Chapter 8 Savannah
Chapter Eight: Savannah
Emilio is gone for two nights, and I hate every second of it.
Not because I miss him. I don't miss people after a few days of knowing them.
That's not how I work. It’s more that I miss the routine of him, the gym in the morning, the coffee he brings without being asked, the way the corridor feels less empty when he's three doors down and I can hear his music through the wall at midnight because the man has no concept of volume or consideration for others.
I miss the noise of him. The compound without Emilio is quieter in a way that makes me feel lonely.
Last night he left with four men in a black van. He didn't tell me he was going, which pissed me off, and then Claudio told me the next morning over coffee, which pissed me off more because getting mission updates from my not-boyfriend's twin brother was not how I planned to spend my Wednesday.
"He's fine," Claudio said, not looking up from the gun he was cleaning at the kitchen counter because apparently that's where people clean guns in this building, right next to the fruit bowl and Charlotte's cookie tray.
"I didn't ask."
"You were about to."
"I was about to ask where the sugar is."
"It's in the cabinet where it's been every morning since you arrived. You were about to ask about Emilio."
I grabbed the sugar and didn't respond because Claudio is a smug bastard, and arguing with him is pointless because he's always right and he knows it and he doesn't even have the decency to be an asshole about it. He's just always right, which is way fucking worse.
Thursday morning Emilio comes back. I know because I hear his boots in the corridor at five a.m. and his door opening and closing and the shower turning on, and I lie in my bed staring at the ceiling and listening to the pipes and feeling relief.
I don't go to him. He doesn't come to me. We meet in the kitchen at seven like we always do. He's got dark circles under his eyes, and his hair is still damp and he looks tired in a way that goes past sleep and into something heavier.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"Miss me?"
"Not even a little."
"Yeah, me neither, little vixen, me neither." He grins, but it's at half power. Something happened at the marina that took the voltage out of him, and I don't push because I’ve learned that pushing Emilio when he's low is the wrong move. You wait. You let him fill the space when he's ready.
So, I pour him coffee. Black, no sugar, the way he drinks it when he's working instead of socializing. He takes it and drinks half in one go and then sets it down and looks at me.
"Leone's calling a briefing at nine. Full room. He wants you there."
"Me?"
"Your intel started this. He wants you in the room when we talk about what we found."
"What did you find?"
He doesn't answer. He picks up the coffee again and drinks the rest of it and the silence between us is the first one we've had that feels heavy instead of comfortable. Whatever he saw at that marina put something behind his eyes that wasn't there when he left, and I don't like it.
Nine a.m. and Leone starts with the surveillance results.
Tuesday night, the Meridian Star arrived at the marina at ten-fifteen.
Two men boarded, matching the descriptions I gave from the waterfront club.
Vidal arrived separately at ten-forty in a sedan, boarded the boat, stayed forty minutes, left with a briefcase. All photographed, all documented.
Thursday night, same pattern. Different men boarding, same boat, same briefcase exchange. Vidal didn't appear Thursday, but the operation ran without him, which means he's not essential to the handoff itself. He's a pickup man, not the operator.
"We've got enough to move on Vidal whenever we want," Leone says. "But that's not the priority anymore."
He nods at Alexandra. She stands and turns the laptop toward the room.
"The Meridian Star is registered to Apex Meridian Holdings.
Same parent entity as the Apex Meridian tech company that built the backdoors into our security systems." She pauses.
"But the Holdings division isn't a tech company.
It's registered as a commercial warehousing and logistics firm.
They operate a port facility twelve miles south of the marina. "
She pulls up satellite images. A fenced compound on the waterfront, warehouse buildings, loading docks, a parking structure. Commercial. Unremarkable. The kind of place you'd drive past a hundred times without noticing.
"The shipping manifests for this facility don't add up," Alexandra continues.
"Containers arriving full from international ports, primarily Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, and leaving empty.
No corresponding inventory records, no customs declarations matching the volume, and the weight logs for incoming containers are significantly higher than what the declared contents would justify. "
"Heavier than what's listed," Claudio says.
