Chapter 20 In Plain Sight
In Plain Sight
Anton:
Through the gap between stacked containers, I watch the figure move. It flows through the shadows like water finding cracks. No wasted motion. No hesitation.
Professional.
My rifle scope tracks him as he approaches the tracker I left where I'd been standing minutes ago, when he thought he shot me.
I adjust my aim. Dead men don't talk.
Two clicks of acknowledgement come through my earpiece. Dominic and Alexei are ready at their positions, targeting lower.
"Now."
Gunfire erupts from three positions. The figure moves, dropping and rolling with reflexes that shouldn't be possible. He disappears behind a container stack.
Dominic's position goes silent first, then Alexei's. I'm already moving, keeping to the shadows, weapon ready. We converge on the tracker's location from different angles. Standard extraction protocol.
The ground where the figure fell is empty except for crushed metal and circuit board fragments.
I scan the container stacks, the narrow passages between metal walls, the darkness that feels suddenly too thick.
Every person associated with anyone I killed that night seven years ago came back clean.
Dead, relocated, or so thoroughly neutered they couldn't organize a vendetta if their lives depended on it.
But someone from that night is here.
That information was manufactured.
Movement catches my peripheral vision. The figure materializes between containers fifty meters out, standing there, facing me, shoulders loose. Confident.
Too confident.
My rifle comes up smooth, scope finding his thigh, finger moving to the trigger. Still aiming to immobilize. Still need answers.
Then, there's a sound above me. Not wind. Not metal settling—but a body dropping fast from the container roof. I track the movement, already pivoting. He's airborne, weapon raised, a knife, not a gun, descending with the full force of gravity and trained aggression.
My hand closes around a metal pipe propped against the container—two feet of solid steel, cold and perfect.
I swing as he drops, a controlled arc that catches his weapon arm mid-descent. The impact reverberates through my shoulders. His knife flies from his grip, clattering across concrete into darkness.
He lands hard but controlled, already rolling, trying to create distance. But I'm already on him.
The pipe hits his knee before he can stand. I hear a crack. He grunts, stumbles, and tries to turn on his good leg. I don't give him time. I swing the pipe again, this time catching his shoulder and sending him into the container wall. The metallic clang rings out across the shipping yard.
"Stay down," I say, my voice cold and steady. "Or the next one breaks your skull."
He slumps against the container, breathing hard, blood streaming from where his head hit the metal. But his eyes...
Green. Sharp. Familiar.
The Armenian from the warehouse. Sergei Petrosyan. "Gregor Markov sends his regards."
The name means nothing. Another ghost. Another manufactured lead in this elaborate fucking maze.
I take a step closer, pipe raised. "Who hired Markov? Who's pulling the strings?"
Petrosyan grins, teeth red. "You'll find out. When he takes what you love."
I lower the pipe with one arm and raise the gun with the other, my finger tightening on the trigger.
But dead men don't lead to their handlers.
Dead men don't dismantle networks. And whoever orchestrated this, whoever's been watching Fee, poisoning Moira, stealing shipments, manufacturing evidence, they're still out there.
"Boss." Alexei's voice cuts through my thoughts. "What should I do with this piece of shit?"
I study Petrosyan. The way he's holding himself against the container. The resignation in his eyes. He expects the bullet. Wants it, even. A quick death instead of what Ruslan does to people who know things.
Which means he knows things worth protecting with death.
"Ruslan's going to have a second session with this one, and this time, he's not going to hold back."
Petrosyan's eyes widen.
"Yuri. The shipment."
Static crackles before his voice comes through, flat and efficient as always. "Sitting exactly where it should be. The paperwork's altered but sloppy. Our guy rushed this one."
I know why he rushed it.
Fee.
The obsession I heard in those manufactured clues, the careful surveillance that tracked her movements, the intimate knowledge of her digital habits. This isn't about revenge or business. This is about wanting what's mine.
