Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
GRACE
The port looked ordinary. That was the first thing that struck me.
Just rows of corrugated steel containers in dull colors, cranes moving like patient metal giants, trucks weaving through lanes painted with peeling lines—nothing that screamed monsters operate here. Nothing that hinted at the kind of nightmare my sister had been swallowed by.
But the guys didn’t trust ordinary. Neither did I.
Bones drove slow as we looped around the perimeter roads—sweeping each access point, the chain-link fences, the double gates, the security booths.
Voodoo took photos from low angles with his phone.
Legend muttered observations under his breath, and AB kept tapping on his tablet, cross-referencing what he saw outside with the digital breadcrumbs he’d collected.
Goblin, head in my lap, watched it all in silent, canine judgment.
We took a short foray to a park to let Goblin walk. I took “point” on the task with AB so he could stretch his legs, and the others went two blocks down for coffee and food. By the time they returned, I had most of the kinks out of my back and Goblin was in a better mood.
When Bones finally pulled into a plain, beige-and-brown highway hotel a mile down from the port, I felt the tension in the SUV shift. We weren’t pouncing yet—we were staging.
The lobby smelled faintly of burned coffee and industrial carpet cleaner. Legend handled the check-in with a casual charm that made the clerk forget to blink, and minutes later, the five of us crammed into a single room with two beds and an extra rolling chair.
Voodoo locked the door behind us. Bones closed the curtains. Goblin sniffed the floor like he was sweeping for landmines.
Legend tossed the keycard on the dresser. “Alright. Recon review.”
We gathered around the small circular table while AB set up at the room’s desk, his laptops and drives clicking into place like he was assembling a portable command center.
I wasn’t quite ready to eat even if they picked up sandwiches, including a ham and swiss croissant for me. Though, after France, that sandwich looked terribly sad in its plastic wrap. So I left that in the bag and claimed my coffee.
“Alright,” I said, sipping the flat white while they began their breakdown. “What can I do to help?”
Bones looked at me first. Always him. Always that quiet, anchoring weight in his gray eyes.
“That depends,” he said slowly. “Do you want to be on-site? Or stay here and back us up?”
My heartbeat lifted in my chest, not from fear—something heavier. “Define ‘on-site.’”
Voodoo leaned back in the rolling chair. “On-site means you’re physically with us. Potential eyes-on with Sarmiento’s crew. Possible proximity to danger. Not necessarily engaging—just shadowing us.”
Legend added, “Staying means you watch feeds AB sets up. You run comms with us, call out any shifts in traffic, security patrols, container movement, or anything weird we can’t see from the ground.”
I swallowed once. “What are the goals?”
“Threefold,” Bones said, holding up fingers.
“One—locate Sarmiento, confirm he’s actually here and not just using this port as a drop point.”
“Two—identify his crew. Anyone connected. Anyone loyal. Faces, habits, routine.”
“Three—figure out the physical layout of his operation. What containers he uses. Who he pays. How they move cargo.”
Legend cracked his neck. “Four—don’t get caught.”
“That too,” Bones said dryly.
I exhaled slowly, sorting through the buzzing static in my head. “So if I go with you, I’m—what? A spotter?”
“More than that,” Voodoo said, voice calm but threaded with warning. “But less than front-line. You’d be eyes and instincts. You know what this looks like from the inside, Grace. We don’t.”
Legend’s voice softened. “But if staying feels safer, no one will hold it against you. You’ve already done more than most people could stomach.”
“To keep us all honest,” AB added. “We don’t know if you were meant for this port. We can presuppose you didn’t make it this far and that somehow you ended up more than halfway across the country…” But the way he spread his hands said that was all up for debate.
Goblin nudged my knee, like he was voting too.
I looked between them—four men willing to put themselves in the line of fire for me. For Amorette. For truth.
Whichever choice I made, they’d adjust without hesitation. They weren’t trying to keep me small. They were trying to keep me alive. But they were also letting me choose.
I set my coffee down, fingers tapping lightly against the paper cup while the room waited on my answer—four lethal men and one extremely opinionated dog.
“If you can use me there, then I’d like to be on-site,” I said finally. They were giving me the choice, but they were also the professionals. “If Sarmiento or any of his crew are here, I want to see it. I want to see them. I need to know…”
I turned it over in my head, I needed to know a lot but what specifically did I need to know there?
“I need to know if I recognize any of them. I may not, it may be nothing.”
“It may be something, too,” Voodoo said. “We get it, Firecracker.”
