25. Chapter 25
Chapter twenty-five
Alex
Today is the first day in over seven weeks that Lina has taken off. She isn’t at the bakery.
It’s strange not being in her presence.
I’m at the Airbnb, surrounded by open files and half-finished reports, yet my attention keeps drifting to the live feed on the second monitor.
Lina moves quietly through her house, cleaning.
She dusts the shelves. Fluffs a pillow on the couch.
Carries a basket of laundry down the hall.
Ordinary moments, the kind most people would never give a second thought.
I do.
There’s something oddly grounding about watching her live. No customers demanding her attention. No crises to solve. No shadows waiting just beyond her line of sight. Just Lina, stealing back a day to worry about herself. A day long overdue.
My eyes linger a moment longer before I force myself back to the reason I’m here.
The contract.
Rain crawls down the window beside me as the glow of my laptop washes over the room. Lina’s name sits in the center of the screen like the calm eye of a hurricane.
Target: Lina Allister.
Status: Active.
Contract Window: Open until further notice.
Somewhere out there, someone accepted money to make her death look accidental. And if Reese and I don’t identify the person behind it first, eventually someone will come to collect.
The thought digs in deeper than I’d like.
I scrub a hand over my jaw and glance back at the monitor. Lina hums softly to herself as she wipes down the kitchen counter, completely unaware that somewhere beyond the walls of her home, strangers are bargaining over the value of her life.
Not while I’m still breathing.
Three years ago, Reese and I were hired by a third party to investigate whispers about a network buried deep in encrypted channels online. At first it sounded like conspiracy bullshit. Rich people paying to make problems disappear through “accidents.” Until bodies started piling up.
A senator’s son dies in a boating accident. A corporate whistleblower overdoses two weeks before testimony. A woman falls from a balcony during a charity gala despite never drinking.
Every death looked clean on paper. Random. Explainable. But Reese saw the patterns first. The timing. The money transfers.
The anonymous cryptocurrency wallets routed through dead-end shell corporations. The same digital fingerprints surfacing around deaths across multiple countries.
When we realized what was in front of us, we were already too deep to walk away.
The site operates like a marketplace hidden behind layers of encryption and invitation-only access. Clients submit contracts. Contractors bid. Payments move through blind accounts and disappear before authorities can trace them.
No names. No faces. Just money and death packaged as convenience for people wealthy enough to afford it.
The kills are intended to blend into ordinary life. Heart attacks. House fires. Muggings. Drug overdoses. Single-car accidents on rainy roads. Deaths that never become homicide investigations because nobody thinks to look twice.
Reese and I made one decision early on—we weren’t going after the clients first. We were hunting the structure itself.
Find one of the contracted killers. Follow the chain upward. Locate whoever manages the network. Burn the entire fucking thing to the ground.
That’s what brought me to this town. It wasn’t Lina specifically. Not at first. We intercepted chatter about an active contract tied to a woman in Texas whose death was expected to resemble either a domestic violence escalation or suicide. Routine enough to avoid national attention.
Then Reese identified the target. Lina Hill.
Since then, every lead has only made things uglier.
The current contractor assigned to her hasn’t made a move yet, which means one of two things. Either he’s disciplined enough to wait for the perfect opportunity…or he knows he still has time. Neither option sits well with me.
My burner phone vibrates against the kitchen counter. Reese.
I answer. “What do you got?”
His voice comes through calm and steady. “The facial recognition chatter is fading. Your face is disappearing from the system.”
Good.
This line of work doesn’t tolerate exposure. The second facial recognition starts making noise, people start digging. And people in this world don’t dig for curiosity—they dig to eliminate loose ends.
“That’s not the biggest issue anymore,” Reese says.
I already know by his tone that he found something bad.
I move back toward the laptop, eyes narrowing at Lina’s file still open across the screen. “Talk to me.”
I hear Reese exhale on the other end of the line, keyboard clicks filling the silence between us.
“I started digging deeper into the contract payment trail,” he says. “Not the wallets themselves. Whoever funded this buried it too well. But I believe I found what triggered the contract.”
