16. Wolfe
WOLFE
What the fuck is up with my brain?
It’s six in the morning. Eva’s face is pressed against my chest. Her dark hair is everywhere, her breathing is slow and even, and I haven’t moved in forty-five minutes because I don’t want to wake her up.
And for the first time in as long as I can remember, my brain is quiet.
Actually quiet. Not the forced quiet I get from heavy metal music, or basketball, or three hours of deep code work.
This is real quiet. Like someone found the volume knob I’ve been looking for my entire life and turned it all the way down.
Her skin is warm, her heartbeat humming. My hand rests on her hip, and I’ve been tracing the same small circle with my thumb for probably twenty minutes, the same rhythm I tap against my leg except now it’s on her and it means something completely different.
Last night was…
I don’t have a word for it. She asked me in the moment, and I didn’t have one then either. I’ve had sex before. But it was mechanical. Physical. Something my body did while my brain observed from a distance, completely separated from the act.
Last night my brain wasn’t observing. It was gone.
Completely offline. Every sensation hit me raw…
her hands, her mouth, the sounds she made, the way her back arched, the heat of her skin under my palms. No filter.
No distance. No pattern to analyze or file away.
It was just her, everywhere, all at once. So much her and not nearly enough.
My brain has never tapped out like that before. Not during sex. Not during anything.
I’m still processing the shut down when my phone buzzes on the nightstand.
My chest tightens. Who the hell is texting me this early?
I reach for the phone slowly, careful not to disturb Eva because I’m not ready to let her go. My hand tightens around the phone as I stare at the text.
Call me. Now.
So much for not wanting to let her go.
I ease out of bed. Eva mumbles something and pulls the pillow over her head but doesn’t wake up. I grab my sweatpants off the floor and take the phone to the kitchen.
“What happened?” I say.
“The Back Bay building,” Ronan says, his voice tight. “It was hit last night around two in the morning.”
My stomach drops. “Fuck.”
“Someone got past the security system. They knew the rotation schedule, the access codes, and which nights run a skeleton crew instead of a full team. They hit the loading dock entrance, cleaned out the data room, and set a fire to cover it. Adriana’s team got there, but it was too late.”
I let out a deep sigh. “Any injuries?”
“One night guard. He’s at Mass General with two broken ribs and smoke inhalation. He’s okay, though. “
I lean against the counter and rake a hand through my hair as my eyes roam the kitchen. The Cheerios box is lined up with the edge. Eva’s knife is next to the coffee maker. Her jacket hangs over the back of a chair.
“Renaldi’s calendar,” I say. “That’s how he knew which nights had less security coverage. Eva pulled that data three weeks ago.”
“You identified the gap at eight days out.” His voice is cold and accusatory. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
“That was the biggest window. But there were smaller ones with a lower probability for an attack. We deprioritized them because we were building the trap around the main security gap.” I close my eyes.
“Dmitri didn’t need the optimal window. He already had everything.
He took the first opening he could find. Because why the fuck would he wait?”
“When he called yesterday,” Ronan says. “He was telling you it was already done.”
“Yeah.” I grit my teeth. “I know that now.”
Ronan is silent for a few seconds, and each one that ticks past makes my gut knot tighter. Finally, he speaks. “Get to the house. Bring her.”
“Ronan—”
“Bring her. She needs to hear this. And she needs to be in the room when we figure out what the hell to do next.”
He hangs up. I stand in Eva’s kitchen staring at my phone.
Dmitri hit the building last night. While I was in bed with Eva. While her breathing was slow against my chest and my brain was quiet for the first time in my life, Dmitri’s people were walking through a door she opened for him.
Not on purpose. She didn’t know what the calendar was for. She didn’t know the building was Adriana’s. She didn’t know any of it until I told her.
But the data was hers. Her fingerprints are on every piece of it. And a man is in the hospital because of the work she did.
She’s going to destroy herself over this. I know it before I turn around. I know it the way I know her now…her patterns, her tells, the way she takes responsibility for everything, including things that aren’t hers to carry.
I hear her feet pad on the floor behind me.
“What happened?” she says.
I turn. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway wearing my Metallica shirt and nothing else, and her hair is a mess, and her eyes are still soft from sleep, and this is the last second she’s going to look like that for a long time.
“Dmitri hit the Back Bay building,” I say. “I just spoke to Ronan.”
The softness leaves her face, and it’s quickly replaced by alarm.
“The Renaldi calendar,” she says, tugging her hair as she paces in front of the refrigerator.
“Yeah.”
“I gave him that.”
“You didn’t know—”
“I gave him the schedule that told him when to walk in.” Her voice rises. “Is anyone hurt?”
“A security guard. He’s in the hospital. He’ll be okay.”
She stops pacing and grips the edge of the counter. Her knuckles go white, her shoulders quaking.
“Eva—”
“Don’t.” She whips her head at me, her jaw clenched.
“Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. Don’t tell me I was coerced.
Don’t tell me I didn’t know. Because I knew something was wrong.
I knew every job was connected. I saw the patterns and I chose not to look because looking is what got me locked up last time.