"By a lot. Consistently. Across eighteen months of records."
The room is quiet. I'm sitting in my chair with my hands in my lap and the bottle cap in my pocket and a feeling building in my stomach that I recognize from the night at the waterfront club when I heard the conversation I shouldn't have heard.
The feeling of a picture completing itself.
Pieces that didn't fit suddenly snapping into place and showing you something you wish you hadn't seen.
"The Meridian Star's fuel logs," Alexandra says.
"The boat isn't just making short runs to the marina for the intelligence handoffs.
Between the Tuesday and Thursday stops, it's making a weekly round trip to the port facility.
The distance and fuel consumption are consistent with a cargo run, not a pleasure cruise. "
"What's in the containers?" I ask.
"That's what we don't know for certain," Alexandra says. "But I pulled Apex Meridian Holdings' corporate filings, and the facility is categorized as an intake processing center."
Intake processing.
The words hit me and I'm back in the waterfront club standing behind the bar with a rag in my hand and two men in a booth talking about things I didn't understand at the time.
They'd used words I'd ignored because they didn't match the conversation about intelligence and moles and the war between the families. Words that sounded wrong in context.
Rotation schedules. Placement. Age brackets.
I'd thought they were talking about product.
Drugs or weapons or whatever else men with guns and money move through the dark.
I'd ignored those words alongside the marina and the Meridian Star and Kreiss's name and hadn't looked at them again because the intelligence about the war was the priority and the rest was background noise.
It wasn't background noise.
"They said rotation schedules," I say, and the room turns to me.
"At the club. The two men. They talked about intake processing and placement and age brackets.
I thought they were talking about drugs or inventory.
I didn't..." I stop. The bottle cap is in my hand now, pulled from my pocket without me deciding to reach for it, and my thumb is pressing into the center. "They're moving people."
Nobody speaks.
"They're trafficking women and children through the Meridian Star to that port facility.
Apex Meridian Holdings isn't a warehouse, it's a holding facility.
Intake processing means people coming in.
Placement means people going out. Age brackets means.
.." I can't finish the sentence. I don't need to.
Leone's face doesn't change. His expression stays neutral, but his hand on the table curls into a fist so tight the knuckles go white and the tendons in his forearm stand up and I watch the color drain from Alexandra's face.
Emilio beside me has gone completely still.
The bouncing knee stopped. The restless energy stopped.
Everything about him is frozen and the look on his face is the one I saw in the corridor during the Castillo attack, the cold one, the one where the sunshine turns off and what's underneath is a man capable of things I don't want to think about.
"How long?" Claudio asks. His voice hasn't changed at all, which is somehow worse than if he'd shouted.
"The shipping records go back eighteen months," Alexandra says. "The facility has been operational for at least two years based on the corporate filings."
"Two years," Leone says. "Two years of a trafficking pipeline running underneath a war we thought was about territory and money. Both families used as cover. Both families too busy killing each other to notice what was moving through our own waterways."
The silence that follows is different from any silence I've experienced in this compound. It's not the quiet of men thinking. It's the quiet of men deciding who to kill and how many and how slowly.
Leone stands. "I need to see Aurelio."
The room shifts.
"All of you," Leone says. "He needs to hear this."
Aurelio's room in the private wing is smaller than I expected.
I don't know what I pictured, a throne room maybe, gold curtains and armed guards and the kind of dramatic bullshit you see in movies about powerful men.
Instead it's basically a hospital room someone tried to make comfortable.
A bed with rails, monitors beeping at intervals, an IV drip, and the smell of medicine.
It smells sweet and wrong that I recognize because Gigi's hospice room smelled the same way at the end.
The Don is in his bed. He's smaller than the stories make him.
The legend of Aurelio Bonaccorso fills the whole compound, every corridor and every conversation, but the man in this bed is thin and gray and breathing with the help of a machine and his eyes, when they open to look at us, are bright and clear and furious about the body they're trapped in.