Chapter 4 - Logan
Ican’t get the image of those blue-gray eyes out of my head. Blue-gray, bleak as a winter pond. Looking at me across the table at the Setai, asking me if she could run from me.
I have to tolerate your behavior. But can I run?
The question hit me low and stayed there.
A woman openly contemplating escape from me, and what I could not stop thinking about was the chase.
About what her voice would sound like, ragged and breathless.
About the heat I would find when I caught her.
How she’d taste with her dignity stripped away.
It took everything I had to keep my voice level, my pulse hammering, my hands twitching under the table where she couldn't see.
Yes, victim. You can run. That's how I'd said it.
Like a joke, but we both knew it wasn't.
I can still feel the ghost of her fingers on my wrist, the barest brush as she'd reached for her glass.
I can still smell her perfume, something sharp that put every nerve on edge.
I catch myself clenching my jaw just thinking about it.
The memory has edged out everything else—reports, calls, even the mounting irritation of the dockland situation.
I'm half a second away from calling in a hit just to burn off the distraction.
Worse, I know I should be angry. The whole point of the meeting had been to intimidate her, to make her compliant, and instead she'd left me feeling like a kid outplayed by his babysitter.
The humiliation should have made me want to tear the hotel bar apart.
But I didn't. I wanted her to do it again.
To look at me like that. To test the boundary of what I could take.
I made the mistake of picturing her mouth, and the rest of my body answered before I could file it.
The worst part was that I knew she'd seen the reaction.
She'd clocked my arousal and filed it away, the way I would have filed it.
Just another piece of evidence. I wanted to see how she'd react.
I wanted to see what she'd do if I called her bluff.
Would she really run? Or would she stay, just to see what happened next?
My phone buzzes, an incoming text from Marisol.
I ignore it. The only thing that matters right now is getting her out of my head before she starts affecting my judgment.
I've watched men lose everything because they let a woman compromise their thinking.
I've made a career out of not making that mistake.
But here I am, fully hard at my desk, two seconds from putting my fist through the glass wall just to feel something sharp enough to drown out the memory.
I've been at this desk since five-thirty. The ocean didn't help this morning. It usually does, the one hour of the day that doesn't belong to anyone else. This morning my mind wouldn't go quiet. I gave up at five-fifteen and came here instead.
I shake the image of those blue-gray eyes from my brain and open the financial files I've been meaning to properly audit for six weeks.
I monitor the operating accounts weekly, but the miscellanea took a back-burner while Jorge's health deteriorated and the prodigal son, Gabriel, returned.
Gabriel hadn't come empty-handed. He'd brought a doe-eyed woman from New York with a whole bunch of powerful enemies.
Now that those enemies are neutralized and Gabriel is back on board, officially out of the seminary, I have time to get all the records up to date.
The financial records are meticulous, which is how I've always kept them, which means the anomaly stands out like damage under good lighting.
I find it at six-thirty: a vendor payment, correctly formatted, correctly categorized, routing through a shell that shouldn't exist. I trace it.
It terminates at an account I recognize from the Zayas dossier I compiled eight months ago when they first started making noise about Lucia.
I sit back.
That can't be a coincidence. Money leaving one of our subsidiary accounts, traveling through a complicated route, then ending up in our rival's account.
Could this be Jorge's doing? Too late to ask now, but it's unlikely.
He hasn't been actively involved in the club for at least twelve months, and certainly not within the past six weeks.
Gabriel, maybe? Perhaps this is some scheme he and Seraphina cooked up, some method of funneling money to a church charity.
Again, unlikely. He wouldn't need a shell company for that.
It takes me another ten minutes of disbelief and looking for alternative explanations, and then I get to work. I make a list of every person with access to these account structures and start narrowing.
Eight names.
Jimmy appears at seven with my schedule and a coffee I didn't ask for, both delivered without eye contact, both set on the corner of my desk. He knows learned exactly how much space to take up and is gone before I can nod.
