Kraken
The walk up the path stays quiet. She doesn't fill the silence with chatter the way she usually does, and somehow that's worse. I'm aware of every step she takes beside me. The wet fabric of her dress. The salt drying on her skin.
I get her settled in the side room off the operations center and post two prospects on the door. I don't look at her when I leave. I've already looked too much today.
The meeting runs long. Too many names, not enough proof.
The room stays hot. I split my attention the way I always do when things are wrong.
I keep one ear on the table, one on everything else.
Mace runs down the logs. Ghost leans against the back wall with his arms crossed and his eyes moving over every face.
Razor sharpens his blade with the slow scrape that means he's bored, which means he's dangerous. Diesel stares into his glass.
"Finn's got a cousin in Miami," Razor says. "Cartel adjacent."
"Could be nothing," Mace says.
"Could be everything," Ghost answers.
I slam my fist on the table. Bottles rattle. "I want names and I want proof. Pull every brother who touched that run. If it's inside it bleeds tonight." I scan the room. "Where's Finn?"
"Haven't heard from him since the night of the shipment."
"Then we start there." I look at Ghost. "Double the west perimeter. I want eyes that don't blink." He inclines his head. "Done."
Mace rubs his beard. "What about the girl?"
Every man in the room looks at me. I feel the weight of it. Whether she's an asset or a liability. Whether Gunny's debt means anything against the cost of keeping her here.
"She stays under my watch," I say. "She's connected to the threat. That means she stays close until we know how." I look around the table. "She's off limits. Anyone looks at her wrong answers to me."
The room rumbles agreement.
I slam the gavel down. The meeting ends. Brothers file out. Mace stays.
"You good, Prez? You seem—"
"I'm fine. Get Finn's financials pulled by afternoon.”
He nods and leaves. I give him thirty seconds and then I walk to the side room.
The prospects straighten when they see me. "Any trouble?"
"No Prez. She was quiet mostly. Spent a while staring at the operations screens through the window though. Kept writing things down."
I look at them. "Writing what?"
"Don't know. On a napkin."
I push the door open. Tia’s at the small table, the napkin in front of her. She's drawn what looks like a branching diagram—lines connecting to circles, numbers beside each one. Her hair has dried into loose waves. The sundress clings in places it shouldn't.
She looks up. "Meeting go okay?"
I step inside and pick up the napkin. She lets me take it. The diagram is a rough timeline. It shows the camera feed gaps marked at intervals, with question marks where the pattern breaks. She's mapped it spatially, the way someone would if they thought in data rather than in gut feeling.
"Where did you get these timestamps?" I ask.
"The screens in your meeting room. I could see two feeds through the window.
I wasn't snooping." She pauses. "Okay I was a little snooping.
But look, the gaps aren't random. There's an interval.
Eleven minutes between each dropout. Exactly eleven.
That's not a jammer. A jammer would be continuous or proximity-triggered. This is scheduled."
I look at the diagram. Then back at her.
She's right. The thought lands flat and certain. Whoever killed the cameras set a timer, which means they needed to get in and out within a specific window, which means they knew exactly how long the handoff took. That's not cartel muscle. That's someone inside who knows our rotation.
I set the napkin down.
"I'll have someone look at it," I say.
Her chin comes up slightly. "I am someone."
The room goes quiet between us. She holds my stare without flinching. There’s no nervous joke to defuse it, no biting her lip. Just waiting to see what I do with that.
I want to close the four feet between us. I want to tell her she's the sharpest person I've let inside this compound in three years and that terrifies me more than the cartel does. I want to do something about the way she looked at me on the beach today.
Instead I pick up the napkin and fold it once.
"Stay in the compound," I say. "I mean it this time."
I leave before she can answer. The hallway is cooler. I unfold the napkin in my hand without looking at it again. I already have it memorized.
Eleven minutes. Scheduled. Someone inside.
She walked onto my compound twenty-four hours ago and spotted something three of my best men missed.
That's the problem with Tia November. She keeps being more than I'm ready for.