Chapter 10. #2
"Where is your son right now?" Brian asked, the question a cold, hard bullet.
"Last I heard in Capo… he was in need of vacation," James said.
Brian smirked. "Capo, you say." John smirked, too.
He was already texting his people, a silent, knowing look on his face.
"Would it surprise you that your son has meddled in my business…
he had a kidnapping arranged that cost the life of one of my contractors' wives.
" There was silence on the other end of the phone, a heavy, tense quiet.
"Now, it should not come as a surprise to you that I have the resources to track down and bring your son Vargas to justice.
" John gave him a thumbs-up and showed him the text on his phone.
"In fact, right now, there is a special forces team on the way to drag his ass back to the US, and he will be standing trial for his crime. "
"Mr. Thomson, please… he is my only son," James begged, his voice a broken plea.
Brian growled, a low, animalistic sound of pure fury.
"And Tina Unling was a mother, a daughter, and a wife.
Your son made a choice. You should feel lucky that I'm having him brought here for justice.
I could have him killed." Brian's voice was a cold, venomous hiss.
"Now, your company had five contracts with me, and as far as I can see, consider them revoked.
You will be paid for the work done so far, but as for the future, Apex will never see another contract from Dranning or any of the companies under the Dranning Corporation. " He hung up before James could reply.
"I want him back in the US, unharmed… mostly," he said.
John nodded. "Mr. Thomson, I understand there is a complication with your contract. I know a guy… he has the biggest contractor business in Las Vegas."
Brian looked at Constance. She nodded. "Call him. Oh, and one more thing, John. Your daughters… they stay on my contract."
John smiled. He knew that both Gloria and Dani had an eye for him.
He nodded. "Yes, sir." He stood and walked out with Hannah, but she turned and looked back, a smirk on her face.
She saw the look on Dani's face, a mix of awe, shock, and a new, burning desire.
She leaned in and whispered, "You should fuck him.
" Dani looked into her sister's eyes, but Hannah just smiled and nodded, her own eyes filled with a new, dangerous admiration. Then she walked out.
---
Brian sat alone in the vast silence of his office, the soft glow of the dual monitors the only real light in the room.
It was nearly eleven o’clock. The rest of the tower had settled into the deep quiet that only came after dark in a building this large, this high above the city.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows the Los Angeles skyline glittered like a field of cold stars, but Brian barely saw it.
His eyes stayed fixed on the screen, scrolling through another wave of emails that never seemed to stop.
Most of them were routine now. Department heads reporting numbers.
Legal confirming the formal severance of every remaining Apex contract.
Public relations drafts already circulating for the statement he intended to make in the morning.
And then there was the one that mattered most…
the encrypted message from Kano Security that had arrived forty minutes earlier.
Vargas had been taken alive.
A special forces unit working under John Kano’s quiet coordination had extracted him from a private villa outside Capo.
No shots fired. No international incident.
Just a black bag, a private jet, and a one-way trip back to American soil where federal prosecutors and a media circus already waited.
Apex Builds would not survive the week. James Apex had already begun liquidating assets in a desperate attempt to distance himself from his only son. It should have felt like victory.
It did not.
Brian leaned back in the heavy leather chair and rubbed both hands over his face.
Three days. Tina Unling had been gone only three days, and she had already been dead before anyone at Dranning even knew she was missing.
The video still existed somewhere on Gloria’s secure servers…
grainy footage of a bound woman with bruises on her face and pure terror in her eyes.
Brian had forced himself to watch it once. He would never watch it again.
He returned to the half-finished statement open on the second monitor.
The Dranning Corporation will not negotiate with those who use violence and coercion against the families of our partners.
We will not lower our standards. Every structure we build…
whether a corporate tower or housing for those who have nowhere else to go…
will meet the same uncompromising safety requirements.
We do not cut corners. We do not bow to pressure.
And we do not forget the people who pay the price when others decide that human lives are acceptable collateral.
He typed another sentence, deleted it, typed it again. The words felt heavy. Necessary. Insufficient.
A soft knock broke the silence.
Brian did not look up. “Come.”
The door opened.
Gloria Kano stood in the frame, tall and composed even at this late hour.
She was still in the dark, tactical-leaning suit she preferred when she was on active duty…
the same sharp, practical cut that somehow managed to look both professional and quietly intimidating.
Her eyes swept the office once, professional and thorough, cataloguing every detail before they settled on Brian.
Dani had finally been ordered to rest. After nearly thirty-six straight hours on personal shadow duty, even her iron discipline had started to fray. Gloria had taken the overnight shift herself without complaint. Family first. The Kanos always covered their own.
She stepped aside.
Behind her stood one of the young maids.
Benita.
Brian had made a point of learning all their names in the first week.
It felt important somehow… small human details in a world that kept trying to turn everything into numbers and power.
Benita was twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, with warm olive skin and dark hair that was usually pinned up for work.
Tonight it was down, falling in soft waves past her shoulders.
She wore the standard French-maid uniform the staff preferred, the black fabric and white lace somehow both modest and impossible to ignore on her.
She carried a silver tray with a single crystal glass full of ice and an unopened bottle of expensive whiskey.
“Miss Mann thought maybe the boss needed something to relax him,” Benita whispered. Her voice was quiet, careful, but steady.
Gloria gave a small nod… permission, acknowledgment, quiet understanding.
The security team had gotten to know the household staff well over the past days.
They understood the unspoken rules of this floor.
Gloria stepped back into the hallway and closed the door softly behind her, leaving only the soft click of the latch and the knowledge that she would remain right outside, watching over both of them while her sister finally slept.
Benita crossed the thick carpet without a sound.
She set the tray down on the edge of the massive desk, close enough that the ice in the glass made a soft, crystalline sound.
Brian still had not looked up fully. His fingers remained on the keyboard, cursor blinking in the middle of a half-finished sentence about structural integrity and human cost.
She cracked the seal on the bottle with a clean twist. The soft pop of the cork was loud in the quiet room. She poured two fingers of the amber liquid over the ice, the whiskey catching the monitor light as it fell. Then her hand settled gently over his on the keyboard.
The touch was warm. Soft. Unexpected.
Brian finally looked at her hand, then up at her face.
Benita’s eyes were dark brown, almost black in the low light, and far more intelligent than most people ever bothered to notice.
Constance and Holly had both spoken to him quietly about her more than once.
She was not simply a maid. She had a degree she never talked about, a mind that missed nothing, and a quiet competence that made her valuable far beyond the uniform.
She was also, as every man on the staff had noticed and as Brian himself had been unable to ignore, a fucking dream on two legs…
curves that the tailored uniform only emphasized, a mouth made for smiling or other things, and a way of moving that was pure controlled grace.
She did not pull her hand away.
“You need to get some rest, Boss,” she whispered.
Brian’s voice came out rough. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
There was no judgment in the words, only quiet, steady fact.
“You’ve been in this chair for three days, Boss.
Three full days. The only time you’ve left this office is to walk down the hall to the bathroom and come straight back.
You haven’t showered. You haven’t slept more than a couple of broken hours in that chair.
You’ve barely touched the food we keep bringing you.
Constance is worried. Holly is worried. Gloria is worried. I’m worried.”
He opened his mouth to argue and stopped when she leaned in.
The kiss was soft. Testing. Her lips brushed his with almost no pressure at first, as if she were asking permission rather than taking anything.
The scent of her skin reached him… clean soap, a faint trace of something floral, and underneath it the warm, living scent of a woman who had been on her feet all day and still chose to come here.
Brian’s hands stayed where they were on the desk.
He did not deepen the kiss. He did not push her away either.
When she pulled back, only an inch, her forehead rested against his.