Chapter 6 Stay in the Car （Absolutely Not）
SIX
STAY IN THE CAR (ABSOLUTELY NOT)
LARK
Some people pregame with shots.
I pregame with felonies.
“Run it one more time,” I say, peering over Knight’s shoulder at the screen. The Riverside Ops room is dim, lit mostly by monitor glow and a crappy floor lamp Arrow dragged in from a thrift store.
Knight exhales, annoyed. “You’ve seen the briefing twice.”
“Maybe I like hearing your voice,” I say. “It’s so soothing when you’re threatening people.”
His eye ticks.
Worth it.
On the main monitor is our target for tonight: Diego Vale, logistics manager for a big shipping firm with a side hustle in trafficking humans for the highest bidder.
Arrow’s labeled him PROJECT SILK in the file header.
His crimes scroll on one side of the screen—routes, flagged cargo, missing persons reports that line up a little too perfectly with his shipments.
“Vale runs his private business out of the back office of that ‘import’ warehouse,” Knight says, tapping the satellite image. “He meets middlemen there. Tonight he’s got a buyer flying in.”
“Creeps-R-Us,” I mutter.
Knight ignores me. “We’re not going in for a full smash-and-grab. We’re in recon mode. We get proof, get out, send everything to the task force that’s already sniffing around.”
I wrinkle my nose. “No smashing? That seems off brand.”
“We are not escalating tonight,” he says pointedly. “We’re just getting eyes on.”
I kick my boots up on the edge of the table, watching him pace. He’s all coiled precision, black t-shirt clinging to his shoulders. His hair’s slightly messed from running his fingers through it, and he smells like soap and coffee and just the tiniest hint of gasoline.
Focus, Lark.
“This is a first-time target,” Knight continues. “We don’t know all the players, and we don’t know how deeply this ties into Cathedral yet. So we move careful. Controlled. Clean.”
“Like a colonic,” I say.
“Like a scalpel,” he counters.
“Boring.”
He pins me with a stare. “We’re not playing tonight, Lark.”
“Who says I’m playing?”
His silence says you, loud and clear.
Arrow is across the room at a secondary station, scanning through city cams and traffic feeds. Ozzy’s on the couch with a laptop and a bag of Skittles, monitoring the dark web chatter. Gage’s scanning his own laptop. Render’s looking through his camera footage. Everyone’s in mission mode.
Except my heart, which is in Knight mode.
He gestures toward me with his chin. “You get the rules?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Say them.”
I sigh. “Stay in the car.”
“Good.”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“Also good.”
“Don’t wander off, don’t improvise, don’t swing my bat at anyone’s head, blah blah blah,” I sing-song. “You know micromanaging gives you wrinkles, right?”
He narrows his eyes. “If something goes sideways, there’s one exit point. One. We don’t improvise with people’s lives.”
The serious note in his voice snags me.
For a second, all the sarcasm drains out. I see it—the weight on his shoulders, the ghosts he doesn’t talk about.
I hold his gaze. “I got it, Knight.”
His jaw flexes. He nods once, like he believes me.
Which is cute.
And wrong.
Because I’m absolutely going to improvise if I have to.
But I’m not going to tell him that.
Arrow swivels his chair toward us. “You two done couples-therapy-ing, or can we go stop some human trash?”
Knight gives him a look. “We’re not a couple.”
Arrow grins. “Sure you’re not.”
Gage rolls his chair away from his desk. “Can you not call Knight and my little sister a couple please?”
I laugh, grab my jacket and my bat, and head toward the door. “I’m not your little sister. I’m a grown ass woman.”
“Lark,” Knight says, eyes crashing into mine. “Lose the bat.”
I blink at him. “You lose your personality.”
“Bat stays in the trunk.”
“Knight, have you met me?”
We stare each other down for a solid five seconds.
He sighs. “Fine. Bat in the back seat. Under a blanket.”
“Compromise. I like this for us.”
He mutters something like, “Dear God,” and follows me out.
The warehouse district is an ocean of corrugated metal and bad lighting.
Knight parks two blocks away in an alley that smells like old rain and motor oil. It’s technically a stakeout spot, but it looks more like somewhere people come to get stabbed or make poor romantic choices.
The warehouse we’re targeting squats at the end of the street like a rusting beast—big, boxy, fenced, with a roll-up dock and a smaller side entrance. A couple of semi-trailers are parked nearby. There’s a security camera on each corner, one above the side door, and a cheap motion floodlight.
Knight kills the engine and looks at me. “Remember the rules?”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, Dad.”
“Stay. In. The. Car.”
I salute lazily. “Woof.”
He glares, pulls his hoodie up, and adjusts the small, almost invisible camera at his collar.
