28. Wolfe
WOLFE
She’s not answering her phone.
I’ve called her twice and she hasn’t picked up. Eva always picks up.
We spoke last night around nine once I was settled back in Boston.
She picked up on the third ring and her voice sounded normal.
Tired, but normal. She asked about the drive.
I told her Cillian almost killed us twice with his lead foot.
She laughed and it sounded real. A little distracted, but real.
“I miss you,” she said right before we hung up. I’ve been carrying those words in my chest ever since.
“I miss you too,” I said. And I meant it. I have a hard time functioning without her and focusing when she’s not right next to me with our shoulders touching or our knees pressed together.
I miss her. Her warmth, her energy, her sass. It grounds me in a way I never knew I needed.
We exchanged those last words eight hours ago.
I’ve texted her twice since then. Once at eleven to say goodnight.
Once at midnight because I couldn’t sleep.
She didn’t respond to either one. I tried to convince myself it was no big deal, that her phone must’ve died, or she fell asleep.
I also tried chalking it up to bad reception. I told myself a lot of things.
Now it’s six in the morning and I’m sitting on the edge of my bed at the house staring at my phone with a knot in my gut that’s tightening by the second.
I call her. Straight to voicemail.
Again. Voicemail.
My thumb hovers over her name on my screen. Something is wrong. I know it the way I know her sleep breathing pattern and the weight of her hand on my skin. Something shifted between nine o’clock and now, and that certainty lands like a brick in my stomach.
I grab my phone and pull up the tracker on my car. The dot isn’t blinking. The car is two blocks from Rosario’s. She’s at Sal’s and has been for hours.
I open my laptop and pull up the cabin’s security cameras to see when she left. The driveway feed shows the car pulling out at 12:34 AM. Then I check the system logs to find out why.
The logs tell me everything…everything I already suspected.
At 11:47 PM, she accessed the encrypted folder. The password-protected one that nobody was ever supposed to open. The session lasted forty-three minutes. Both subfolders were opened, leading her to both saved documents and my text message archive.
Fuck. She found everything.
I close the laptop, put my hands on my knees, and breathe.
Except I can’t breathe. My lungs are squeezed tight, and drawing in a breath is near impossible. I press my hands to my forehead while my brain runs through what she saw, and what she thinks, and what it means, and every scenario crashes into the same brick wall.
She read the case file. She knows I found evidence that could have freed her from prison and that I closed the file to protect my family.
She read the relocation plan. She thinks I’m planning to remove her from my life on Friday.
She read the messages I exchanged with Ronan. She saw “she won’t be a problem” and “I’ll handle it” and three weeks of messages where I know I sound like a guy who already agreed to let her go.
And so she ran.
I pick up the phone and call her one more time.
Voicemail. My heart hammers when I hear her voice.
Leave a message. I don’t leave one because nothing I can say in thirty seconds will fix this.
It’s not enough time to explain what she found.
That conversation needs to happen face to face, when I’m standing in front of her so she can read my face and see that it tracks with the words I say.
But I can’t go to her. Not yet. The operation is tonight.
If I leave, the whole thing falls apart.
It’s bigger than both of us, and as much as I want to set things straight with her, there’s too much at risk if I go to her.
Every piece of this plan depends on me running the digital takedown while Lochlan’s team handles the Revere attack.
Without me, the timing collapses, the law enforcement tips go out wrong, and Dmitri’s network survives.
And if Dmitri’s network survives, Sal is still a target. Both of them are.
Eva’s been in Boston for hours. She went to Sal. I’m sure of it. Which means she’s out in the open in a city where Dmitri’s people could be watching. And the only way to make sure nobody touches her, or her brother, is to finish what we started.
I can’t chase her. The best thing I can do for Eva right now is destroy every threat to her life in the next twelve hours.
And I hate it. Because it looks like the same choice I made eighteen months ago when I found a case file with her name on it and closed it to protect my family. I didn’t know her then. She was a stranger with a conviction that connected to our business.
This time it’s different. Closing that file was choosing my family over Eva. Running this operation is choosing Eva. Every threat I take out tonight is one that can never touch her or Sal again.
But she’ll never see it that way. All she’ll see is a man who picked the mission over her. Again.
Gritting my teeth, I put the first part of the plan into action. Spoofing the number Eva gave me takes about thirty seconds. I type the message, route it through Anderson’s number, and hit send.
Mr. Moreno, this is James Andersen, Red Sky Capital Partners. Apologies for the early text. I need to reschedule our meeting due to a conflict on my end. I’ll follow up next week with a new date. Looking forward to connecting.
I collapse back on the mattress, letting out a deep sigh. Sal will see it when he wakes up. He’ll be disappointed, but he won’t be suspicious. And he won’t be waiting around at Rosario’s tomorrow night for whoever Dmitri sends.
Eva knew this was part of the plan. She helped build it. But now she probably thinks the plan was my cover for getting rid of her. She has no reason to believe I’ll follow through on any of it. But I do, because I won’t backpedal on facts.
And the real fact is, I want to keep her and Sal safe and protected.