I glance back toward Lina’s file on the screen. Her photo stares back at me, smiling, completely unaware someone put a price on her life.
“What triggered it?” I ask.
“It’s tied to money.”
Of course it is.
In our experience, it always comes down to one of three things. Power. Revenge. Money. Sometimes all three.
“I dug through Lina’s financials,” Reese continues. “Trusts. Divorce records. Inheritance filings. That’s where things got interesting.”
I rest against the counter, already feeling something ugly beginning to take shape. “How interesting?”
“There’s a trust in Lina’s name established by Virginia Allister before she died.”
The Allister’s. Her ex’s family. Old Texas money wrapped in polished reputations and country club appearances. The kind of family that donates to children’s hospitals while destroying people behind closed doors.
“I already know about the pregnancy clause,” I say. “Five million payout just for being pregnant. Protected from marital access.”
“Right,” Reese says. “That part wasn’t hidden.”
Meaning something else was. I straighten. “What did you find?”
“There’s an addendum attached to the trust.”
His voice lowers slightly. “It was buried separately under secondary legal filings tied to the original pregnancy clause. Different attorneys. Different timestamps. Almost like somebody didn’t want it easily connected.”
Anxiety grips my core.
“Reese, quit stalling.”
“Lina receives another five million dollars every five years for the rest of her life.”
Silence fills the house. Rain taps softly against the windows while the words settle into place inside my head.
Five million. Every five years. Forever.
“As long as she’s alive,” Reese adds, “the payments continue.”
I foresee the direction this is heading before he says it.
“And if she dies?”
“The money folds back into the primary Allister family trust.”
I stare out the window. There it is. The motive.
“Who controls the trust?” I ask.
“David Allister, Cole’s father.”
I briefly shut my eyelids. Lina is probably spending her day off trying to breathe, while her ex-husband’s father circles her life like a fucking vulture. A family bleeding money every day she remains alive.
“She doesn’t know, does she?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” Reese says. “Honestly, I’m not even sure Cole fully understands the scope of it either. The addendum was intentionally hidden.”
I rub a hand over my jaw, my mind already moving ahead.
“So David commissioned the contract to stop the payouts.”
“Looks like it.”
Five million dollars every five years. Most people would kill for far less. Hell, we’ve investigated contracts over custody disputes worth less than a luxury car. Money just gives evil people cleaner tools.
“What about Cole?” I ask. “Any beneficiary connection?” Keyboard clicks echo through the phone.
“No direct access. No beneficiary designation. So far everything points back to David Allister.”
That tracks with what I’ve seen.
Cole is dangerous, but he’s reckless. Addicted to control in the ugliest way possible. But organized enough to commission a professional contract killing through a hidden network? No.
“Cole isn’t involved,” I say.
Reese pauses. “You sure?”
I think back to the parking lot. The way Cole grabbed Lina. The fury in his eyes when she resisted him. The desperation underneath it.
“Yeah.” I grunt. “He doesn’t want her dead. He wants her back.”
I push away from the counter and casually pace through the house.
“Men like him don’t escalate because they planned murder,” I continue. “They escalate because control is slipping.”
Reese stays quiet, letting me think out loud.
“Every interaction we’ve documented points to coercive control. Isolation. Emotional manipulation. Ownership disguised as love.”
I stop near the window again.
“Fifteen years,” I mutter. “Imagine living under that for fifteen fucking years.”
It scratches at the cage I’ve built around my darker instincts.
“People like Cole strip you down slowly. Decision by decision. Until you stop asking permission to exist.”
Reese exhales. “We’ve seen it before.”
Too many times. Women pulled out of situations so psychologically brutal they apologized while being rescued. Women who defended the men, bruising them because survival taught them peace was safer than resistance.
“She survived him,” I say, adding, “that’s what he can’t stand.”
And maybe that’s why I never miss the exhaustion beneath Lina’s strength. Like she’s still learning she’s allowed to take up space. Like she’s allowed to walk through a door on her own.
Reese breaks the silence first. “So that leaves David Allister.”
“Yeah.”
And somehow that feels worse. Because Cole is chaos. David must be strategy.