But it's there, hard and undeniable, sitting in my chest like a second skeleton. Structural. Load bearing. Remove it and everything collapses.
I love her. And someone took her from me.
I'm going to get her back. And then I'm going to kill everyone involved. Not quickly. Not cleanly. I'm going to take them apart the way they tried to take apart my life, and I'm going to make sure the last thing they see is my face.
The compound is chaos.
Two guards dead at the east gate. Clean shots, suppressed weapons, double taps to the head. Professional. The two men assigned to my quarters are crumpled in the hallway outside the door, same execution-style kills. Whoever did this moved through the compound like ghosts. Four minutes. In and out.
I crouch beside the first guard. Ricci. Twenty-six. Wife and a daughter. I assigned him to this post personally because he was steady, reliable, the soldier who followed protocol without needing to be reminded. He's lying on his side with his hand still on his holster. He never even drew.
The second guard is face down. Santos. Older, ex-military, a man who survived three tours overseas and ended up dying in a corridor because I wasn't here to stop it.
The entry wounds are precise. Whoever pulled the trigger was trained to kill quickly, cleanly, without wasted motion.
Military background. Possibly private sector.
The operator a tech and weapons company would have on retainer.
I step over their bodies and push open the door.
The room hits me like a fist.
The desk is overturned. Documents scattered across the floor, pages torn, her coffee cup shattered against the wall. The coffee is still warm. I press my fingers to the puddle spreading across the hardwood and feel the heat, and the sensation travels up my arm and settles in my chest like a coal.
She was here. Thirty minutes ago she was sitting at this desk in my shirt, pen between her teeth, muttering about shipping manifests. Alive and sharp and brilliant and mine.
There are signs of a struggle. A chair knocked sideways.
Scratches on the hardwood near the bed, like someone was dragged.
She fought. Of course she fought. Alexandra doesn't go quietly.
I can picture it. The door bursting in. Her on her feet before the first man reached her, throwing the coffee, the chair, anything within reach.
Making them work for it. Making them bleed.
But no blood on the floor that isn't from the coffee. They took her alive.
I pick up the overturned chair and set it right. I don't know why. Some reflex toward order, toward fixing what's broken. The chair sits upright in the middle of the destroyed room and looks absurd.
On the floor near the bed, I find one of her hair ties.
Black elastic, stretched out from use. She wound her hair up with it this morning while I watched from the bed.
The memory is so sharp it cuts. Her arms lifted, neck exposed, that messy knot forming at the crown of her head.
She caught me watching and smiled. That smile.
The one that's both challenge and invitation.
I pick up the hair tie and put it in my pocket.
I stand in the middle of the room and let the recalibration happen. It takes less time than I expected. The man who walked out of this room three hours ago had priorities. The war. Aurelio. The organization. All of it ranked and ordered and managed with the discipline of twenty years.
That man is gone.
The man standing here has one priority. One target. One reason to keep breathing. He has a black elastic in his pocket and the smell of her shampoo still in his sheets and a hollow in his chest where something vital used to be.
Then I pick up a torn page from the floor. Her handwriting. The Apex Meridian notes, the shipping manifests, the connections she'd been mapping all morning. They're scattered everywhere, trampled, some of them missing. Whoever took her took the documents too.
This wasn't the Castillo’s acting on impulse. This was whoever runs Apex Meridian removing a threat.
Aurelio is in the war room. He stands at the head of the table, hands flat on the surface, flanked by two senior captains. His face is granite.
"Sit down," he says.
I don't sit. "What do we know?"
"Six-man team. Entered through the east gate using a cloned access card.
Took out the perimeter guards with suppressed weapons, moved through the east corridor, reached your quarters in ninety seconds.
The compound's external cameras caught them loading her into a black van. No plates. No markings."
"The internal cameras?"
"Disabled. Remotely. Every feed in the east wing went dark sixty seconds before the breach."
Apex Meridian. Their backdoors, their access, their surveillance network. They didn't watch the compound. They weaponized it. Used our own systems to blind us at the exact moment they needed us blind.
"The van?" I ask.