Arrow’s voice crackles in my ear. “Knight, you’ve got three guards in rotation outside. Two at the dock, one smoking near the side door. No cops in a five-block radius. You’re clear.”
Knight gives me one last hard look that says seriously, stay, then slips out of the car, closing the door quietly behind him.
I watch him move.
He’s so good. He’s so sexy.
Silent, precise, a shadow in a darker shadow. He skirts the line of parked vehicles, pauses near a stack of pallets, checks sightlines, then slides around toward the blind spot of the nearest camera. Arrow’s been looping the feed, but Knight never trusts tech alone.
He trusts his eyes.
He trusts his instincts.
He doesn’t trust me.
I wait.
Thirty seconds.
Sixty.
Ninety.
“Knight has entered the west side,” Arrow murmurs over comms. “Approaching side door. Guard’s distracted on his phone. I’m looping cam three…”
Ozzy adds, “Chatter in the Silk channels say the buyer’s running late. You’ve got maybe twenty minutes before extra assholes show.”
My fingers drum on my knee.
I shift.
I look out the window.
I glance at my bat under the blanket in the back seat.
Knight slips inside the warehouse, and the door swings shut behind him.
It takes me exactly twelve seconds to decide I have absolutely no intention of sitting here like some obedient golden retriever.
I pop the glove box, pull out my burner tablet, and tap it awake. My favorite stolen network-mapping overlay flickers to life, picks up the warehouse’s basic wireless footprint, and overlays it on the city grid.
“Arrow,” I say sweetly, “you still got that feed loop going on cam three?”
A pause. “Yeah. Why?”
“Can you give me a piggyback on the internal cam system? Just the low-level stuff. Nothing fancy.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“Lark.”
“Arrow.”
I hear him sigh. “Okay, you’ve got a visual relay. But if Knight asks, I didn’t help.”
“You are an angel and I appreciate your moral flexibility.”
The tablet fills with grainy, slightly skewed footage—inside the warehouse. Crates. Dust. Stacks of unlabeled boxes. A shabby office in the back with a cheap metal desk and a wall safe.
And Knight.
Moving through the shadows, hugging the walls, pausing whenever he hears something.
A guard walks past an interior window, and Knight freezes, blending into the darkness like he was born there.
I stare, a mix of pride and worry twisting in my chest.
He’s so controlled it makes my teeth ache.
My gaze flicks to something else in the feed—little blinking blue lights above some of the interior doorways.
Huh.
“Arrow,” I say slowly. “Those aren’t just regular cams, are they?”
“Define ‘regular.’”
“The ones above the office doors. That’s not basic security hardware. That’s… higher-grade. Facial mapping, maybe?”
More keyboard clacking.
“Shit,” Arrow mutters softly. “Yeah. That’s not warehouse-level. That’s darknet surveillance gear.”
My spine goes cold.
“Why would a trafficking middleman need black-market facial ID?” I ask.
“To keep receipts,” Ozzy chimes in over comms. “You film the deals, you keep everyone’s face on file. Makes it easier to blackmail clients or sell identities to the highest bidder.”
Arrow adds, “Some of these rigs auto-backup to off-site servers on the dark web. Even if you smash the local drives, the footage lives on.”
“And we just walked Knight into that,” I say.
Silence.
On the tablet, Knight slips past a camera, hugging the thirty-degree blind angle.
He thinks he’s invisible.
He’s not.
The camera lens blinks. A small red light goes from steady to pulsing.
“Arrow.” My voice is sharp. “That light—tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
He swears creatively. “Someone just switched the system from local loop to live feed. Those cams are no longer dumb. They’re sending to a remote server.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet. Give me a second.”
Knight’s voice comes over comms, low and calm. “What’s going on? I’m inside the office corridor. Looks clear.”
I press my lips together.
He doesn’t know.
He never likes not knowing.
“Just local interference,” Arrow lies badly. “Stay on target.”
My brain races.
If those cams are doing any kind of automated facial mapping and selling to a client list, then Knight’s face is about to become digital merchandise.
And if he keeps going deeper, there’s a chance that feed doesn’t just map him—it flags him.
I don’t think.
I move.
“Lark?” Ozzy says. “What are you doing?”
“Just stretching my legs,” I say, flinging my door open.
I tuck my tablet into my jacket, shove the bat under my arm, and slip into the alley shadows, keeping low.
Static in my ear explodes. “Lark. No,” Knight growls. “You stay in the car.”
“Can’t hear you, connection’s bad,” I whisper. “Try again later.”
I jog down the alley, sticking close to parked cars until I’m tracking the back side of the warehouse fence line. There’s a sagging section behind a dumpster—classic lazy maintenance.
I wriggle under.
Inside the yard, it’s quieter. Just the distant hum of the highway and the drip of some mysterious liquid from a busted gutter.