Chapter 30 Shelby
Shelby
Once we rescue my wife, we don’t go home to sleep. We return to the war room at the Syndicate’s headquarters. All hands on deck. Maeve, Serena, and Nikolai make a formidable tech team, scanning the dark web for leads.
Earlier, we ticked the old meatpacking plant in Widett Circle off the list of places Giovanni might have been holding Serena. Still, Ray’s team continued surveilling it. With every minute that passed, the property looked suspiciously active for an abandoned building.
“Motherfuckers!” Serena grunts, pointing at the monitors.
We look up at the live feed from the drone she designed.
Its thermal imaging sweeps the main structures, translating heat into ghostly bursts of color.
Beneath the concrete floors, clustered heat signatures bloom where there shouldn’t be any.
They’re too organized, too concentrated to be a coincidence.
Dozens of bodies. Maybe more. The shapes huddle together in tight corners, bleeding into one another on the screen, impossible to separate.
Whatever Giovanni buried beneath that plant isn’t storage.
It’s a holding pen.
“Dave, we need to…” I whip my head to the right, where my older brother stands.
“On it,” he answers my unfinished request as he holds his cellphone to his ear. “Ray, mobilize all teams. We leave in ten.”
“Ten minutes?” Tommy double-checks to my left.
“No time to waste. We’ve got only an hour before dawn.
“All teams in position,” Ray’s voice crackles through my earpiece.
“Serena, security system offline? We’re dark?” I ask.
“Confirmed,” Serena’s voice follows, steady despite everything she’s been through in the past twenty-four hours.
“Their cameras are showing a loop from four hours ago. Their motion sensors think everything is quiet. Their panic buttons will dial a disconnected number.” A pause.
“They won’t know you’re there until you’re inside. Be safe, Shelby.”
Pride swells in my chest. My wife built the security systems of her father’s empire. Now she’s turning those same systems against the monsters.
“Copy that,” I murmur. “Going radio silent until breach.”
I move through the shadows toward the loading dock, Alpha team flanking me.
Four men, hand-selected from our best operatives.
Silent. Deadly. Efficient. The night air bites at my skin, but I barely feel it.
Every sense is dialed to eleven—the crunch of gravel beneath tactical boots, the hum of the wind in the trees, the hammering of my own pulse.
The door opens without a sound.
Rusted containers, crumbling concrete, the smell of rotten blood, and abandonment. Perfect place to hide women and children before shipping them overseas like livestock.
Not tonight.
We press forward together, deeper inside, and more smells hit me. Sweat. Fear. Human waste. The stench of people held too long in too small a space. My stomach lurches, but I force it down. I’ve smelled worse in Aleppo. I’ve seen worse.
Don’t freeze. Don’t you dare fucking freeze.
A guard rounds the corner, hand moving toward his holster. I’m faster. Two steps, a quick slash of my knife across his throat, and he crumples without a sound. I lower him to the concrete and keep moving.
“Contact neutralized,” I whisper into comms. “Continuing to primary objective.”
“Copy,” Serena responds. “You’ve got two more heat signatures forty feet ahead, ground level. Then the basement access should be clear.”
We move like ghosts through the labyrinth of abandoned equipment. Two more guards fall before they can raise an alarm—one to Tommy’s team entering from the south, one to my own hands.
My hands that aren’t shaking.
The basement door looms ahead, industrial and heavy. I press my palm flat against the cold metal and close my eyes for half a second. On the other side of this door are people who’ve been treated like cargo. Like goods. Like the children I couldn’t save in that warehouse in Moscow.
You’re not there. You’re here. And here, you can make a difference.
I nod to my team. We breach.
The room beyond is worse than I imagined, and I’ve imagined plenty. Makeshift cots crammed together. Buckets in corners. Eyes that have stopped hoping blinking against our flashlights.
“Fifteen,” I breathe into comms, scanning the space. “Repeat, fifteen. Eight adult females, seven minors. All alive.”
“Copy that,” Dave’s voice comes through, tight but filled with seething fury. “Medical team is ready at extraction point.”
I crouch in front of the nearest group—a woman clutching a girl and a boy against her chest. Her eyes are wild, terrified. She doesn’t know if we’re salvation or a different kind of monster.
“You’re safe now,” I tell her, keeping my voice low and even. “We’re getting you out of here. All of you.”
