I thought I had him.
Leon Varga. Arms dealer, mid-grade enforcer, smart enough to be outside Wolfe's inner circle, close enough not to get burned. He'd hung on the outside of Kreel's life—just close enough to count, just far enough to blend into the background. A bank transfer, a single digit off. A secure line phone call on record less than two seconds. It was on the edge. But I'd followed whispers for less.
The raid was smooth as clockwork. SWAT rolled in, sharp and deadly. I entered through the front, gun down, badge up, heart pounding with the bitter flavor of sureness. Varga was sitting in his office, unruffled. That ought to have been the first warning.
He didn't flee.
He didn't flinch.
Just sat there and smiled like he'd been waiting for me.
The room stank of hubris. Tidy bookshelves, a leather chair that had bled more often than it had read spines. I walked up, tossed the picture of Kreel on his desk.
"Know him?"
Varga glanced. Glanced at me.
"Not my taste," he replied smoothly. "Too neat."
We ransacked his place. Computers, papers, hard drives, firepower. I waited for the snap. The slip. The hint of blood on his hands.
It never happened.
The alibi checked out.
Security cameras put him in the other part of town at the time of Kreel's murder. Security logs. Witnesses. One of them a goddamn state senator.
The "evidence" I believed I had? False. The transfer was not Kreel's—it was that of a deceased man with the same alias. The phone call? A misdirected ping. Data corruption. Or tampering.
Varga sat there throughout, smiling like he was in on something I wasn't. And perhaps he was.
Gregor Nash was waiting for me when I returned to the precinct. His tie was loose, but his stance was stiff. He said nothing, only raised an eyebrow as if to say Nice work, Kane. Another ghost hunt. He didn't need to say the rest—I'd heard it before.
I went past him without comment, but his smirk walked with me down the hallway like a shadow that refused to blink.
Sylvie pinned me in the stairwell.
"You let your instincts guide this one," she growled. "You wanted Varga to be the man, so you blinded yourself to anything else."
"I followed the evidence," I grumbled.
"No," she said. "You followed the commotion."
I should have defended myself. I didn't. Because perhaps—just perhaps—she was correct.
Lillian's voice on the phone was gentle. Uncertain. "I rechecked the DNA markers," she told me. "There's… a variant I didn't catch before. It's not a genetic mutation—it's a signature. Someone encoded it on purpose. Someone who had access to pretty specialized tech."
"You think Varga might have been able to do that?" I asked.
A hesitation. "No," she said softly. "That's not his universe."
Everything I believed shattered. Like brittle glass under strain.
The lower I dug, the frigidity of the trail. All the breadcrumbs that I followed disappeared in the wind. I hung around in my apartment one night, regarding my evidence wall. Kreel's visage. Wolfe's identity. Strung along in little nooses holding nothing in tethered binds with everything else. My hands scraped with want. My head wandered.
Then there came this message.
TELL KANE TO STOP.NEXT TIME IT WON'T BE A WARNING.
No call-back. No identifier. Only these two sentences.
And an image.
Sylvie's apartment. Telephoto from the other side of the street. Her silhouette against the curtain.
My heart skipped a beat.
I phoned her. Three rings. And then her voice, sleepy, irritated. Safe—for the time being.
But they'd established a limit.
This wasn't about Kreel anymore. This wasn't justice.
It was about control.
About leverage.
About me.
I ran into Jax the following morning at a diner that reeked of stale eggs and burned coffee. He was restless, eyes darting to each face that entered.
"This is not a bad trail," he breathed. "This is a planted trail. You were supposed to find Varga."
"Why?"
"To waste time. To lose credibility. They want you in the weeds, following the wrong smell while they wipe out the actual trail."
"Know who it is?"
He paused. "Not yet. But I know who's next."
He pushed a picture across the table.
Lillian.
I clenched my teeth. "They're targeting anyone who assists me."
"They don't want the truth covered up," Jax growled. "They want it erased."
I drove around randomly after that. Through backstreets. By past police stations that dated back decades. Under bridges where the homeless share better information than the FBI. And all I could wonder was—where did I go wrong?
And then it came to me.
I hadn't gone wrong.
I'd been taken wrong.
This wasn't a misstep. It was a detour. A sly, deliberate misdirection.
Someone was monitoring my every step. Someone with reach. With technology. With vision. Someone who required me running around in circles while they swept the decks.
So now I was standing at a fork in the road.
Continue along the path I'd been provided—clean, official, easy to justify.
Or burn it all to the ground. Reduce it to the bare essentials. Begin anew from the ashes.
I was on the roof of my high-rise as the sun disappeared behind the horizon. Cigarette smoke in my lungs. Rage in my chest. The city was serene from where I stood.
It wasn't.
And neither was I.
They needed to blind me.
They needed to mislead me.
They needed to make me think I'd taken the wrong turn.
But now?
Now I was going to let them see what happens when a man with nothing to lose anymore finds the right one.