By the time dusk fell, the precinct looked different.Not in its walls or lights, but in the eyes of those who worked there.Adrian had always said that you could tell when a department was sitting on a secret. The air thickened. Conversations slowed. Smiles didn’t reach eyes.Tonight, he and Mara were the ones holding that secret and they planned to use it.They had less than twelve hours to set the trap.Which meant planning in whispers and walking the knife’s edge between “too cautious” and “too obvious.”The bait would be a location file — a fabricated site visit to a derelict warehouse on the east docks. On paper, it would look like the staging point for an early-morning sweep connected to a weapons smuggling lead. In reality, the place would be wired for surveillance, with an undercover SWAT team staged three blocks away.If the Syndicate took the bait, they’d send muscle. And if they sent muscle, Adrian would have them.Mara stayed at her terminal long after most of the bullpen

The next twenty-four hours felt like a taut wire. Every move had to be precise, every decision measured. Adrian had been in long games before, but this one was different. The handler at the shack hadn’t just been careful — he’d been confident. That meant either he had layers of protection… or he believed no one inside the department had the reach to touch him. Adrian was planning to prove him wrong on both counts. At 7:03 a.m., Mara slid a coffee across Adrian’s desk. “Black. Two sugars.” “You’re learning,” he said, accepting it without looking up from the map of the South Docks spread in front of him. She arched a brow. “Learning, or bribing you into telling me the rest of the plan?” Adrian smirked faintly, but his eyes stayed on the map. “We know the drop is waterfront-adjacent, but not exactly which pier. Kearney will get the details late. That’s by design. Syndicate prefers last-minute comms.” “And when he gets them?” “We’ll already be there.” By midday, two unmarked sur

The city never truly slept. It only shifted masks.By the time Adrian and Mara left the safehouse, the night had begun to bleed into morning, sky pale with the suggestion of dawn. The streets still glistened with rain, neon signs flickering weakly against the gray. Mara drove in silence, hands steady on the wheel, but her mind reeled with fragments of what she’d seen—Adrian locked in with Elias Vance, their words muffled, their faces hard and sharp like pieces of glass cutting against one another.He hadn’t told her what was said. Not really. Just a clipped, “He’s ours for now.” But she’d seen his eyes when Vance dropped that single name—your brother—and that was enough to tell her Adrian wasn’t nearly as untouchable as he pretended.The safehouse door slammed shut in her memory, and she shivered.“Where to?” she asked finally, voice quiet.Adrian’s profile was carved from shadow, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “We don’t have long. The gala tonight—charity cover for a laundering channe

The call that would change everything came at 6:47 AM. Adrian's burner phone—one of three he kept for emergencies—buzzed against the table with mechanical insistence. The sound cut through the heavy silence of the safehouse like a blade. Mara's head snapped up from where she'd been dozing against his shoulder, the coded ledger still spread between them like evidence of their shared damnation. "Don't," Mara whispered, her voice hoarse from exhaustion and the cigarette smoke that had filled the room through the long night. But Adrian was already reaching for the phone, his movements sharp and controlled. The caller ID showed only a number—department issued, Internal Affairs division. His blood went cold. "Cross." "Detective Adrian Cross." The voice on the other end was crisp, professional, carrying the kind of authority that made seasoned cops straighten their spines. "This is Lieutenant Morrison, Internal Affairs. You need to come in. Immediately." Adrian's grip tightened on the p

The police dragnet tightened around the warehouse district like a noose, but Adrian had planned for this moment with the cold precision of a man who understood that survival often came down to preparation and timing. The monitors showed search teams moving in coordinated sweeps, their flashlights cutting through the early morning gloom like silver blades. Adrian watched them work, noting their patterns, their blind spots, the way they cleared buildings with textbook efficiency. Professional, thorough, but predictable. "They're good," Mara observed, standing beside him at the bank of screens. "But they're searching for fugitives, not ghosts." Adrian's fingers moved across the keyboard, activating systems he'd hoped never to use. Throughout the warehouse district, cameras that looked like security equipment but fed into his private network began tracking the search teams. Motion sensors disguised as utility boxes started mapping their movements. The hunters had become the hunted, and