Her blank expression makes it clear she doesn’t understand my words. But something in my tone must translate because her grip on the children loosens slightly. She nods, points to her and the kids, then whispers, “Spasibo.” She thanks me in Russian.
“Secondary sweep complete,” Tommy reports. “Two additional contacts neutralized. Building is clear.”
“Team Bravo, begin extraction,” I command. “Let’s bring them home.”
We work quickly, efficiently. Women and children are guided toward the exits, wrapped in emergency blankets, handed off to the medical team waiting in unmarked vans. Some walk on their own. Others have to be carried.
One little girl, no more than six, reaches for my hand as I lead her toward the door. Her fingers are tiny and cold, and they wrap around mine like I’m the only solid thing in her world.
I don’t freeze.
I hold on tighter and walk her into the night, toward safety, toward freedom.
Fifteen people who won’t be sold tonight. Fifteen people going home instead of into hell.
Because I didn’t freeze.
The next hour passes in controlled chaos. Serena coordinates the cyber cleanup, ensuring every digital trace of tonight’s operation disappears into the ether. She’s magnificent. She’s sharp and focused and utterly unbreakable despite everything she’s been through.
When the last victim is loaded into the last vehicle, I find her standing beside our SUV, staring at the retreating van like she’s seeing something I can’t.
“Lucia Rossi is in that van,” she says quietly.
I move to stand beside her, draping an arm around her shoulder and hugging her tight. “You did this!”
“Her family probably thinks she’s dead,” Serena says, her voice muffled against my chest.
“She’s not dead. Because of you.”
She shakes her head. “Because of us. Because you didn’t freeze this time.”
The words hit somewhere deep. She’s right. In Russia, when everything went sideways, I turned to stone while children died. Tonight, my mind stayed sharp. Clear. Present.
Because I had something worth being present for.
“Get in,” I say, opening her door. “We’re done here.”
The drive back to our temporary residence, in a Syndicate safe house in Brookline that even Giovanni doesn’t know about, takes forty minutes through empty early-morning streets. Serena spends most of it on her laptop, monitoring police frequencies, ensuring our operation stays invisible.
I spend most of it watching her.
The way her brow furrows when she concentrates. The way she tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear without thinking. The way her lips move slightly when she’s reading code, like she’s having a conversation with the machine in a language only they understand.
I almost lost her. The thought surfaces unbidden, sharp as a blade.
“You’re staring,” Serena says without looking up.
“I’m appreciating the view.”
That earns me a flicker of a smile. The first genuine smile I’ve seen on her face since I rescued her.
I’m aware we haven’t had any time alone since I got her back.
Yes, she’s expressed her gratitude. Still, something is bothering me that I can’t name.
Serena’s been standoffish, even considering the horrors she must have endured while in captivity.
We reach the safe house a few minutes later. It’s a brownstone that looks like every other brownstone on the street, which means it’s unremarkable, the kind of place eyes slide past without registering. Exactly what we need right now.
Inside, the space is sparse but comfortable. The Syndicate furnished the place for short stays, so luxury wasn’t a priority. Dave had someone stock the pantry.
“We should sleep,” Serena says, setting her laptop on the kitchen counter. “It’s almost six.”
“We should.”
Neither of us moves toward the bedroom.
Instead, she pours two glasses of whiskey—Macallan 25, because even in a safe house, the Syndicate has standards—and carries them to the living room. She curls up on one end of the couch, feet tucked beneath her, and offers me the second glass.
I take it as I sit on the opposite end, leaving space between us that feels necessary yet unbearable.
“Fifteen people,” she whispers. “Eight women, seven children.”
“Yes.”
“We did that.”
“You bet.”
She takes a sip of whiskey, then stares at the glass. “It doesn’t fix anything. My father has been doing this for years. There are hundreds more, thousands maybe.”
“We’ll find them. We have the locations. We’re not done, Serena. This was only the first strike.”
Her eyes meet mine, dark amber in the dim light. She opens her mouth as if to say something. Then, she drops her gaze to the Persian rug. She shuts down, her lips forming a tight line, a bluish vein pulsing at her set jaw.
I set down my glass and close the distance between us on the couch. Not touching her, not yet, but close enough that her warmth wraps around me.
“Talk to me.”
For a moment, I don’t think she will. Serena DiLorenzo doesn’t show weakness. She was raised to survive in a world where vulnerability equals destruction. Opening up, letting someone see the fractures, goes against everything she’s been taught.
“There’s a video,” she says finally, but pauses; she swallows hard.