The coffee goes cold while I work.
I find two more transactions before the trail goes cold.
Money is bleeding out of La Sirena's accounts.
Small amounts — fifty, sixty thousand in the last six weeks — disguised as routine expenses, moving through shell companies with enough layers that a casual audit would miss it entirely.
Someone who knows how I built these systems, knows how I think, set this up to be invisible to me specifically.
And they're sending money to the Zayas family. Whoever did this isn't just skimming. They're funding the people who want to tear down everything Jorge spent forty years building.
At nine I take the back stairs down to the main floor.
La Sirena in the morning is a different building than La Sirena at midnight.
The cleaning crew is finishing the floors, their machines running low under the sound of someone reading the reservation list at the host stand.
The bar is being restocked, bottles moved from dolly to shelf in the unhurried rhythm of the day shift.
Morning light comes through the Art Deco windows at an angle that catches the dust still settling from last night, golden and specific — the kind of light that makes the glamour look like construction.
The club smells like cleaning product and leather and the ghost of last night's smoke.
I move through it without stopping. The floor manager is by the stage, reviewing something on a clipboard.
Two servers are near the hostess stand with the reservation list between them.
A woman with brown hair, wrong shade, wrong everything, passes me on her way to the back hallway, and my chest does something involuntary, one stupid second of the wrong reaction before I catch it and move on.
Jimmy intercepts me near the bar. Tablet in hand. "Morning briefing's set for eleven. Gunner's already in the security room. And the funeral home called. Jorge's ashes are ready for pickup."
I nod. File each item. Don't look at Jimmy directly, just process the information and continue toward the stairs.
At eleven I take the back stairs up to the security room, which is Gunner's domain and looks like it. Monitors everywhere, no furniture that invites comfort. A man who considers relaxation a security vulnerability.
Gunner is standing when I arrive. He's always standing.
He's a wall of muscle in a black t-shirt, arms straining the fabric, a face that's been broken and healed wrong at least twice.
Scar through the left eyebrow, neck tattoos visible above the collar.
He's looking at the monitors when I enter and shifts his attention to me without nodding, without any greeting.
Just transfers his focus like he's moving a camera.
The other staff give him wide berth. Not because he's rude. He's not. He's just present in a way that makes people nervous, like standing next to a loaded weapon. You know it probably won't go off. You're aware of it constantly anyway.
I've heard people call him a beast.
"There is a mole bleeding money to the Zayas," I tell him.
Gunner looks at me, and for a moment, the animal behind his eyes beats its chest.
"Who is it?" he asks.
"Eight people have access to the relevant accounts. If we rule out me, Gabriel, and Marisol, that leaves five. I can probably narrow it further, but that's all I've got for now."
"Which five?" he asks.
I pull up the files on his wall monitor. Mid-level employees, each with legitimate access to the relevant accounts, each with a gap in their timeline I can't yet explain.
"So we question them," he says.
His emphasis on the word 'question' makes clear that he is referring to a very physical, very painful round of inquiry.
"Not yet. I want to set traps. Send different information to different people. When the Zayas move on something, I'll know which thread to pull."
Gunner looks at the files. His eyes move slowly, not reading but taking inventory. "Security footage?"
"Pulled. Nothing on camera."
"Phones?"
"Working on it."
He nods once. Looks back at the monitors.
"They'll escalate," he says.
That's the whole briefing.
I take the stairs back to my office. The routing number is still on the first monitor, patient, waiting for me to find what's underneath it.
I trace it again. Same terminal point: an account flagged in the Zayas dossier, one that shouldn't be receiving money from inside La Sirena's operating accounts.
Someone with access to these systems is funding the people trying to dismantle everything Jorge built.
I sit down and go back to work.
By early afternoon I've lost count of how many times I've read the same column.
My focus slides. I drag it back. It slides again.
The work is still here, the access logs, the timestamps, the betrayal itself, but my mind keeps finding the gaps between the numbers and filling them with something else entirely.