Yuri knows it, too. I can hear it in the micro-pause before he delivered his report, the slight edge that enters his voice when discussing threats to people he's claimed as part of his pack.
He won't say it out loud because he respects the hierarchy, respects that Fee is mine to protect, mine to worry about, mine to kill for.
But he sees it.
"Fee?"
"I'm here." Her voice floods my earpiece, raw and shaking. "I'm fucking happy to hear your voice. I was terrified."
Something in my chest shifts, feeling like tectonic plates are realigning around a new center of gravity.
"I'm coming back to you. It's a promise, my Solnishko."
"You better." Fire underneath the shake now. "Be unkillable like you said you are, or I'll kill you myself."
The corner of my mouth twitches. There she is. My fierce little sun who doesn't cry when men try to murder her, who hacks assassin networks, and demands answers instead of protection.
"Yuri." I switch back to tactical, forcing my mind into the cold calculation that keeps people alive. "You're sure he's only hearing and seeing what we want?"
"Da." No hesitation. "Comms are blocked and scrambled.
He's chasing shadows on a loop I fed his surveillance systems. As far as his monitoring shows, you're still stalking containers near sector three.
" Yuri's voice drops, which means he's about to deliver news I won't like.
"Lorenzo left the hospital. Furious. Soon as he heard about Moira's supplements.
Dimitri's tracking him, but that's an unpredictable variable now. "
Fuck.
Lorenzo Carlucci on a vengeance rampage is the kind of chaos that gets civilians killed and territories burned. He doesn't think tactically when the family's threatened. He thinks Old Testament.
"Yuri, keep Dimitri on him. And Fee, I still have to take you out on that dinner date."
"Boss." Viktor's voice joins. "Warehouse is empty. No secondary positions. No backup. Just the Armenian."
"Good work, Viktor. Watch the perimeter."
"Boss, the inventory check. We didn't crack every crate, but we sampled random containers from each pallet. Serial numbers match the manifest. Nothing obviously missing or replaced."
"Understood. Keep eyes on the area."
"Da."
I switch channels. "Hey, Yuri."
"Da."
"Update Connor. Tell him his shipment's intact."
Static crackles. "Will do. Connor just got back with his wife."
"Fee, are you still there?"
"Yes, I'm here." Her voice drops and goes soft. "My Anton."
Her words stop me mid-step.
"Say that again."
A pause. Then quieter, aware now that Yuri and Dominic and Alexei can hear every syllable through the open channel. "You heard me the first time."
"I did." I start moving toward the extraction point, weapon still ready, but my focus is split between danger and the woman on the other end of this line. "I want to hear it again."
"Greedy." There's a smile in her voice. Teasing. "Maybe when you get back, I'll say it as many times as you want. Just you and me. No audience."
Fuck. The promise in those words, the implication of what else she might say when it's just us.
She continues, "So maybe hurry up? Before I start thinking you don't actually want to hear me say it again."
I'm already moving faster.
"I'm heading to you now. Forty-five minutes. Maybe less if I ignore traffic laws."
"Ignore them." Fire underneath again. "I'll bail you out."
My mouth curves despite everything. She does this. Makes the darkness feel less absolute.
The SUV is in sight, Alexei inside. As I reach for the door, Yuri's voice cuts back in, sharp and sudden.
"Boss. Hartley just walked in."
My hand freezes. "To the hospital?"
I wrench the door open and slide into the passenger seat. One look at Alexei conveys everything.
His foot hits the accelerator before my door closes. The SUV lurches forward, tires screaming against concrete.
"Da. He's approaching Connor now."
This is strategy, desperation, or both.
He created a situation where Lorenzo's rage sent him hunting while we're scattered across the city. The shipment was easy to find. We got one of his men, five I've killed.
And now Hartley walks straight into a hospital crawling with Lorenzo's soldiers and mine. He's burning through assets like they're disposable.
He's adapting. And that makes him more dangerous.