Even if she thinks I’m full of shit.
Twenty minutes later, I drag myself into the kitchen. My eyes latch onto the Cheerios box Eva moved then put back over a week ago.
Cillian wanders in and leans against the doorway.
“You look like you haven’t slept in days.”
My brows furrow, the box still rooting my gaze. “Eva left the cabin last night. My car’s parked near Sal’s place. She’s been there since around three.”
“How do you know?”
“I have a tracker on my car.” I take a step back from the counter, take off my glasses, and rub my stinging eyes.
“Of course you do. Do you know why she left?”
“Yes.” I slowly turn my head toward Cillian.
“I checked the access logs on my network. She got past my password encryption and found some files I had locked down. One was the case file I pulled on her almost two years ago, the one that had all the details of the evidence presented in court. I did some digging and found out that she was innocent. Someone else committed the crime she went to prison for.”
“Fuuuuuck. Did you send it to anyone to try to help her?”
“No. I closed it. Her case had a thread that connected back to one of our family’s businesses. If I spoke up and presented my evidence to anyone, the Feds would have ended up on our doorstep. I had to let it go.”
Cillian is quiet for a second. “You chose us over her.”
“But she was a stranger. I didn’t know who she was back then. All I knew was that helping her could bring down everything our family built.”
“And now she knows the truth, that you held all that back.”
I lean forward, fisting my hair. “Yeah. But it gets worse. Ronan called me the night before I took her to the cabin. He’s been all over my ass for weeks about how we’re going to deal with her because he doesn’t trust all the inside knowledge she has about our organizations.
He sees her as a risk to our livelihood.
And he thinks my judgment is shit right now because I’m in deep with her.
I told him I’d handle it. But I should have told him to just fuck off, that there’s no negotiation when it comes to her. ”
“Okay…” Cillian says, folding his arms over his chest. “So then what else did she find?”
“I put a contingency plan together the other night. I know Ronan, and I needed to make sure Eva was safe from anything he might throw her way. To him, she’s a liability, and I was afraid for her.
So I drafted a relocation framework that would put her in a new city with a new identity.
But I was never going to use it. I only built it because my brain wouldn’t stop running worst-case scenarios after Ronan’s call.
It made me feel better, like I was in control of a situation that was spiraling fast.”
“But she doesn’t know that.”
“She doesn’t know any of it. All she sees is a guy who could have freed her from prison and didn’t, and then built a detailed plan to ship her out of Boston the day after the operation.
” I look up and stare at the Cheerios box.
“She thinks I’m the same as the last guy who screwed her over.
The one who framed her and let her take the fall for that hacking job that sent her to prison. ”
“You’re nothing like that guy,” Cillian says, walking into the kitchen.
“I know that. But if I had to guess, she’s sitting in her brother’s apartment right now pissed as hell that she fell into the same trap she was trying to avoid.
Guy uses Eva. Guy benefits from Eva. Guy has a plan for getting rid of Eva when she becomes inconvenient.
” I put my glasses back on. “From her past experience, I fit the profile.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The only thing I can do. I have to run the operation with you guys so we can destroy every piece of Dmitri’s network. And I’ll make sure Sal is safe and Eva is safe and every threat to her life is gone by Friday morning.”
“And then?”
My jaw tightens. “Then I’m going to find her and tell her everything. The truth. All of it. Every ugly fucking piece. And she’ll either believe me or not.”
“She will.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “You gotta have faith.”
I let out a snort. “I blew past faith when she hit my encrypted files.”
“Look, I know Eva. And so do you. She’s pissed right now. She’s hurt. She’s probably sitting at Sal’s, plotting seventeen different ways to destroy you. But she’s also the smartest woman either of us has ever met. And smart people eventually look at the evidence again when the anger wears off.”
“And what if that doesn’t happen?”
“Then you show her. Not with words. Let’s face it, bro, words are your weak spot anyway. You gotta show her with your next move.” He taps the doorframe with his fist. “Starting with tonight.”
I look at Cillian and swallow past the lump in my throat. He’s always standing between the bad thing and the person who needs protecting. Always there for me.
“Twelve hours,” I say.
He nods. “Twelve hours. Then we go get your girl.”
“She’s going to stab me when she sees me.”
“Probably. But she’ll feel bad about it afterward.” He grins. “That’s how you know it’s real.”
He walks out. I sink onto a counter stool, still fixated on the Honey Nut Cheerios box. My phone is next to me, quiet. And my chest aches like it was split open with a machete.
I open my laptop and start going through the final details for tonight. My brain does what it always does. It locks onto the work and pushes everything else to the side because that’s how I’ve gotten through every hard thing in my life. One task at a time, keeping my head down.
But she’s still there, underneath all of the distractions. Her voice rattles between my ears.
“I miss you.”
That was eight hours ago.
And now she thinks I was planning to throw her away.
I scrub a hand down the front of my face and try to focus.
I stare at the cereal box again, cleaning and unclenching my fingers.
I blow out a slow breath.
By midnight, I’ll either have saved everything that matters to me or lost it all.