Bones didn’t smile, but something in his posture eased, subtle as a breath. “Then we tailor it to that. Controlled exposure. You don’t separate from any of us. If we say move, you move. If we say get down, you get down. That’s the whole deal.”
“Copy that,” I said, lifting a shoulder.
Legend’s mouth curved into something warm and crooked. “We’ll run it like a low-key recon circuit. Walking the public-access areas first—tourist edges, lots of traffic, nothing suspicious. Just a couple and their friends checking out the port.”
“Couple?” I echoed.
Voodoo gave a shameless shrug. “Optics. People look twice at four guys in tactical boots casing a commercial dock. They don’t look twice at a woman and her boyfriend walking hand-in-hand with a few friends trailing behind them like overgrown ducklings.”
AB didn’t even glance up. “I’m not a duckling.”
“No,” Legend said solemnly. “You’re the angry mallard who steals French fries.”
AB flicked a pen cap at him.
Despite myself, I smiled.
Bones refocused us before the banter could take off. “We’ll rotate positions. Grace with Lunchbox first, Voodoo second, me third. Alphabet stays here with remote feeds and a line of sight on our exits. Once we get the lay of the land, we escalate to a closer sweep.”
“And if I see someone I recognize?” I asked, heat already creeping up the back of my neck.
Bones didn’t miss a beat. “You tell one of us. Quietly.”
Then, softer, “You do not approach. Not alone. Not first.”
My throat tightened, because he wasn’t patronizing me. He was worrying in that razor-edged, tactical way of his—silent calculations behind gray eyes.
Legend pushed the sad croissant toward me anyway. “Eat something. Even a bite. Running on fumes only works in movies.”
I tore off a corner, just to satisfy him. It tasted like plastic-wrapped disappointment, but he still looked pleased that I ate it.
“Once we decide to go in,” Voodoo said, leaning forward, elbows braced on his knees, “we’ll move as a unit—even when we’re split. You track with one of us. Goblin too.”
Goblin huffed like this was obvious.
AB finally turned away from his monitors. “If there’s a smuggling route tied to Sarmiento, I’ll pick it up. If there’s chatter he’s on-site, I’ll hear it. If there's a sudden movement of unregistered containers—hello, red flag.”
“Good,” I murmured, adrenaline beginning a slow simmer under my skin.
The guys shifted subtly, that collective awareness I’d come to recognize—all of them feeling the same invisible turning of gears.
We were getting closer.
We weren’t stumbling blind anymore.
We had a location, a name with weight, a direction.
“Then what’s next?” I asked quietly.
Bones pushed back his chair, unfolding to his full height with that military precision that always made people step aside without knowing why.
“We gear up,” he said.
“We go in,” Legend added.
“We watch everyone,” Voodoo finished.
“And we don’t stop,” AB said, “until we have a trail.”
I drew in a slow breath.
“Good,” I whispered.
Because under all the fear, grief, and exhaustion, a single truth was burning, we were hunting again.
Voodoo drummed his fingers against his thigh, eyes narrowing thoughtfully as he studied me. “One more thing,” he said. “Did you bring anything in… I don’t know… touristy chic?”
I blinked. “Touristy chic?”
Legend snorted. “Translation, something that says ‘I am innocent, non-threatening, and definitely not here to watch organized crime.’”
I spread my hands. “Does such a thing exist in my wardrobe?”
Bones answered without missing a beat. “No.”
Voodoo clapped his hands once, decisive. “Alright then. We’ll fix it.”
Which was how, twenty-five minutes later, I found myself stepping out of the SUV at the port’s public-access promenade wearing a Delaware sweatshirt three sizes too big, a navy baseball cap with a crab on it, and sunglasses so large they bordered on parody.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered, pushing the brim of the hat up.
“No,” Voodoo corrected solemnly, adjusting the strap of his own camera bag, “this is camouflage.”
Legend walked past in a tacky “BIDEN COUNTRY” t-shirt and jeans, sipping iced coffee like he was preparing to review a food truck festival. “Honestly?” he said. “You look extremely normie. Can’t even see the murder in your eyes.”
Bones wore jeans, a hoodie, and a backpack—standard under-the-radar dad-on-a-day-trip gear.
On him, it looked like a tactical uniform pretending to be civilian clothes.
Goblin trotted happily beside him in a bright blue SERVICE ANIMAL vest, which was probably the only legitimate accessory among all of us.