Through the earpiece, I catch movement. Yuri had turned on an external mic so I could hear everything. Fabric rustles as he shifts position so I can listen to the conversation unfolding.
"Fee. Listen to me, Solnishko."
"I'm listening," Fee whispers.
"Stay exactly where you are. Don't move."
"Okay."
Hartley's voice cuts through the earpiece, "Connor. I wanted to personally assure you that the shipment's secure. After everything with Morrison, I know trust needs rebuilding."
Connor's voice comes carefully. "You drove here to tell me something you could've said over the phone?"
"In the past, Morrison dealt with you directly while I handled the background work. After his passing, meeting at the docks felt crucial. And today, coming here in person, it's about rebuilding that same foundation. Trust requires presence, not phone calls."
Face-to-face contact creates psychological bonds that encrypted communications can never match. It's how criminal networks survived before technology made everyone lazy and traceable.
"Just me," Hartley continues. "No intermediaries. No buffers. I want you to know I can be trusted, and I'll take all responsibility if something happens to the shipment."
I catch Fee's sharp inhale through the comm.
"Appreciate that," Connor says, his voice slower now, testing him. "Though showing up at a hospital's an odd choice for trust building."
"I heard about Mrs. Carlucci." Hartley doesn't miss a beat.
Forty-five minutes suddenly feels like forty-five years.
Silence.
"Moira's stable," Connor's voice says. "They're monitoring her."
"Thank God," Hartley answers.
The speedometer climbs past ninety as Alexei weaves through traffic. Every lane change is calculated, every gap exploited.
My phone vibrates against my thigh.
Dimitri.
"Anton, I got some information."
I straighten in my seat. Dimitri doesn't call unless the information is crucial.
"Go on."
"Girl named Tasha. High-end escort. Says Hartley used to call her three, sometimes four times a week. Same pattern for eight months. Then nothing."
"When did the calls stop?"
"Three weeks ago. Exactly." Dimitri pauses, and I hear traffic behind him. He's mobile. Still hunting.
Three weeks. Right when Morrison got snatched. Right when this whole operation started accelerating.
"She waited," Dimitri continues. "Gave him space. But after three weeks, curiosity won. She stopped by his brownstone yesterday afternoon."
My hand tightens around the phone.
"And?"
"He answered the door. Looked at her like she was a stranger trying to sell him religion." Dimitri's voice drops lower. "Didn't recognize her. Not her face, not her name, nothing. Told her he had company and shut the door."
"She's sure it was him?"
"She said it was him." Dimitri exhales hard. "But she swears something was off. She thought maybe he found a girlfriend."
Alexei glances at me, reading the shift in my posture. His foot presses harder.
"Where are you now?"
"Outside Hartley's building. Watching." A pause. "You want me to go in?"
"Yes, but get some of the guys to go with you. We should think everything is a trap with them."
"Understood."
I switch channels. "Viktor, Dominic. Dimitri needs backup at Hartley's brownstone. Now."
"On our way." Viktor's already moving. I hear car doors slamming in the background.
Back to Dimitri. "Don't go in until they arrive."
"Da."
The line goes dead.
Alexei takes a corner hard enough that the tires scream. We're still too fucking far.
Through the earpiece, I catch Hartley's voice again, smooth and professional.
"I should let you get back to your family, Connor. I just wanted you to know that I'm available twenty-four seven. Any concerns, any questions, you call me directly."
Footsteps echo across tile.
"Yuri?"
"Hartley is going toward the elevator."
My jaw tightens. "Stay with Fee."
The SUV weaves between two delivery trucks. Alexei's expression stays blank, focused, but his knuckles are white against the steering wheel.
"Dimitri." I switch back. "Viktor and Dominic there yet?"
"Pulling up now."
"Good, but be extra vigilant. Things aren't what they seem today."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because the man who's talking to Connor at the hospital isn't David Hartley. Someone's wearing his face."