” Her voice cracks. “And now someone’s in the hospital because I was too freaked out to open my eyes. ”
I want to cross the kitchen and put my hands on her shoulders and tell her she’s wrong. But she’s not entirely wrong. And she’d know if I was lying.
“Ronan wants us at the house,” I say.
“Now?”
“Now.”
She leans forward on the counter, covering her face with her hands.
I let her process everything for a minute.
She drags herself off the counter and straightens up.
Then she walks back to the bedroom. Five minutes later, she’s back and fully dressed with her hair pulled back.
She tosses me the Metallica t-shirt and I pull it on as she palms the knife and sticks it into her pocket.
The Eva from last night, the one who said “don’t go” and pulled me into her bed and fell asleep with her face on my chest, is now locked away behind the same wall she’s been building since she was taken from that courtroom in handcuffs.
I get it. That wall kept her alive for fourteen months. I’m not going to be the one who tells her she doesn’t need it now.
Even if watching her put it back up makes my heart clench and ache in a way it never has.
When we pull into the gate at my family’s compound, I already know the kind of chaos that waits for us inside. Eva didn’t say a word the entire ride, and I didn’t try to fill the silence. I know she’s torturing herself, and anything I say would just make it worse.
Because she’d know I don’t believe my own words.
And I’ve already lied enough.
We walk into the conference room. Lochlan is on the phone with Adriana’s security team.
Ronan sits at the far end of the table with building schematics spread out in front of him.
Gavin is pacing, which means he’s ready to hit something.
Cillian stands by the door. He looks at me when we walk in and his eyes flick to Eva and back.
He sees it. Whatever’s different about us this morning, he caught it in half a second.
“Sit down,” Ronan says, his eyes cutting to Eva.
She drops into a chair, her shoulders squared. I don’t think she has the energy to fight him on it today.
“The fire was contained.” Ronan looks between us.
“But the data room was cleaned out. Hard drives, backup servers, physical files. Everything related to three active DiMicheli real estate projects is gone. So now Dmitri has operational data on three properties that are worth forty million combined. He has leverage. That’s what he wanted. That’s what he’s been building.”
Dead silence fills the room. Eva clenches her fists in her lap, her expression like stone.
“The trap was supposed to prevent this,” Ronan says. He’s not looking at Eva, but the implication is clear. We had the intel. We had the timeline. We weren’t fast enough.
“We were working on an eight-day window,” I say. “Dmitri moved early because he already had everything he needed. He told me on the phone. This was always coming. We just didn’t have the speed to get ahead of it.”
Eva pulls Lochlan’s laptop toward her. She stares at it for a beat. “He used the maintenance override window.”
Every head turns.
“Not the main security gap we were planning around. A smaller one.” Her fingers move fast across the keyboard. “We deprioritized it because the exposure was shorter. He didn’t care. He only needed forty minutes.”
She turns the screen toward Ronan. A timeline. The maintenance override, the access code cycle, the exact forty-minute window Dmitri’s people used to get in and out.
“We built the trap around the biggest gap,” she says. “He took the first one he could find. Which means he’s not being patient anymore. Something changed.”
Gavin stops pacing. Cillian’s eyebrows raise about a quarter inch. Lochlan puts his phone down. Ronan leans back in his chair.
We all look at her, waiting for more.
“You already have my job history from two days ago,” Eva says. “What you need now is the link between my data and this specific hit.”
She pulls Lochlan’s laptop toward her and starts working again. It only takes her five minutes to get the connection mapped.
“There,” she says, turning the screen toward Ronan. “That’s how he did it. That’s the exact data I gave him that made last night possible.”
Eva looks at him. “If we’re going to figure out his next move, you need to understand exactly how he used what I built. Every piece. Including the ones I wish I could take back.”
Ronan’s forehead pinches. “Fuck. Dmitri has leverage on three properties worth forty million. That’s not an endgame.
That’s a starting position.” He looks at Lochlan.
“He’s going to use it to force his way to the table.
Either he trades the data back for a seat, or he uses it to burn everything down until someone gives him one. ”
Ronan looks at me and lifts an eyebrow. “Your source just gave me a clearer threat assessment in five minutes than your two-hour briefing last week.”
“She’s not my—” I start to say.
“His source,” Eva says, still looking at Ronan, “is right here. And she’s not done yet.”
Ronan’s mouth twitches. The closest thing to a smile I’ve seen from him in months.
I sit across the table and watch Eva Moreno take the worst morning of her life and turn it into the most complete threat briefing my family has ever received. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t flinch. She takes every piece of guilt she’s carrying and converts it into information that might save us.
That’s Eva. She doesn’t break. She builds.
Eva leans back in her chair. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t need to. She just ripped herself open in front of my family and handed them the pieces without cowering.
But I’m watching Ronan’s face. And the thing I see there isn’t gratitude or respect or even strategy.
It’s calculation.
He’s looking at Eva the way he looked at the warehouse data. Like she’s an asset he can deploy.
And the thing tightening behind my ribs isn’t fear of Dmitri anymore.
It’s fear of what my brother is going to ask me to do with her.