Even AB, who had remained at the hotel but insisted on blending in for safety, was currently wearing a local minor-league baseball cap and sending us live updates like a retired accountant moonlighting as an intel analyst.
I stared at my reflection in the SUV window—hat, sunglasses, sweatshirt.
I really did look like a tourist.
A tired tourist.
A grieving tourist.
A tourist hunting human traffickers.
“Okay,” I said, exhaling a laugh despite myself. “Fine. I look like someone here to buy saltwater taffy and take pictures of boats.”
Voodoo grinned like he’d just won a prize. “Exactly. Perfect.”
Bones fell into step beside me, shoulder brushing mine. “Stay close. First pass is wide-angle. Public spaces only.”
Legend led the way toward the boardwalk overlook. Voodoo angled off to take fake photos of the harbor. Goblin sniffed every post like he was conducting his own investigation.
And as I adjusted my ridiculous crab hat again, it struck me, we really did look like tourists.
Lethal tourists.
Determined tourists.
Tourists hunting a predator across state lines.
And the strangest part? For once, the monsters wouldn’t see us coming.
The Atlantic wind cut straight through my oversized Delaware sweatshirt, sharp enough to sting. It whipped the edges of the pier flags, sent salt spray climbing the air, and made Legend’s iced coffee a questionable life choice.
Despite the cold, a handful of tourists wandered the public overlook—families pointing at container ships, a pair of retired birdwatchers with binoculars, two teenagers taking selfies beneath the “PORT OF DELAWARE” sign.
Completely average.
Completely harmless.
Completely misleading.
Voodoo lifted his camera again, angling it toward the cranes. The shutter clicks were soft beneath the wind, but I knew AB was getting every image in real time—zoomed, filtered, cross-referenced, and compared to satellite data.
In my left ear, AB’s quiet voice buzzed through the comms. “Blue-liveried cranes on Pier C are consistent with the container transfers from three of our flagged manifests. If Sarmiento is here, that’s where he would be staging the movements.”
Bones murmured under his breath, “Pier C is three hundred yards to our right.”
Legend followed my gaze, sipping his slush of melting coffee. “Which means we take our time.”
So we did.
We walked like tourists—casual, curious, slightly cold. Goblin sniffed the boardwalk planks, stopped to investigate a patch of old salt dried into a pattern only he understood, then continued his slow march.
I tried to mirror everyone’s nonchalance, but it felt like wearing someone else’s skin. Too loose. Too soft. Too wrong.
AB’s voice came again, quiet but alert. “Security rotation just shifted. The guy in the bright orange vest is new. He’s walking fast.”
Bones’ eyes flicked without moving his head. “Direction?”
“Toward the Pier C guardhouse.”
Legend muttered, “Convenient.”
We paused at the overlook railing, pretending to admire the cargo ships. They towered above the water, hulking metal beasts belching cold steam into the sky.
“Okay,” AB continued. “Update, two private vehicles entered through the south gate without stopping. No port markings. Not unusual, but they drove straight toward the restricted side of Pier C.”
Voodoo’s camera clicked, clicked, clicked. “Got their plates. AB?”
“Recording.”
The wind gusted hard, rocking the boardwalk under us. I shivered and Bones angled himself between me and the ocean like he could shield me from the air itself.
Still—everything looked normal. Dockworkers in reflective vests. Stacked containers. A local couple taking pictures. Tourists chatting about where to get fresh lobster.
Nothing screamed cartel. Nothing screamed human trafficking. Nothing screamed my life is about to split open—
Until—
“Grace,” AB said suddenly, tone shifting from commentary to razor focus, “look left, two o’clock, by the chain-link fence.”
I turned casually, heartbeat stalling.
A man was standing there.
Lean. Mid-thirties. Worn jacket. Hands in pockets.
Watching us.
Not the ocean.
Not the ships.
Us.
The worst part wasn’t his stare.
It was the way he looked away so quickly—too quickly—and pretended to light a cigarette he didn’t actually light.
My mouth went dry.
Bones was already moving closer to me, not touching, but anchoring. Legend shifted to the other side, posture loose but ready. Voodoo lowered his camera as if adjusting the settings, lens angled toward the man.
AB spoke in my ear. “He matches the description of one of Sarmiento’s ground spotters from the Reynosa hub.”
The boardwalk suddenly felt too open. Too exposed. Too ordinary to trust.
Wind slammed into my hat. Goblin pressed against my leg, alert and still.
“Alright,” Bones murmured, voice pitched low. “We’ve got our first shadow.”
And just like that—
Normal was gone.